Anyone else remember then being the cool new thing instead of a mandatory one?
Pepperidge Farm remembers
Yep went down hill after the BlackBerry Storm
Oh man, full keyboards… A dream
That company just rolled out the physical keyboard add on. I’m very lazy, but if pressed I will dig up a link
I loved the hell out of my N900. An actual computer in your pocket.
I’ve been looking into a new phone, and I’m seriously considering one of those “Unihertz Titan” ones with the physical keyboard.
I have a Unihertz Titan, using it to write this, and it is a good phone but it has a strange display ratio that so many apps don’t understand. So many apps are borderline unusable and you have to force the display into 16:9 “mini mode”. That works but not that good because everything gets tiny in this mode.
The novelty of a hardware keyboard is lost very quickly and I don’t think that I would buy the phone again if I knew back then what I knew now. This is not really the fault of the phone but more that nearly all app developer only bother to include a 16:9 vertical screen option and that’s it.
Thanks for the info, that’s good to know. So the phone is good otherwise? I see on their site they also have some “normal” style phones, maybe I should consider one of them instead.
Yes, I don’t have a complain at all with the hardware (besides the display aspect) or the software on the phone. It works great, the bootloader is easy unlockable (which is importand for me) and the device is sturdy.
Unihertz is making some cool phones
There was a brief moment when there was a tech being talked about that would shift the glass coating to give tactile feedback on a touchscreen…
Going back to something I might finally stop having to completely relearn from changing phone sizes, just sounds better somehow, even though they arent perfect.
The G1 with the slide out keyboard was so nice from an interface perspective. I had been saying for years and years how I would love a modern version of the G1, but in the last few years smartphones have been ruined enough that I don’t even want that anymore.
i had fun with my classmates testing out software apps which we had developed on BlackBerry Storm
When the subject comes up I have often said that cell phones are what we avoided in the PC space when the IBM BIOS was reverse engineered.
It has been a disappointment to me that so many smart otherwise tech literate people have seemed to not be able to see the tech industry, and others, putting the digital noose around out necks with smart phones.
We are not too far away from entire brick and mortar businesses being off limits to someone whose only smart phone is not an iPhone and does not pass Googles Play Services Safetynet checks for an app and the only method to pay they have being cash or a physical credit card. That is wild, and something that should worry nearly everyone that has a vested interest in being able to live their lives without being under the thumbs of private corporate interests if they so choose.
And that is before even getting into the even more concerning parts of modern phones which take all of the above and make it scary by replacing private corporate interests with governments.
Nothing good ever comes from getting in a position where you have to interact with, or obey, another party and they get to set all of the terms.
Cash and card payments are perfectly fine for all of my in-person shopping needs. I don’t use a phone for banking or paying
not my fault your phone isnt cool
Hopefully, I will someday be able to buy a Linux smartphone that is truly controlled by me.
GrapheneOS with no Google play services/sim is the best experience currently available
I’m building a cyberdeck
The year of the linux phone.
I wish it could actually happen. But corporate has learned a lot from the 90s and early 00s. They are lock in experts that won’t let that happen easily.
postmarketOS has been making strides ever since Google announced they’d kill
sideloadinginstalling 3rd party apps.The list of phones is growing, I hope they get something high end up there. Current gOS is best because I want a phone with a good camera.
I want my jailbroken iPhone 6 back.
That thing was sick. Simpler, yet more customizable than iOS currently is.
And I realize everyone probably has a “things were better back then, shakes fist” opinion, but I have reason to believe my exact setup would blow kids’ minds, transported forward in time.
Other than the camera, I guess.
And I realize everyone probably has a “things were better back then, shakes fist” opinion
At some point, we have to start admitting that things were just better before. A lot of technology/software peaked ~15 years ago. Before it started sliding into the fucking mess we have these days.
Some yes, many no.
Linux drivers? Nowadays you can plug almost anything in and it just works. 15 years ago it may have not been possible to make it work.
The amount of self-hostable open-source software now beats everything from 15 years ago.
Yeah, the self-hosted and FOSS side of things will forever be improving, but corporate shit just gets worse in terms of UX. I mean even FOSS projects have awful UX sometimes as they try copying corpos and their web apps.
I am not using corpo software for about 6 years now, with Jira/Confluence being the only exception at work, but Windows was never very user friendly. People joke about Linux not being friendly, but it was mostly that those people were used to Windows. But even in Win95, while being better than anything before, and most things after, it wasn’t a bastion of UX.
People should find an old computer from 95/98 era and try it out. It’s not as great as many seen to remember. UX has improved a lot since those days, but so has the spyware.
Some things yes, some things no.
Setting a static IP on an interface is a nightmare now.
Time to get an android and start tweaking it.
Where did it go?
I just got a huge nostalgia blast of the days running Cydia on my iPod Touch 3rd gen. I’d customize Winterboard, install emulators, pirate games. The little, touchscreen computer in my pocket truly felt like it was mine! Then I got a Nexus tablet, hopped on early Android, and felt even more free to use my device how I wanted. Fast forward to today and I feel like some sort of criminal running Graphene and just hoping F-Droid repos exist after Google locks down Android. Tech is way less DIY and hella dystopian, as we move into a full surveillance state and compulsive identity verification. But I digress. Now I’m just rambling and depressed about the future of tech. Thanks OP. 🥲
I do what I can.
It’s weird to think of Android 4 as “early Android”. For me that was the peak.
Indeed. I was a little late to use Android. Jelly Bean was my first real experience with it.
And shit form factor, huge and bulky but very flat only. Because all customers demand it.
Same thing’s happened to cars: They all look like SUVs because people want to feel rugged.
No, that’w because the larger vehicles have more lax emissions standards.
Yeah. Got a loaner car from Volvo and even as a “compact” it’s bigger than my 10 year old car in my garage.
There’s a stupid EPA rule that needs to go away like the chicken tax.
Chicken tax?
AKA why America never got the Hilux
Dammit I’m supposed to be a tax expert. I knew about the protectionism but I didn’t know it was called the Chicken Tax. Pretend I told you that fact it’ll be good for my ego.
What fact?
Yes! I remember being obsessed with Samsung Note phones because they were for power users and had so many cool features. The Note 9 was the last smart phone I actually was excited about and I kept that thing for 5 years. I got the S22 Ultra and it was cool but by that point Samsung had removed all the cool hardware features from their phones (thermometer, barometer, iris scanner, finger proximity sensor [could do really cool mouse like actions by hovering your finger above the screen], and a bunch of other cool features).
Now I have the Pixel 8 pro and slapped GrapheneOS on it. The OS is really cool and so technically amazing but I could care so little about the actual device it’s loaded on.
How is the P8P with Graphene? My P8P has been absolute hell lately, with constant wifi disconnects and calls break up every minute or so. I wanted to like this phone coming from OnePlus but honestly it has felt like Google just seem to pop out new phones and leave the old ones riddled with software bugs.
I’m not a huge privacy person, more like mild so I haven’t heavily considered Graphene but I’m getting fed up with this one haha
It’s so smooth and personalizable. I really appreciate how little there was on base install and how much you can add or take away for yourself.
The stock camera app is okay, that’s my only larger issue.
Sounds awesome! I remember being blown away when my friend showed me the IR camera on his Cat phone, which could see footprints. (He had a Cat phone because he’s very clumsy and drops his phone every single time that he ties his shoes.)
Beyond cool hardware, I had a Huawei P30 which came with a really good “augmented reality” ruler. It was quite accurate. And it had a nice IR transmitter that could act as a legacy remote (Xiaomi also does this but their software is not as good).
Now I have a Pixel and holy hell is it too large for its own good. Supposedly a compact phone.
Find yourself a privacy comm and settle in. You have agency over you digital life.
I have my blue and grey Nokia still.
When I was on my way home from work on the subway, I just tried to fill the screen with a snake the whole time.
I still hope for a cool game to be included when I buy a new phone. Spoiler: there is no cool game included
I still remember the day I beat Brickbreaker on my 2007 Blackberry. It was a glorious day in my personal gaming history that may never be surpassed
This is exactly what Orwell feared TVs would become when he envisioned telescreens. Took a little longer for it to come to fruition. What’s fascinating about the novel that people over look is that the older generation in 1984 tend not to own them because they’re resistant to new technology just like today. So they aren’t really mandatory. Like smartphones.
I think the Party members were required to have telescreens, but the proles were not because they were seen as unimportant and incapable of organizing a rebellion.
Correctly assumed by my recollection.
This is exactly what Orwell feared TVs would become when he envisioned telescreens.
Especially considering how some smartphones already have under-display cameras.
Technology makes me want to retch these days.
I remember them being big stupid bricks that nobody would be caught dead with.
But, then again, i’m 52 and didn’t see the internet until my second year of college.
Touche, should have said smart phones but even the old ones that let you send T6 messages like a pager were pretty advanced cool tech vs this.
Heh - first one I saw was literally a little suitcase you’d open up with the handset inside. Then they were built into cars for a while. Only THEN came the handheld brick ;D
I think we’re talking about the early smartphone period, circa 2009-2015
I remember when it was socially unacceptable to be glued to your iPhone when you go out with people.
I remember when I had to leave my GameBoy in the car…
I remember when no kind of mobile computing was available to anyone other than corporate execs.
i missed the pokemon red, blue, gold and silver versions
I had no idea what Pokémon was in 1998, but for some reason the dude at Walmart or wherever convinced my mom to buy Pokémon Blue with my atomic purple GameBoy Color for Christmas and the rest is history.
It still is, people are just offending at a high rate.
They’re still cool form factor minicomputers tho, and cameras, video players, game consoles… and also phones.
