Seems like in this day and age, the cheaper the phone the more features you get … you can get a cheapo phone (100-150 euro) with a huge 2-day battery, two physical SIM slots AND an SD card slot, headphone jack, ok-ish cameras … usually they’re huge, 6.5" or more …
Let’s not forget our dearly departed SD Card slot.
I stillhave it
last year almost checked out a phone without jack at the carrier’s store, noticed on time, turned around and got a model with lower specs but had a jack
The Clicks Communicator BB clone looks to have a Jack. It’s in the running!!
Clicks Communicator BB clone
What I miss about Blackberry is the trackball. Touchscreens are fine for what they are, but the BB trackball allowed pixel-perfect precision pointing – it was worth it having to clean the lint out of it every so often.
I don’t miss the 16-bit graphics, though.
I feel like the only people who crave the physical keyboard on a phone are the ones that still refuse to use a Swype style keyboard on a touch screen.
When they were first released it was pretty good and now it’s basically perfect.
I have not had a physical keyboard since my palm pre died and have not felt the need to go back.
Swipe was great like 6 years ago. In the last five at least it’s been steadily getting worse, and it’s gotten significantly worse since they replaced whatever existing algorithm with their AI bullshit. Now my keyboard tries to put in slurs because the prediction is based on the internet. You delete them from the dictionary and they just pop right back up. It misspells commonly misspelled words now too.
Trash everytime In your issuing Thurs shoot us and exerciser inn frustratinglyYah Everton I use thistle shot of an exerciser on gridironYah everytime I use this shot is an exerciser in frustration
Close enough
The physical keyboard meant you could type under the table at a meeting, text in complete darkness, or type while watching something else. They nailed the keyshapes so that your fingers knew they key positions.
Why use swype keyboards when you can use thumb-key ?
I mean, unless your hand are such that you can type using 10 fingers while holding your phone, using a typewriter machine’s keyboard (so that the branches don’t mix if you type too fast?) is a total non-sens!
Honestly it’s because I never felt the need to change. Looks interesting though.
That looks interesting but I’m kinda turned off that it’s made by an authoritarian propagandist. And yes I know he made Lemmy too, and he’s also why so many instances block ml.
If yo prefer a non-free option, made by a profit oriented company, “message ease” offer a similar system…
Also, using a qwerty keyboard doesn’t force you to love neither Remington nor Mr Sholes…
Oh i know it’s a nonsense position to take and I’m probably gonna check out the keyboard anyway, I just don’t like that guy’s values.
I haven’t checked them, but I think I am banned from at least some .ml things ; I am not sure if I can still see them.
Using a mixture of the suggestions, swipe, and thumb typing on a touch qwerty I can write faster than I could on a keyboard, it’s super easy. Even when I was practicing touch typing on a physical qwerty, my brain couldn’t manage more than average 40wpm I don’t think. Which is slow, if I remember. Much faster using a mixture of input styles depending on the word I am about to input. My mind pretty much instinctively knows which is gonna be the fastest method of the 3 at this point. I don’t think limiting one’s self to a single input style would make people like me any faster.
I still use 3.5mm auxiliary cables on a daily basis. Not phased out quite yet.
Sony xPeria 6 user here still using aux for headphones
I still have it and still use it
I can live without the headphone jack, no micro SD card is the bigger sin, limiting you to your phones built in storage for no reason other than pure greed is infuriating
This was solely, and I mean completely solely, done out of greed to make more money by massive up charges to the phone model with more storage, and to push users into using their cloud based storage systems that would lock you into their ecosystem and and make a subscription based profit.
I haven’t needed the extra storage of the micro SD since what feels like forever. My current phone has 128GB, I’m only using half of it and I have hardly deleted anything from it in something like 2 years.
I also had what appeared be too much storage.
Then I got 2 cats.
Now it says 99% full.
Ok so you got a ton of photos of your cats but you’re not sharing any. I see how it is.
She came to inspect what you were complaining about 😅
No cat taxation without cat representation.
Doesn’t matter if you don’t have a use for larger hot swappable storage, many others do, otherwise all these phone companies wouldn’t sell higher storage models for absurdly high markup
Some people actually take pictures and videos. Or if you’re a phone gamer, some games will take up over 20 gigs themselves. … But good for you?
I’ve been self-hosting my own storage backup with Immich, and it’s been a game changer for me. It’s been an improvement over swapping out microsd cards and keeping track of what is stored where.
I’ve had a Sony phone for my last 2 phones, so quite some time. Great units, WITH that delicious headphones jack AND microSD slot. Praying to the phone gods that this continues.
The Motorola Moto G (at least for now) also has both
I’ve own 3 Moto Gs. They are good budget bricks. But they do not age well as far as software goes.
Didn’t know there was anyone still doing that. I assume no removable battery? Any pre installed bloatware?
Hi mate, both Sony devices were fairly clear of bullshit software, but I used ADB to remove Facebook etc. Compared to Samsung Galaxy Tablet of the same year, the Sony is a clean dream. All my music is on the microSD card (almost all FLAC). Internal DAC is good too.
I refuse to buy a phone without a headphone jack. They already stole our IR blaster, I refuse to let them take more
I got a red magic 11 pro. Crazy high specs, headphone jack, and IR blaster. Also cooled with a fan and (superficially but looks awesome) circulating liquid cooling.
Still no SD card slot, though.
I’m glad my current phone has this. Earphones with the cable seems to handle calling while bicycling better ✨
I recently bought an MP3 player because I was so sick of Sonos fucking me around, messing with Bluetooth for a few minutes every time I wanted to play a song, losing or breaking my USBC to aux adaptors, no local storage for music, subscriptions, etc.
$100 and this thing has dual DAC chips, can be used as a desktop DAC, has a micro SD card slot, 3.5 AND 4.4mm aux output, and USBC rechargeable. (And Bluetooth but I’m not touching that.) It’s genuinely so good that I’m thinking about dumping all “smart” crap and just going full Y2K with my tech.
I want to buy something like this but two of the things I always look for with MP3 players are touch screen and Android so I can download Musicolet, or whatever other apps I want. Players like yours sometimes come with touch screen (sometimes not) but they never have Android.
And unfortunately the ones that fall within those parameters are a crap shoot. Just had one fail after one summer of light use (SD card slot). Previous one lasted a few years before failing (3.5mm jack).
They’re all made by companies with Chinese names with absolutely no online presence whatsoever other than the Amazon page they’re sold on.
The more premium models from Fiio are all touch screen with Android. I specifically didn’t want Android and they were out of my budget anyways. HiBy comes recommended too from the research I did and I think they are all touch screen with Android as well.
I would never touch a Sonos after what they did to the people with the first gen hardware.
It’s my biggest fear with cloud crap and then they went and confirmed it.
Yeah I have first gen Sonos. I heard they had bricked em before my app upgraded and I disconnected them from the internet before they got to mine. They’ve just been offline since, only used on the tv.
2025 Motorola 5g Stylus. Aux port and SD card slot. It’s fantastic. And Motorola supports grapheneOS
Not sold in Australia. I’ve had that issue a lot with smart phones over the years. The one time I bought one from a different retailer I spent $2k on the damn thing and the stock phone case shattered the glass body fresh out the box, and it stopped charging after 6 months. Asus refused to service it because it wasn’t covered by warranty in Australia, completely ignoring Australian consumer protection laws. Nothing came of my legal complaint either, they just took the fine they received. Never buying Asus again, or a model that isn’t covered in Australia.
Ah no, booo urns!
My $200 Motorola has one, I don’t see the issue here. If headphone jacks are important to you, find a phone that has one. I’ve never had a smartphone without a jack.
Well, if you want something with good cameras and/or a future-proofed CPU for the next 10+ years, you can’t buy a phone with “legacy” features. That’s why I was holding onto my Redmi 4X until recently. Now I have a Redmi K90 without a headphone connector, SDcard slot or an unlockable bootloader - because capitalism. At least it could run a Browser decently - unlike the older one.
My plan is to use the new phone for the next 10 - 12 years (or more if I can still use a web browser decently). Could a ~150€ Redmi shitbox do this? - From my experience: if you like waiting 10 mins for a simple website to load.
At least throwing money at the problem mitigates it somewhat.
This was my annoyed rant. Enjoy.
Also: The new phone doesn’t even support analog audio output (for some stupid reason) and I have to buy a 10€ DAC to have a decent wired audio. Spending money makes you spend more money. Great.
The headphone wire also serves as a FM radio antenna. You can’t get that with wireless headphones or a connection via the USB jack.
I haven’t listened to FM radio in probably 8-9 years. It’s literally nothing but ads with a few minutes of the most commercial music shoved down your throat 12 times a day
I agree that most radio stations are shite. Fortunately, I live in Ireland, which still has publicly funded broadcasters. I have my phone permanently tuned to Lyric FM, which plays classical music with almost no commercials.
You don’t have community radio where you’re at?
On AM stations yeah. Not FM though.
AM is a while different beast, and there aren’t any phones with AM receivers.
AM is literally on its last legs in the UK, even BBC Radio 4 shut down on it recently. Soon it’ll be just Radio Caroline and the odd hobby pirate.
We’ll come to regret it I think, the old Radio 4 signal could be picked up all over the country from like three transmitters and received on something as basic as a razor blade and coil of wire. We’re so keen to turn the internet into a massive single point of failure, and it’ll bite us in the arse with the Russians going about cutting our cables.
I still prefer my baseball on the radio to this day. All thanks to a cheap 6 transistor radio under my pillow.
‘Blocked in your country’ unfortunately but get what you’re on about. The loss of Test Match Special on 198 kHz was actually a mild cultural loss in my opinion, cricket is supposed to arrive on a crackly amplitude-modulated carrier.
Europe has (soon to be had) two AM broadcast bands; medium wave which is more or less the same as North America but it’s shorter and has 9 kHz channels, and long wave which goes down really low from 153 to 279 kHz. Long wave is properly antiquated tech, you need genuinely enormous aerials to efficiently put it out but it covers ludicrous distance over ground wave. It used to be used for broadcasting the UK’s main radio programme to ships and remote areas, and could get a thousand miles or so out to sea with just one transmitter.
I’m sorry it’s blocked for you. But while I have never listened to a Cricket Match, I would bet the farm it’s tailor made for radio like baseball.
Oh bummer. I’ve got 2 good community stations plus CBC on FM in my area
I think they’re joking about earbud wires catching AM radio signals and giving spooky whispers
I don’t think they’re joking at all… what they said is true. If the phone has an FM receiver then the wired headphones do serve as the antenna for it. It will not work without wired headphones.
Back in the day that was a good way to have free music over the air if you didn’t have an unlimited data plan, which most people didn’t.
It’s just obsolete tech now. Having a headphone jack doesn’t mean anything if the phone doesn’t have an FM receiver. Most phones don’t have an FM chip in them anymore.
My current phone is Samsung XCover 4. It’s a fairly newish rugged phone; still has a FM receiver.
They just said it can’t be recreated with USB which you can definitely do
No you can’t… at least not easily or cost effectively.
It’s not just the wire on the headphones, it’s how an analog jack works. A 3.5mm audio jack routes raw analog signal through a direct electrical connection. USB doesn’t not. Without the raw analog signal, the FM receiver can’t do anything with it.
You need extra hardware like an analog pass through to get USB to handle analog radio signals. And that’s expensive and bulky for no benefit over an audio jack which is compact and dirt cheap.
Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about here.
Sounds like I can do it with a chain of ten different adapters. Sold!
I’m not disagreeing that the FM radio circuit being directly connected to the trs connector is how phones worked for decades, I’m just saying that they said you couldn’t get FM radio over usb, so I assumed they must not be talking about literally receiving FM radio to the computer because obviously you can use SDR over usb. Maybe I’m just too autistic to appreciate what they were trying to say, but the interpretation I had from their comment was that killing TRS removed the ability for your phone to receive radio even including over usb, which is demonstrably wrong. But yes, your phone receiving the raw analogue signal through the TRS connector and using its dedicated radio circuit is in fact a thing, and almost certainly the better way to do it.
My Motorola has an FM receiver app. You can scan and save your favorite stations and save them separately for different cities. You can even record audio. I’ve used it in places where reception sucks for streaming from my home server. And if you don’t want to use the headphones, you can switch to speaker or BT and still use the wire as an antenna.
Bruh, I had a phone with an infrared blaster for television. The moment fairphone comes out with something that works with a graphene. I’m in.
They won’t, since they really don’t like the graphene guys and are in bed with their competitors who really enjoy harassing them.
Still have it on all of my Windows 10 Mobile phones.
When, thanks to linux, you manage to resurrect a 10-year-old decent specs pc and you have all the goodies.
