I have been thinking about this issue lately because I own some devices that still work as normal, but are really old (one being almost eight, and the other almost seven years old).

The dilemma is the following:

I don’t actually need to upgrade these devices, because newer models don’t have any new features that I have any need of. What my current devices do is all that I need them to do, and that could probably still be true for many more years to come.

In other words, if I get an upgrade now, then I would be wasting money because I could just stick with my current device until it breaks for good and then buy a new one instead.

The problem is that, if I wait until that point, then I’ll be left without a device that I need for everything that I do on a daily basis, until I have been able to save up the money to buy a new one.

This makes me think that I should maintain a “critical device failure” fund, just in case. But even if I do, that doesn’t solve all the problems.

With my smartphone, for example, I use it for online banking authentication. There is no alternative system that I can use where I live, and this system can only be tied to one device at a time. There is always the risk that if I lose my phone, then I would also lose access to my online banking app, which is a service that due to certain circumstances, my wife and I use on a daily basis. We truly depend on it. I would have to quickly buy a new device, and then rush to the bank, to go through a long and gruesome process of getting the permission to install the app on the new phone (true story).

Ironically, I can “transfer” the app between devices, but that feature is useless if I let my smartphone completely die first.

And there are many other similar apps and services that I regularly use, which I can hold on one device only.

I also know, however, that whatever date I choose to upgrade these devices on, will be a mostly arbitrary one. So... shrug

Just to give you a final example: The battery on my smartphone wasn’t doing too well, so after almost six years, I finally got it replaced. It was surprisingly cheap, considering how it breathed new life into my device. Maybe I was just imagining it, but it suddenly seemed to work faster, not to mention that the battery lasts way longer now, obviously. Many people that I know though, would just have tossed this six-year-old device and gotten a new one. For them, a dying battery is synonymous with a dying phone, and at the six year mark, that’s... maybe not a completely unreasonable way of thinking?

But anyway.

How do you device when you upgrade a device?

I use Android and I don't like and I suspect I would like ios about that much. The sw practices and manufacturer behavior is not what I would call exemplary. Compared to the desktop the mobile os landscape is locked down without much choice.

I have personal experience only with Pinephone released around 2020 which I used for about a year with postmarketOS for most of that time. I finally replaced it due it low battery endurance and call reliability with sleep due to inflexible requirements on that front but I actually liked it more that the Samsung I use now.

Other than that I only know about Librem 5 released around that time. Are there any recent examples of phone hardware that is meant to run a linux distro and what do you think about the future of that?

They all released videos at almost the exact same time, so even though I don’t care, I was made to care. Therefore, I’m inflicting that same pain on you. You’re welcome.

Mrwhosetheboss made a good point saying that the target audience for this thing are rich people who want phones that look flashy and can pay for them, but don’t care that they have worse specs than the less flashy ones at a similar price.

MKBHD called it the “S25 Ultra Lite”, which I thought was funny. He also brought up the issue of cooling. He additionally said that no one is asking for thin phones, although it seems that Apple has also bought into the idea that people want this, since it’s rumored that they want to release a thin iPhone this year.

Dave2D said that he tested the heat dissipation capacity of the phone and that it can handle itself well. Apparently it still somehow has a vapor chamber inside of it, as well as a wireless charger. Apparently it also has the smallest battery in the lineup, even though it doesn’t have the silicon carbon tech that is all the rage now. He made a good point though, namely that this could just be Samsung starting the trend so that the technology matures in a few years’ time.

All three of them mentioned that everyone uses cases these days, which immediately kills the whole purpose of buying a thin phone and losing out on better specs.

If you somehow have not gotten enough of tech YouTubers acting confused over Samsung launching a product that no one asked for, there’s also Techaltar and Tech Spurt. I recommend the latter for dirty British humor.

I don't think I've installed an update on my phone and felt like it was an improvement over the old version.

Samsung just pushed their new firmware onto my phone and added a whole bunch of annoying AI stuff that I don't want and additionally decided for me that I no longer want the bluetooth signal in the statusbar unless I open up the notification menu, with no way to reenable it. I turn off my headphones when I don't need them and it was really useful to see at a glance that if they were connected and I had forgotten to turn them off.

I think the answer is probably yes, but I wanted to double check. Does anyone here have experience with them? For clarity, this is the home modems that you can buy for stationary 5g internet. This is not those pocket, battery powered personal hotspots.

I just moved into a new studio in France. Despite literally every other building on the street having fiber, my studio does not have it. So I am stuck with DSL, since France doesn’t use cable for internet service. My dsl gets 2-10 Mbps down and 0.25-1 up. This is abysmal, especially the upload.

The other problem is the building is such a good shield against radio waves. With Orange, supposedly the best mobile carrier in France, I get exactly zero service, even sticking my phone out the window.

There is a carrier called Free, that does offer a 5g home internet box. To test it out, I got a Free (but not free) SIM card for my phone. Sticking it out the window, I get about the same speeds as my DSL box provides.

So there is the impetuous for my question. Should I expect their 5g home internet box to be about the same speeds as my iPhone, or can I expect them to be faster and more reliable, since it isn’t battery powered and can me larger?

So this may be weird, I just got a new set of pixel buds pro 2 and they work great, except if I'm not playing audio on my phone they frequently disconnect and reconnect from my bluetooth - I can tell because I can hear the tones. But if I'm playing a podcast or YouTube video, no issue. Phone is a Pixel 7a and it doesn't do this with my old A buds, my car, etc. haven't tried pairing the buds to anything else yet.

I've updated firmware, restarted everything, checked settings, turned off the adaptive sound, with no change. Help?

While not the same website, this reddit thread from several years ago is the only thing coming up on Google for me and everyone in there has had the same thing happen to them: the Screen Time settings in iOS showing some website being up 24/7

It should be noted I don't have Verizon, have never been to verizon.com, and don't even use Safari as my browser. I have -0- idea how in the world this is showing up, and so it automatically makes me assume my phone has been hacked somehow (but try to remind myself that tech is also just wonky).

I set the screen time limit to 1 minute, and it has not showed up again as an app that has even been used. This is on a iPhone XS on iOS 15.4.1

Does anyone have any idea what this means or why this would happen?

My phone, Samsung Galaxy S20, has finally started having some screen issues and made me start looking seriously at a new phone. I felt like I got great use out of this phone after 5 years, and I anticipate trying to get a similar or (hopefully) longer life span from my next phone.

Ideally I'd like to keep this phone going for another year, currently the screen issue is more annoying than actually preventing me from using the phone. The OLED can no longer properly display black colors and when the screen goes to sub 10% brightness it adds a yellow tinge to the screen, and using my blue light filter only makes it worse. This has led me to use my phone less at night or when it's dark, since it's like having a dim flashlight shining in my eyes.

A bit of a startling realization, was that I've been putting off building a new computer since I moved over here due to the expense, but I'd happily drop more than I'd be willing to spend on that new computer on a new phone since I use it everyday throughout the day.

This made me wonder how often others replace their phones.

Are there any criteria you look for when picking new phones?
Are you a brand loyalist, or do you shop around?
Do you do camera comparisons between phones/models?
Or simply, how do you choose your phone?

My iPhone 14 Pro has been at 84% battery health for almost a year now. Anecdotally the battery lasts significantly less time than it did previously, even when it was already at 84% health. I think it may just be a stale calculation, and my actual battery health is significantly lower. If I can get it to show as less than 80%, I can get AppleCare to replace it. Does anyone here know how to get the iPhone to recalculate this value?

I have Coconut batter on the Mac, and it can check the battery health for an iPhone attached with a cable. It uses a different formula, so it gives me a health of 87%. However it also shows history for when I have run it in the past, and when I tested it almost 100 charge cycles ago, it also read 87%. I don't know how any battery can go almost 100 charge cycles with zero degradation (537 to 617 cycles, so it's not like it's a fresh battery).

Hello friends, and thank you in advance for any help on this topic.

I am looking for an android keyboard that does not have emoji, stickers or gifs, but also has long press options for special characters like dashes, slashes and colons etc.

Searching online for variants of "no emoji keyboard," only floods my results with the opposite and it's beyond frustrating!

I realize that the answer is likely right under my nose and I'm just missing it for whatever reason.

I would glady pay money for such an option if only I could find one.

I'm sorry if this question is silly or posted in the wrong thread, but I'm at my wits end.

Again, thank you for any help or redirection to my query!

Cheers!

My previous phone was a pixel. My tech life generally is a weird mix of things that are bad for privacy that I accept for convenience but also in other ways I choose to sacrifice things to protect privacy.

Does not registering the phone with Samsung actually cost me any functionality as a user?

I've been a long time Fi user on the Pixel line of phones, so I've always gotten the gold standard of service from Fi. My wife is an adamant iPhone user. We want to port her over to my plan, but I was hoping to get some recent feedback from anyone using a modern iPhone (just bought her a 16) -- All the things I find on Google are months to years old. If this is you, how well do the iPhone features (Visual voicemail, iMessage, RCS, FaceTime, 5G, etc) work for you on Fi?

I was asked to recommend a phone to an older relative that is bad with technology and wanted to ask some advice.

It is important that the phone is reliable and clean. That is no bloatware, popups, adware, nagware or anything like that. Other than that the requirements are simply as good a camera as is available at the budget and maps.

The options I can see are:

• standard Android phone - Personally I have Samsung A34 which would fit the hw and price but the sw is horrible. I also have no current experience with custom ROMs as I went with adb(and Universal Android Debloater for ease of use) to remove the worst of it. From what I have heard the Google Pixel comes with least amount of bloat as Android(single source) but they seemed to have different problems with hw each generation and the price would mean an older one. Maybe something else would be better choice here.

• iPhone - honestly I have zero experience here as I never had it so I don't even know how much it would fit. The price would also mean an older or used model

• Dumb or KaiOS phone would fail the camera requirement and the minimal phones mentioned here(eg. Light phone, Minimal phone) are expensive for what they are and I am not convinced a good choice here given the usual problems with niche hw and sw(but maybe I am wrong?)

I am in EU and the budget is less than 500EUR, preferably less than 350EUR.

What sort of non stock andriod launchers are people using at the moment? Just moved from iPhone to Android and want to use something better than oneui. Currently using niagara but curious what people are actually using?