Re: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
 

Quick reply...

Also, replace-ability of parts. I am not speaking of hi-tech LCD panels and touch-screens, oh no; I am speaking of simple, plain screws. Why do they have to have special, black-colour, large-flat-hat screws, which are difficult to find, when simple silver-ish-colour, small-hat screws are cheaper and sold in hundreds (for eyeglasses repair or something)?

It's like keys in a laptop keyboard: the keyboards are different, the keys are different, so if one or two keys break... Ok, there is http://www.laptopkey.com/ for that. Still, if you go to extreme and calculate price of all the keys in your laptop's keyboard, it will be comparable with price of laptop: they have to have their profit from that.

About falls [Nokia N900]: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=37609

Best wishes.

Re: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
 

TRUE!!! It's so funny how the little things are always skimmed over/messed up. Screws seem like superficial little things...until you need extras.

I've had a similar experience, but with a "gaming keyboard." An Adesso EasyTouch135. A cheap little thing that did the job alright, I suppose. Got it because it looked alright. I was playing Zork in DOSbox, and the "O" key popped off. An attempt to put it back on resulted in a broken latch. I called my friend to help me replace the latch, since, being the filthy little cheapskake I am, I didn't want to shop for a superior keyboard.

You know how much he said I needed just to replace the latch? $8. I gave him the keyboard and dusted my old-beater Logitech BT keyboard off.

J1000. My Samsung Flash didn't even survive a 4' fall onto tile without the screen developing a battle scar streching from bezel-to-bezel!

You too! ;)

Re: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
 

Another one I will add to the list.
Phone Calls - This isn't necessarily a smartphone exclusive but modern feature phones and smartphones really aren't that great when it comes to call quality and reception/signal.

Re: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
 

Eh. A very broad generalization that I'm strongly inclined to disagree with. For older revisions of various flagship phones and other cheapy phones, I'm inclined to agree with you, but that's about it.

Re: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
 

http://pocketnow.com/2013/08/16/call-quality-sucks
This covers issue well.

Re: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
 

Holy truth! The old "dumb" phone did the job of being phones perfectly. In the new "smart" phones, the phone feature looks like an after-thought. "Let's build this cool new device that can do 200 different things" - then, two weeks before the release, "Oh sh*t, we forgot that people may also want to make phone calls with it, we need to bash something together quickly!"

Re: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
 

I have used both newer and older dumb phones and I find that older dumb phones generally have better call quality in terms of both reception and audio. I still use a dumb phone and call quality is lacking. This is not a smartphone exclusive problem.

Re: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
 

IMO, the things are as they are because 10-15-20 years ago those devices were made for specific market and potntial buyers knew exactly what they are buying, why they are buying it and most important, how to use them. Now, those are just mass market devices for everyone and development goes only in the direction that marketing can sell.

Re: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
 

The real issue lies with the expected core use cases, 10 years ago the primary use for PDAs/Phones was for accessing local content with the occasional syphoning of low bandwidth data for terminal access or email. Sure you could surf the web a bit and search and if you are concerned about that I'd suggest you fire up the wayback machine to remind yourself about what web content was 10 years ago. Once you closed the app or service the radios would all shut down until the next email push/pull or the user asked to go on-line. Battery life was great and idle meant idle.

That has now been flipped with the expectation that _everything_ is constantly sucked down a high bandwidth pipe. The processors and RAM in most of these modern mobile devices are primarily specified to provide an adequate web experience which today means lots of media and lots of scripting and those just eat memory.

Once this is considered it is a waste not to use that processing power in other applications so the bloat continues especially as desktop levels of performance approaches. This becomes the norm.

Then the issue of idle radios, sadly users hate waiting for the next poll cycle to let them know that a new kitten must be liked on Facebook, they want that alert _now_ so the radios can't be turned off.

18 years ago I had a PC with 8MB of RAM and a 60MHz processor, it ran Linux just fine. 14 years ago I was working on a 3G phone that was close in terms of specification and ran on a battery for days, that said the phone UI was limited and tailored for a 96x120 colour screen where as the PC would multi-task a full desktop. Neither device would be considered usable today.

I look at the devices I worked on over between 2000-2012 and the leaps in performance over the years were astonishing. The pace has not stopped since I moved on from working on mobile phones. The drive has now shifted to how close devices can get to a traditional "Desktop experience" without necessarily considering if that is the correct approach. It does make life easier for application developers migrating from PCs, they are used to vast quantities of RAM, processing power and bandwidth.

It reminds me of the adage "All software sucks" but at least there is software.

(now using a Nokia 8800 Arte since the USB port on the N9 died, guess that covers hardware reliability too...)

Re: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
 

Actually, I would disagree on this point. :) Ten years ago, I had the luxury of acquiring an HP Journada handheld PC. The keyboard was just big enough to touch-type on, and the screen just wide enough to comfortably read text; thus, I was able to use the device very much like a traditional laptop machine. But, the handheld PC concept has apparently died out.

Four years ago, I picked up a Nokia N900. Of course, it's a very small form-factor, but still it had the resistive screen that could be used accurately with a stylus, and a Linux distribution capable of running desktop software. And so, I was still able to edit text files in the same manner as on my desktop, which was a luxury.

The current common hardware set for mobile devices is indeed powerful, but they've dropped every useful input method available. No keyboards any more. Almost nothing with a stylus. Low-accuracy capacitive screens. Completely closed operating systems.

These are not personal computers any more. They are nothing but content-consumption toys. Personally, I would _love_ to see a return to a more traditional "desktop experience", just to have a device that was more capable for use in doing real work...