Hey, it has a barometric pressure sensor, that’s cool. OG Galaxy Watch had one, then the WearOS replacements got rid of it.

Galaxy isn’t very good on updates either. Haven’t seen one on the Watch 5 Pro in a year.

Over the years I’ve found, in the grand scheme, unless the CEO murdered your family, who cares? I didn’t buy Sony products for a couple of decades, right now I don’t even remember why I stopped. I think it was around shit warranty handling. Meanwhile, I was removing viable options from my purchase pool.

More recently, I’m just trying to make my purchase decisions like I’m a business. Does the item at a given price fill the needs of the role? Does buying the year-old model at heavy discount fit the need? Avoid the top-tier release-day buzz, buy at a discount, use the tool as long as possible. These techniques collectively will stifle all the “economy” they’re trying to make a profit from.

Vendors that are truly terrible will lose customers. One person’s soapbox won’t affect them, however, despite best efforts.

Everything mobile manufacturers have done since smartphones finally became popular in 2007 seemed like temporary solutions due to moving so fast. It’s clear now that it was all an attempt to paradigm-shift compute into leased property.

It really needs to end, along with the terrible disposable hardware designs. Even if we were not in a climate crisis, it is about as bad as the US was in the 1950s throwing trash everywhere.

On some level, especially now, want to find an alarm clock or an mp3 player or even a camera? It’s getting harder and harder. Old phones with their battery removed or replaced are perfect for those roles.

Qualcomm product toolchains have been a right mess. Oddly less malicious and more, “we move too fast and branch too many platforms,” historically making long-term maintenance a nightmare.

Good to see them improving that, finally.

No, and Google closed the SMS API from future growth so RCS can’t be added to third-party SMS apps.

Narrator: it is not.

That’s great until you get hit by a car and can’t remember shit, or your family has to deal with handling your end of life and the only password record was in a blob of tissue in your skull.

Passwords in general are dumb and should cease to exist, though.

Most of the software updates you see are a result of CI/CD processes. The industry claims it makes good design patterns to get features our faster and more reliably. In reality it is just a rushed shitstorm that results in half-assed Friday releases that aren’t fixed until the following week.

I’ve long turned off auto update of my apps. Too many times I’m on a trip or other scenario where my tool is meant to be a tool and not some tech bro’s rented wet dream, and the tool is broken.

But here’s the kicker. CI/CD exists for another reasons or so:

• Frequent updates tend to reset review rankings in app stores. Not only does it offer plausible deniability to the app company, but it also screws with the review scores in their favor, as well as other rankings.
• Great way to help nudge along planned obsolescence. All that pointless rewriting of flash storage on a daily basis.
• Psychological manipulation, it gets notifications in your face to try and increase app engagement, which ensures it is fresh and running gathering user telemetry to sell as a side-hustle, as well as direct-interaction telemetry and getting more ads in your face.

It’d be better if we all just went back to landline phones some days. Modern tech is too noisy, abusive, and intrusive.

They are blind and lost. Nest hasn’t had a feature update since they acquired them 10 years ago. Their thermostats don’t even have a “its freezing outside and the air conditioner shouldn’t run” feature. Fi rots on the vine. Their camera service is terrible and they just raised the rates. Garbage company anymore.

Great write-up and great find! You’ll find companies will often try to weasel out of actually honoring ethical programs more than not, but that doesn’t mean give up! If nothing else, the learning will lead to long term education and basically forever employment in various fields.

Chicken fried water heater?

Yeah, pocket answers and declines would become very frequent. I already pause music and skip tracks while walking, mowing, etc.

Sadly, it is not standard. Even now. If only fruit company wasn’t the way they are and could be trusted. (Not a zinger at you for using their products, just personal decision.)

The S22 US version used snapdragon 8 gen 1 (in the US) and the chip was prone to performance issues. It worked, but it was rough, ran hot, and ate power for lunch. I’m not sure if that was a year that the international variants had an Exynos, but their performance is generally worse.

So seeing a simpler phone with basic android seem to do fine versus a flagship with super bloated Android on a first gen apps processor makes a lot of sense, really.

All of the data you mentioned, voicemail audio included, would be about 10 megabytes.

I probably would consider them, but their phones tend to have lackluster US carrier/band support and lack of security updates. Coupling that with the high price tag, no go.

American here: What’s a transportation company? (I jest, but seriously, probably hundreds of thousands of transportation companies.)

Offline maps are the way to go. I made a habit of having all of the US always stored in my phone just in case something bad happened. Only takes 12GB or so. Cell service can be spotty in large parts of the country so you can’t depend on Internet maps.

Then it paid off. Plane lost an engine mid-flight, had to emergency land 850 miles from where I needed to be, and off I went by rental car with map in hand…er…cupholder.

eSIM works until it doesn’t. Carriers in the US have had eSIM phones fall off the network when their activation servers fail, or bill data usage incorrectly on eSIM lines, among other weird issues. It’s a way too fragile technology that adds more problems than it attempts to solve.