Took me a while to realize the last image was not a cartoony shark nibbling on an under-sea cable.
You will have to pry my Galaxy S10 from my cold dead hands
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!!
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
You know that you can change keyboards right? Futo swipe texting works great.
Swipe gang rise up
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.
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.
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 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
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.
No cat taxation without cat representation.
She came to inspect what you were complaining about 😅
I have broken 4 micro SDs in the last 2 years. Thsnkfully, “broken” means set to read-only mods, so i could recover it. But yeah. I use it a lot.
This shows just shitty SD cards are for storage that’s used a lot. Even the expensive ones for high intensity use burn out really fast.
And that’s why I stopped giving a shit about SD card slots. I’ve never had a micro SD that didn’t break within a few years at most. It’s annoying and since you have to keep buying new cards it’s not even cheaper than just buying a phone with “enough” storage. I’d rather spend the money up front on a phone with a higher storage tier and have it actually work worry-free for the entire five plus years I’m using it.
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
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 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
Let’s not forget our dearly departed SD Card slot.
I stillhave it
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.
Does it play FLAC and OGG files? Make/Model please?
Yep. I have .flacs .wav etc. Plays em all. They call em DAPs (Digital audio players) now instead of MP3 player because they can play most music formats.
Fiio Echo
Dank
Ass
PlayerEDIT: Another highly recommend player is the HIFI WALKER H2. Some people are putting custom firmware on it, if you don’t like the stock.
This thing popped out in my feed in the last days and I was tempted, would you suggest it?
P.s. is that a KZ / KBear cable I see?
I’ve really been enjoying it, and it sounds great. I’ve been using the desktop DAC mode for gaming because it genuinely sounds so good.
The iems are actually Jade audio jh13 (also made by fiio). They were like $50 and probably have the best sound quality I’ve ever had in buds. And I used to have some expensive earbuds back in the iPod days.
Thanks for the pic and details! That’s a nice bit of kit there.
2025 Motorola 5g Stylus. Aux port and SD card slot. It’s fantastic. And Motorola supports grapheneOS
Graphene on that phone?
I haven’t done it yet. But they did an announcement that they are supporting it on more devices going forward. I think they have one device that is going to have Graphene by default
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!
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.
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.
And this is why phones don’t need 3.5mm jacks.
If you really want it so bad just buy a DAC/DAP.
Wouldn’t need it if I could buy a phone with a jack and SD card slot. This is the problem smart phones were supposed to solve
Smartphones are supposed to be general purpose, not catering to a specific niche like audiophiles. Wireless and/or dongle works for most people.
It’s kinda like saying you wouldn’t need to buy a camera if only smartphones had interchangeable lenses.
I don’t need an audiophile smart phone. But the main draw back in the day was you could declutter your pockets. But then they removed functionality after everyone got rid of all the extra devices. Like the aux port, expandable storage, removable batteries etc.
In this case I bought one of the cheapest DAPs I could find. It just happens to also have noticeably great sound quality. I just wanted an aux port and enough storage to have my music stored locally so I wasn’t relying on the cloud or a subscription. I was sick of fucking around trying to get wireless stuff connected all the time. It never works right in my experience.
A premium option for an MP3 player would be the Tangara. open hardware, open software and even has a wheel like the old iPods, plus the team is on the Fediverse
That might be an open source model, but it’s definitely not the premium option.
There are some very expensive models out there. Astell & Kern for one, even the brand I got my $100 DAP from has a model that’s a few thousand dollars
I bought an innioasys Y1 for similar reasons (I really wanted that old school iPod feel) and I love it. Running RockBox firmware and all my music fits on it. It feels nice to have something reliable and tactile (and also not the same device that accepts messages and other notifications that interrupt my music)
I refuse to buy a phone without a headphone jack. They already stole our IR blaster, I refuse to let them take more
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.
Oh bummer. I’ve got 2 good community stations plus CBC on FM in my area
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.
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.
Having a headphone jack doesn’t mean anything if the phone doesn’t have an FM receiver.
It means I can connect my phone to my car stereo without a bunch of fucking dongles.
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.
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.
Sounds like I can do it with a chain of ten different adapters. Sold!
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.
You’ll have to pry my 3.5 mm jack and physical media from my cold, dead fingers.
Look at that gorgeous piece of machinery!
I like both. wireless for the convenience, wired for the quality n latency. Imagine a guitar effects rack n all pedals are connected via bluetooth. Every note would have a 3-5 business day delay. BUT not having the option to choose is a real bummer.
That’s kind of an insane comparison. Input delay when using wireless headphones to listen to music is essentially meaningless. At worst it means it takes an additional 1/2 of a second for the song to start.
Input delay when you’re actually playing music is of utmost importance because there is a delay on everything you do. It makes it impossible to keep rhythm.
It’s two completely different scenarios
Yeah, but people play games on their phones, and video syncing to wireless earphone latency, is extra software that the app has to work around.
And all this, because some industry leaders want to extort you for 50 extra bucks for headphones, instead of putting the 0.70 cents jack on your phone.
The point, is the senselessness of the inconvenience the customer goes through, not how big or small the inconvenience is.
It’s proof the designer doesn’t have your interest in mind, and will take active steps to make your life worse, big or small, if they can get 10 more bucks out of you that way.
Any halfway decent pair of bluetooth headphones has negligible latency nowadays. I play competitive PC games with bluetooth audio and there’s no problem.
Headphone jacks in phones need space for the jack itself and a DAC while not a lot of people use them anymore. That’s why many phones don’t have them. If you do need a headphone jack, you can just buy a phone with a a headphone jack.
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?
Lots of Chinese phones definitely do IR blaster, dual SIM and SD card. I don’t think the headphone jack is as common since it steals a lot of room for something that most people actually do not use or want.
mine is dual SIM. i don’t think i’ve ever used that slot since my cellphone telephone company moved to eSIMs. I’d rather have the microSD slot
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.
Talk? I use it daily on all my devices
2025 Motorola 5G Stylus.
Has aux port and SD card slot
And a stylus
That’s the one I got precisely for those reasons.
The shitty part is that the screen was advertised by LG themselves as an HDR display and once I got it it’s not HDR in any sense of the word. If I used my phone to watch stuff besides the odd tiktok I would have been very pissed and returned it.
Yeah me too, but I didn’t notice the hdr thing, I also don’t watch much on my phone as a main screen for anything visually interesting.
I don’t, wireless headphones are way better.
Yes and… constantly charging everything is annoying
And losing them
It is kind of annoying, but in my experience not more annoying than dealing with wires. My current wireless pair have been the longest surviving earphones I’ve ever owned by a significant margin because it has no thin wires to weaken and break after so many repeated tangles and wraps and bends and twists and tugs. It is one very major weakness removed. Also no more cable noise, no more having to cable manage your chest to stop the wire from smacking against your torso and making that annoying thumping sound you hear deep in your ear hole. Sure batteries are a weakness in themselves but I honestly will take the inconvenience of charging them once a week or so over dealing with goddamn wires. That’s a good deal.
Speaking for “away” use though. Earphones that I take and wear outside. At home it’s a whole other story.
Yes, having to charge them is mildly annoying, but nowhere near as annoying as having a cable hanging off your head tethered to your desk or pocket the entire time you’re using them. I would never go back to wires.
I don’t have that issue at all.
Do you know what’s even better? Being able to choose either, or both!
Yeah I can’t stand having a wire dangling around especially when I’m working
My work rig for both jobs includes an apple 3.5mm earpods set. It’s one of two apple products I use, the other being wireless airpods-pro2 I grabbed that I pair with nothing and use for Quiet Time.
The amount of time I DON’T spend futzing with my sound gear before zoom calls or messenger calls is wonderful.
Yeah that’s how it is for me, my ear buds are paired with my laptop so I can listen to music most of the day and not having the wire makes it easy to get up and walk to my work tables as I test and build stuff then when I join a meeting its already paired and ready to go
Unless you like high bitrate flac.
24bit gets down sampled to 16bit, no thanks.
If you
claim tocan hear a difference between flac and a high quality mp3, would you really want to use the shitty phone DAC to plug your headphones in?Wired is and always will be superior to wireless.
That’s an opinion, not an argument
