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US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

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Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually mine is G7 Power, it's perfectly supported by Lineage OS: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ocean/ Only thing that was a little tricky was that you needed to go to Motorola's website to unlock it, but once I grokked it, it took around 10 minutes.

I also realise I must have bought it in 2019, since that's the year it came out.

Their version nomenclature is confusing. Mine is a "G Power 2020," so it's different and I don't see it on the LineageOS Wiki. Maybe it will eventually get supported(?).

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#302
post #33

Note the negative tone about having our phones actually work longer, last longer and be usable longer without draining our money just to keep the threadmill rolling. Imagine how pissed the car industry must be now since most people drive cars for 10-15 years instead of replacing them once per few years like iPhones.

> Note the negative tone about having our phones actually work longer, last longer and be usable longer without draining our money just to keep the threadmill rolling.

Indeed, it's a really positive development. Finally this market is pretty mature and one can buy something that isn't completely unsable within a couple of years of purchase.

My family of three phone users just upgrades our phones to whatever the lower end pixel is when they break (due to some accidental damage). Despite the horror stories, these phones have always been fine for us.

The last remaining barrier to this strategy (limited security updates from Google) is finally going away, so the future for "replace it when it breaks" looks even better.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#303

What upgrade? There's not a phone on the market that's meaningfully more compelling than my Pixel 5a. Maybe if I gamed on my phone or something, it would matter? But my camera is already better than I could ever reasonably need. My processor is fast enough to do everything I need without skipping a beat. I don't really watch movies on my phone but the screen is still probably the best screen of any device I own. The…

Me too, but I'll probably move on when updates end. This was my first pixel after being frustrated by even shorter update lifecycles from other brands.

Beware though, there are lots of posts about sudden death of Pixel 5a phones over on the XDA forum. Just a "black screen" failure to start. They even extended the warranty by 1 year for this particular issue, so it seems like a real hardware failure mode. So maybe this will not be a phone with staying power even for those not bothered by the lack of OEM updates.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#304
post #216
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smallest current vaguely mainstream phone IMO is the Asus Zenfone 10 at 146.5 x 68.1 x 9.4 mm. The iPhone 13 mini is 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.65mm. Then you have weird stuff: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2022&fDisplay... so perhaps by the time your phone dies the Cubot Pocket 4 or 5 will be your answer. Here's the Pocket 3: https://www.gsmarena.com/cubot_pocket_3-12314.php

Zenfone 10 is only marketed as a compact phone. In reality, it is just slightly narrower than a Samsung S23 (146.3 x 70.9 x 7.6).

yet that makes it 5.9" instead of 6.1" clever marketing gimmick to fit into the below 6" bracket

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#305
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I can't even customise the home screen as much ( Literally cannot remove a link to Chrome and other google apps )." I was simply clarifying the point the OP brought up. You literally cannot remove that search bar from the homescreen https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/133065648/is-th... And my point stands, with the Pixel launcher you cant change either of the features mentioned. And an aside: Interesting h…

> And an aside: Interesting how you made me and the OP sound deranged because we don't want to install a 3rd party service to customize the use of our phones. Fair enough, but I was trying to phrase it as a gentle joke. I mean... you're trying to "customize" them to make them use "3rd party services"! That's the whole point! That's what you want! You want something not-Google, and you're mad that the mechanism to do…

Again I didn't mention any angst over the restriction I was simply reinforcing the OPs point that those items are not negotiable. And I really don't see how the points you brought up are comparable. The bing search bar is removable and the iOS sign in is required for functionality. The issue at play here are features that have nothing to do with functionality and are locked in eating up a large space on a limited space device. This is just poor design from a UX perspective but great placement from a user habit and marketing perspective. Its great that you degraded our comments/concerns as "hilarious" and that we are "angry" when the OP was simply sharing a subjective experience, with one part that is factually correct.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, moved on to what? What has replaced those things and rendered them obsolete? On-board storage sure didn't, that's small and not portable, and we already had that. Bluetooth headphones didn't, those require special hardware, have to be charged (battery), have higher latency, reduced sound quality (lower fidelity), packet loss, and spyware built in, and DRM capable. Not even close to a replacement for analog h…

The storage on the device is portable when the device is portable. There are very few instances where I'd find an SD card acceptably portable but a phone not so. Phones these days come in hundreds of gigs of storage. My current phone was a decently cheap one and had 128GB of storage, easily >100GB of usable space. On Android one can easily mount the storage as a USB drive and transfer data at high speeds. And given i…

> Why save it locally when it can trivially be streamed?

If you usually have a network connection, then most of the time streaming is fine. However, not everybody does. About 50% of the time I'm not home, I have little to no service, and even sometimes when I have a strong signal, it will randomly just stop working unless I toggle airplane mode off and on to reforce a handshake with the tower. If we all lived in a big city then sure we could probably make that assumption, but some people live in Wyoming. With local storage I can download high quality FLACs from Bandcamp and get higher quality without having to even think about whether I'll have service. Offline playback of music is a feature the original iPod had!

> Why keep your entire photo and personal movie collection on your portable device which can get lost and broken when you can just connect back home and access even more storage with higher reliability anytime, anywhere?

I would guess most people have more than 100GB in personal photos and videos, so even for the average use case this seems wrong, but especially for people that record much 4K video, you'll run out of space very quickly. Those files can easily get multiple GB in size. If you're on a vacation where you have little or no network connection, you'll have to downgrade your video quality or limit what you record. How is that better? If there were an SD card slot, this is a non-issue because you can bring as many SD cards as you need, and swap them out as they fill up. Can you do that with onboard storage? Then it's not a replacement/obsolescence, it's just a feature removal.

> I don't understand what you mean about "spyware built in" for Bluetooth headphones. All my Bluetooth devices do not have any other kinds of network connectivity, they don't phone home or anything like that. There's no app or anything like that needed for them.

That's great, I'm really happy for you. But some bluetooth headphones do have spyware (especially some of the best ones in some people's opinions). If it requires you to use a special app to pair and/or access features, then it (probably) has spyware in it. Bose is a great example (or at least was, maybe things have changed). With a physical head phone jack, there's no pairing required and there's no way to force you to use their software. That's a hell of a feature IMHO.

That you don't personally have a use case for a headphone jack, doesn't mean it's obsolete. There isn't a replacement for a physical headphone jack, only alternatives with different pros and cons. If that were the criteria, then the M3 macbook would be considered obsolete because I don't personally have a use for it.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#307

Not surprising. Phone upgrades in the last 5 years have been barely worth it. I'll be to first to criticize and mock The Google, but I've been plenty happy with my refurbished Pixel 5 that I not only plan on running it into the ground but getting another one if it finally croaks or loses too much battery capacity. Yes, I could just get the latest Pixel when that happens, but why switch from a phone that I know intima…

One issue is that your Pixel 5 won't get any more security updates (past October 2023). My wife's Pixel 4A is in the same boat - perfectly fine except no more security updates. Doesn't matter much right now, but will gradually start to matter over time.

as a Pixel 4a owner myself, I was caught off-guard a bit that updates were EOL this fall "already"—the past three years have really flown by.

While I'd always previously driven either a pre-owned model or a new, on-production mid-grade, the announcement of the Pixel 8 road map with seven years of updates sealed the deal for me. I went the full monty for the Pixel 8 Pro with 1Tb storage.

It is a little big for most of my back pockets when I'm on the go, but since it's very close in dimensions to the Nokia 7.2 that I used prior to the 4a, it's already feeling quite natural in the hand.

And having the flagship optics package is pretty cool; something I'd always given up with the previous scheme.

But if the SLA had just been four or even five years I don't think I would have made the same choice.

(And don't even get me started on how the non-flagships have crap options for storage: 256Gb is not enough for active mobile users, but that's usually the cap unless you pop for the flagship. Grr.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#308
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term phablet has been pretty much obsolete since 2015 or so. Better accept that we're not going back.

All Android devices and all but one iPhones are phablets. Come at me.

All Smartphones are PDAs

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit is that you can use any USB-C cable for charging. You can also use any USB-C cable for data transfer at low speed, which is what the iPhone supports. With iPhone Pro, you can transfer at low-speed with any cable or high speed with USB3 cable. But most people would rather carry a cheap, light, 6 ft charging cable than heavy, expensive, 3ft for the rare case of transferring data.

But why is USB-C not a benefit of the iPhone 15, per the discussion? It has a USB-C connector, only limited by its USB2 implementation.

No one in this thread has made that claim.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try OsmAnd, it's great!

Actually, map rendering in OsmAnd embarrassingly slow, even on mosern-ish phones. Try organic maps instead

It's gotten a lot faster a few months ago when they started using OpenGL instead of CPU rendering.
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