Anyone remember when Steve Jobs said in response to adding video support to the iPod that “nobody wants to watch videos on a handheld?” And then just a few months later, iPods got support for images and videos?
And what if I don’t want to watch “stuff” on my phone? My phone is supposed to be a portable “swiss-army-knife” of digital tools.
They made tablets for the other “stuff”
I remember back in 1990ish, there was a guy involved in the local music scene who got interviewed on AM radio (Right before the rise of conservative talk radio, when there were still local hosts talking about local issues.). This guy wasn’t a big shot and not a musician, just a guy passabout music. tmusic. He went by the moniker Jim Clevo, I had the fortune of meeting him once. Anyways, he had insight as to where the music industry was headed. In the interview, he told how in the future we would be listening to music through our phones. At the time high tech was a cordless landlines with an answering machine built in. He sounded crazy, i couldn’t figure out why he thought we would all be holding phones up to our ears listening to music, I never had anything but a corded phone at the time. Not sure why I’m rambling about it other than this post reminded me of him.
Was he frank zappa?
https://www.grunge.com/139089/rock-stars-who-freakishly-predicted-the-future/
We didn’t “realise” we could watch stuff; we got touch screen technology, wifi and mobile data became cheaper as we got 3G, 4G and 5G. The we *could *watch stuff, and browse the internet - this was always the obvious course of phones even in the 90s when bricks were still around. Meanwhile battery tech hasn’t moved forwards much, so these big screen, wifi, Bluetooth & 5G connected,video playing devices need bigger batteries to keep going all day. Ironically a bigger device - even with a bigger screen - will have a longer battery life because you can physically fit a bigger battery in.
Also this chart stops at 2015 - and thats still accurate. Mobile phone tech has plateaued. Time was, iPhone launches each year were a big deal because Apple was good at bringing previously out a of reach tech into the mass market. Now all the changes are minor and phone launches are dull. iPhones are now just popular because they’re iPhones. Chips are getting a bit more energy efficient pushing the capabilities a bit; but cameras, screens, storage and connectivity are probably as good as they’re going to get for now beyone incremental changes.
We’re now probably in the enshittification phase where companies try to justify ever increasing prices but can’t - iPhone prices have been largely static for 5 years because Apple can’t find a compelling reason to increase them. Whether there are stupid notches in the phone display, or expensive accessories like wireless headphones or now trying to up-sell people on software / services - ultimately a phone is just a phone now. The manufacturers latest hope is that somehow AI will allow them to charge more but it’s looking like AI in it’s current form has little value to consumers. Apple has delayed it’s changes to Siri because it’s struggling to make something that isn’t basically just another unreliable overhyped LLM.
Realistically the next real leap in phones will probably only come if and when battery tech improves; if smaller high energy density batteries come then that really will unlock a new revolution. The AI bubble doesn’t look like it’s going to deliver.
Before full touch screens came out I bought a small windows CE full screen device and put a few videos on it on a card (can’t recall if it was sd or something more primitive) and watched anime in between calls at work.
I always wanted this, and phones getting better at it just meant less devices. I am partial to phablets and fold phones because I like to read books,light novels,and manga on a bigger screen while being portable. I have in the past used both a tablet and phone before I got my fold, and when the inside screen of my fold failed after a couple years I am now back at both until I can afford a replacement.
I know not everyone wants this, but that’s why we have options, and dumb/feature phones can still be purchased, even from large carriers (though price of plan may be wasted on those). These memes act like there are only smartphones now, but dumbphones were always an option.
Realistically the next real leap in phones will probably only come if and when battery tech improves
I don’t think so. The real thing is just ergonomics. They want as big a screen as they can and human hands are only so big. They won’t retreat in form factor.
If anything they’ll are toying w bit with folding screens to make devices scale up and still be hand friendly.
The next big step is going to have to be wearable, to produce arbitrarily large content hands free. Don’t know if social norms will tolerate it, but that’s really the possible evolution from the status quo.
and the battery life 😱😱😱😱😱😱😱
The modern 170 g is larger than the older 170 g, what a crock of shit
The older one was a thicc boi
Porn, this meme used to say porn! Why do we keep self censoring?
I agree with the sentiment, but porn is maybe too restrictive. Phones basically became the new TV.
Good point, overall short form video apps must trounce porn sites
While porn is definitely part of it, you can also watch Futurama on your phone.
That’s essentially porn for your soul
The social media algorithms that give us fake internet points have conditioned us to comply.
We’re on Lemmy though. Even if it were censored you could simply post it to an instance that won’t censor.
That’s why the original commentor was complaining about it. And I’m agreeing with them.
It used to be porn but that was back when phone screens were 16:9. Now they are 18:9 and thats for vertical scrolling of social media feeds.
Because reposters don’t care, they just repost as is, they don’t restore, decensor or remaster anything… And there’s no incentive to, people will upvote anything, there’s no minimum quality anymore (if there ever was at all).
This graphic is missing the (de)evolution in phones when manufacturers unnecessarily started putting holes and notches in the screens.
#StopPuttingCutoutsInMyFuckingDisplays #BringBackBezels
Some phones go to the extreme, but my small circle camera cutout doesn’t bother me. On a phone, it’s always in the status/notification bar anyways so not a big deal unless you watch a lot of widescreen content.
The biggest deevolution must be audio jacks… the big lie of “we need to remove them so we can make your phones smaller”, just for phones to get thicker. Surely it can fit.
I think a lot of the reason phones are getting bigger is because of battery life. You can absolutely make a small phone with a big battery, but then it would be thicc and people (read plebs) don’t want little bricks, they want big slabs.
So for the few of us that want little bricks, we’re just entirely fucked. There are the Jelly phones, but they run Android, and I’d rather have a slab that spies on me a little less than a perfect brick filled to the brim with Google spyware.
I’m waiting and hoping and waiting and hoping that Linux phones get to the point where I can daily drive one.
I am in this camp- little brick with a replaceable battery because if I want to watch a show or play a game I’ll use a different device. Absolutely no one caters to us. I would also pick a Linux phone if I could in that form factor but in the US there’s not even a smattering of choice. To make a Linux phone work you’d need an emulation layer to make android apps work (I honestly don’t know the state of Linux phones on this ) but without it you’d be using a windows phone with craptastic app support. That’s what really killed WIndows phone. Lets keep hoping brother.
This is the only manufacturer I know of making modern little phones:
But they’re Android.
Those are actually really cool thanks!
By stuff you mean animated GIFs of big breasted horse hung transgender anthropomorphic lions being violated by giant alien tentacles, right?
Just say porn
That’s so obvious I didn’t think it needed to be said. Who doesn’t watch animated GIFs of big breasted horse hung transgender anthropomorphic lions being violated by giant alien tentacles?
Maybe if you’re a kinky pervert you’d watch .mpeg of big breasted horse hung transgender anthropomorphic lions and giant alien tentacles doing missionary in a committed exclusive relationship exclusively for having kids, but nobody is that depraved.
More like corporations realized that people with larger screens tend to browse more content and spend more time in their phones, so they made it the only available option, whether you like it or not.
And as a fan of large screens (like projectors), I couldn’t be happier. Hence why I own a foldable, because most phone screens still aren’t large enough to satisfy me.
I am so opposite of this - you could never sell me a foldable - I can’t even find one Android game that is worth playing that isn’t a remake of an old PC game. That folding will eventually kill the device earlier than a non fold. I just don’t see the draw… I have a tablet or laptop or pc for games and other stuff.
Don’t know what to tell you, because I’ve owned four different foldables and none of them ever had any issues. They’re just durable and reliable as any other phone.
You remind me of the kind of people who avoid OLEDs, because they still believe that burn-in is an issue that wasn’t solved years ago…
Angry upvote!
Not sure it’s really relevant how long someone spends on their phone. The only thing that matters to them are sales, and the simple matter is that larger screens sell better than their smaller counterparts.
The more time someone spends on their phone, the more likely they are to want better ones, the more likely it is for their phones to break, so they end up selling more. Also, it’s very likely that manufacturers have partnerships with corporations like google, meta, etc, that profit a lot from increased phone usage.
Look at all that screen real estate. Utterly wasted on ads and super tall fonts.
Well, I like reading comfortably
Same, so for that reason the ads should gtfo to make more space for the text 👍
(And fonts that are tall but not wide aren’t very comfortable imo)
Don’t forget all the margins around everything for no reason
Super tall fonts?
Yes, look at the screen resolution of your phone (mine is at 1080x2340 by 6.38 to 2.97 inches) and then at an old palm PDA from the early 2000s with 320x320 (or at tops 320x480 by 4.8 to 3.1 inches) and now compare what amount of text you can display on each. The Phone should be able to display soo much more Text, but it doesn’t because the Fonts are so tall.
Thats what I mean.
Because modern phones are somewhere near 400 DPI the fonts are rendered much larger so that they appear more clearer.
If you ran it at 72 DPI (like 90s-era monitors, not sure shout PDAs) you could fit an insane amount of text but would it be legible?
From this graph we can say the Razr was peak
I still have one somewhere. I’m amazed at how quickly people forgot that for a period of about a year, the Razr was the “it” phone to have. It was a fashion symbol, and had the same general societal status as the iPhone… before the iPhone.
Then smartphones hit it big especially with the iPhone itself and nobody gave a shit anymore.
One of the Razr’s other big contributions was in abandoning the usual stupid proprietary multi-pin model specific cell phone charging connectors because it normalized the then state of the art USB mini B connector for both charging and data transfer. People were going around calling the mini B “the Razr plug” for a couple of months there, fully believing it was yet more proprietary bullshit because that’s what they’d been conditioned to expect.
Early cell phones were weird. We don’t get that kind of weird anymore.
I have small hands and I hate how few small phones there are now
I have larger than small hands and hate how few “small” phones there are.
I have hands and hate how few “small” phones there are.
Same. It’s been a problems for way over 10 years now. I’ve upgraded to the pixel 9 pro and it’s just too big, even though it’s one of the smaller modern phones available. It’s actually smaller than my previous phone but it seems harder to hold one handed.
Would love a slightly thicker phone with a huge removable battery
also we have to encase our phones in cases because they’re not durable enough to survive day to day life. they could be made more rugged from the factory
That’s mostly because we care about aesthetics. My work phone is some Samsung flagship model from two years ago, I don’t have a case for it (because I don’t give a shit his it looks). Its with me on all factory visits in dirty production environments and what not, dropped it multiple times, stored in my pocket or just thrown in my bag. Screen is not cracked, sides and back are scratched and dinged up, but nothing is broken. They’re plenty durable if you don’t care about minor cosmetic things.
oh man your experience is so different from mine 😂
any phone i drop brings it a little closer to being completely non functional as long as it’s not in a case.
but i do agree with you about one thing: it is all about aesthetic. there’s tons of phones out there made with less shatterproof/scratch resistant glass, or think enough outer shells to protect their innards because when you buy a phone in a store you find the slim ones sexier
They’re experience is different than pretty much every single person on the planet. Hell I keep my phone in a case covered and I still crack the screen even with screen protectors on it.
How do you guys crack screens so easily? I’ve had it happen on one phone and I’ve dropped all of them, sometimes without a case, mostly without a screen protector.
The one that did crack was from like the tiniest drop after 2 years of use but it was a cheap phone without gorilla glass IIRC
Nah, I’d prefer to have a case I can swap once it becomes too damaged vs a phone chassis whose damage I have to live with until I buy a new phone. I’m trying to keep my phone for a long time, so the former is definitely better for my use case.
there’s no preventing us from having thinner cases and thicker phones for such scenarios (and is probably the route i’d want to take, too, since i’m extra clumsy)
This is a good idea. I’ve had to learn how to disassemble and fix phones for the wife mostly and me leastly. She broke a camera glass - and a glass coated back plate. My issues were battery replacement and a USB port replacement and one headphone jack replacement. All things I managed to learn how to fix to keep our 5 to 7 year old phones going until we were damned ready to get a new one. Durability is crap for a reason.
What are you all doing with your phones that you need to put them in cases? I feel like this is the equivalent of covering a high-end car in bumper stickers.
Ehhh the one phone I didn’t put a case on happened to be the one phone I broke a screen on. Maybe it’s just pure chance, but I started doing cases and screen protectors again after that
dropping them accidentally occasionally.
You’ve never damaged a phone ? You would be in the minority I think.
You might like the king kong mini 2
I do like that phone, but it’s 5 years old now. Do they even make it any longer?
There’s a mini 3 but it’s taller so not as small
There’s a pro version and the king kong mini 3 too, both more recent.
Sadly that would cost me 1000 USD and I cant afford that haha
This looks too good to be true, especially from aliexpress
A friend got one. A few months in it works flawlessly. It even has a projector built in!
It really is a tank.
It’s Chinese. Will it spy on you? Maybe, but so does Google, maybe the govt, the meta app has been proven to listen even when supposedly not active.
Maybe the least invasive option is Pixel with graphene.
I use a Xiaomi, fwiw.
Do you feel like magsafe batteries scratch that itch?
Nah, specially after a couple of years and the phone’s internal battery doesnt last a full day
