No MicroSD slot and no removable battery means no sale for me. And from the posts on this forum, I'm far from alone.
When my S2 died a couple weeks ago I had already read the rumors that the S6 would lack these critical, basic features. So I went ahead and bought an S5. So glad I didn't wait for the anti-consumer S6.
Removable batteries are both about getting through a full day of hardcore usage without ever being tethered to a charging wire, as well as increasing the overal longevity of the phone by being able to replace it 2-3 years in when it no longer holds a decent charge.
Expandable storage isn't just about having more storage in the device. It's about being able to have safe storage independent of the device that can survive the device failing. Every night my phone does an automatic backup of all my apps and data to my MicroSD card. I can't tell you how many times this has saved me over the years, on multiple phones. More than once on my Samsung Captivate (original Galaxy S). More than once on my S2... including this most-recent time 2 weeks ago. I moved my MicroSD card over to my new S5, restored my data and I was right back where I left off.
And don't give me that crap about backing up to the "cloud". The "cloud" is a joke, and those of us in the Real World don't have data, let alone wifi access 24/7. Just because I don't have wireless signal doesn't mean I don't want my data backed up that night.
Every cell phone I've ever owned has had a removable battery, and every smartphone I've ever had has had a MicroSD card... including some non-smartphones from back when they were called TransFlash. There's no way in hell I'm going to start giving up these basic, core features of owning a phone. If Samsung doesn't get its head out of its ass, stop being stupid and stop being anti-consumer then the S5 could easily be the last Samsung phone I ever buy. I'll miss the OLED screen but they won't deserve my money at that point. I'll vote with my money and give it to a company that isn't into the business of screwing the user and forced-obsolescence.
If you care enough about 911 and emergency situations to be reading this article, and you don't have a landline, then that's on you for being irresponsible. People spend more on texting than it costs to have a landline. No excuses.
The monthly cost of a landline is cheap insurance in the event of an emergency. Cell towers go down, fail, become over-congested, and cell phone batteries die.
If you care enough about 911 and emergency situations to be reading this article, and you don't have a landline, then that's on you for being irresponsible. People spend more on texting than it costs to have a landline. No excuses.
The monthly cost of a landline is cheap insurance in the event of an emergency. Cell towers go down, fail, become over-congested, and cell phone batteries die.
If you care enough about 911 and emergency situations to be reading this article, and you don't have a landline, then that's on you for being irresponsible. People spend more on texting than it costs to have a landline. No excuses.
The monthly cost of a landline is cheap insurance in the event of an emergency. Cell towers go down, fail, become over-congested, and cell phone batteries die.
Wake me up when there's a Nexus device with a MicroSD slot. Until then, I couldn't care less about Nexus devices as apparently they don't care about me or all the other countless users who have learned and conditioned their usage of their smartphone around what used to be a standard, logical feature.
My old Northgate Omnikey keyboard had the keycap letterings not printed in paint, but as plastic molded throughout the entire thickness of the key. There was no possible way to wear it off. It was also full-mechanical with a metal base. Could be switched to Dvorak layout in 2 presses.
Holy shit, ISCABBS is still around? I spent a ton of time on that back in the early 90s and made a lot of friends there (none of whom I have heard from in eons of course).
Dell most certainly does still offer FreeDOS. Perhaps just on some of their business line, but it's there.
We've chosen it to save money when we were just going to put our own non-MS OS on there. Ubunutu is also an option on a number of models. RHEL too, but that'll cost you.
I ditched Linux Mint as an option for my clients when I discovered that major updates required a complete, clean re-install. I switched to Xubuntu and have been perfectly happy. Since kicking Mint to the curb I haven't paid much close attention. Is this still the case with major version upgrades?
You're joking right? Consumers are pushing a desire for thinner lighter devices capable of longer and longer run-times with higher loads.
Believe it or not, consumers also like to not have to replace their device in 2 years because the battery only holds half the capacity it used to. Just because it's not on the box or part of the advertisement's spiel doesn't mean it's not something consumers care about. There are plenty of consumers who can see into the future beyond the length of their nose.
Something has to give when you are designing around these requirements. A lot of modern devices are thin because their batteries lack any kind of protection. Using flat lithium cells gives the designer far more flexibility to design a product rather than having a full battery pack with protective case and protection circuit.
You seem to be under the misconception that these rule each other out. Do you do much electronics repair? How many devices have you owned? Opened? Replaced the batteries on? I am on a tablet right now that is thinner than a Microsoft Surface Pro 2, but unlike the Surface it has a user-removable battery and doesn't sacrifice run-time to get it. My cell phone is thinner than an iPhone... and guess what? Removable battery.
Manufacturers aren't making non-removable batteries because of design constraints. They're making them non-removable because it ensures that when the battery wears out, the consumer is forced to buy a new model. Otherwise why permanently epoxy the battery into the device? I know all about unprotected lithium cells... I'm a certified Apple technician and have opened plenty of MacBooks. But you can have a battery that uses the case of the device to protect it without gluing the damn thing in so it can't even be serviced by someone with the proper training and tools.
The average consumer is likely to damage the types of batteries used in these devices and burn their house down in the process.
I'm well aware of this... it's made quite clear in our training and quite obvious when you're working on them daily. But it's not as necessary as you've been fooled to think. The "design constraints" and "users are demanding thinner" is just the bullshit lines they've come up with as an excuse to mask the actual reason: enforced obsolescence and increased revenue stream. If it were actually true, there would be no need for the epoxy, and no other manufacturers proving them wrong.
Given the pace of technology and the average use life of such devices, replaceable battery is one feature I really no longer care about.
That's nice. Not everyone is rolling in cash and prepared to buy a new phone or tablet every 2 years, especially when there's no technical reason to have to do so. Consumers have been conditioned to accept a worn-out battery as a legitimate reason to trash their otherwise perfectly functional and adequate device, which is insane and inexcusable. This would've never been accepted pre-iPhone/iPod. My sister's HTC One X is less than 2 years old and already can't hold a charge worth a damn. The phone is already 3 times the phone she needs, so why should she be forced to buy a new one? It's criminal. Luckily I am willing to replace it for her but HTC has made it unnecessarily difficult for no legitimate reason. There are thinner phones with user-replaceable batteries... they could've made it so she could do it herself, but that wasn't advantageous to their bottom line.
And if the batteries actually fail a quick and quite cheap trip to the repair shop will see it swapped out.
WHAT "repair shop"? Maybe for the lucky subset of people who live in cities near an Apple Store or some other electronics shop. But guess what? There's a lot more to the USA and world than the big cities. And the fact remains: there's no need for it to not be replaceable by the consumer. There's no need for them to pay $80 to have som
I've stopped buying consumer electronics that take the markedly ANTI-consumer and needless action of making non-removable batteries. I realize this eliminates most tablets* but I really have little use for a tablet (my job has provided several for me to use but I really couldn't care less about them, having tried them).
* - And all Apple hardware, but I'm ok with that too.
You obviously haven't lived or even traveled anywhere where there are mountains.
Newsflash: the world isn't flat, and radio signals have difficulty passing through hundreds (or thousands) of feet of solid rock.
There's no cell service where I live. Radio reception is fuzzy. I can barely get satellite TV due to the position of the mountains. My internet has to be DSL as Comcast will never run cable out here.
And Netflix/Hulu/Amazon will happily stream you that fast? I highly doubt it. I have a 6Mbit/s DSL connection and Netflix won't even saturate that, although Amazon and Hulu do a better so it's not my internet connection throttling Netflix.
My car can go a lot faster than the 20MPH it was stuck in traffic the other day doing for a long time too. The potential of the pipe is only one factor.
The comparison was about legit physical media versus legit streaming services. Not about illegally pirated movies. That's an entirely separate issue and has nothing to do with what I was talking about
Most of the USA isn't cities. City folks have an awfully distorted sense of what is "normal" and have no concept of what the rest of the world live like. My town has a population of less than 4000. The largest "city" in my state has barely over 40,000.
I have a movie collection numbering in the many hundreds. All are on original physical media.
All the reasons that people have for streaming versus playing off discs I agree with... but there's one kicker: once you get past the annoying menus, notices, and previews, and actually get to the movie, the quality can't be compared. Not many people have a 30-50 Mbit/s internet connection that can handle the full bitrate of 1080p video with lossless 5.1 sound, and I can't think of any streaming source that would send that even if someone did. They're all horribly compressed up the ass with lossy compression... noticable even on my 40" TV but especially so on the 92" projector.
Unskippable menus suck, and online libraries are certainly convenient... but when it comes time to watch the movie, I do kind of want it to actually look good. But I guess I'm a dying breed.
Actually, they had done a safety study and determined that a large number of injuries were caused by keys being driven into the driver's knees. So the relocation was mostly a safety issue.
Not to mention they crash-tested their cars against dummy moose...
All these comparisons with Netflix fail to address one critical point: video quality
I can stream the same movie on Netflix and Hulu on the same device (Roku), at the same time, on the same internet connection. If I stream that movie on Netflix, the stream doesn't fully-utilize my internet connection and is noticeably poor. If I cancel, then immediately start streaming the same movie on Amazon Prime, same device, just moments later, it saturates my internet connection and looks considerably better. I can switch back and forth and the results are consistent. I can also recreate this with other movies available on both. I've done this on multiple different nights... the test results are always the same.
Not to say that if Amazon ups the price of Prime that we'll keep it... I'm not a big fan of streaming in-general. But to compare Netflix and Amazon one really needs to take into account the video quality. Netflix quality is absolutely HORRIBLE and I can't stand watching content off it, and choose Amazon or Hulu whenever possible. Of course, in this day and age people seem content with Youtube level of over-compressed shit so it's probably a lost cause...
If you're paying $30/blu-ray disc you're either impatient or doing it wrong. I don't feel a burning need to watch a movie within some arbitrarily-short timeframe after its release just so I can keep up with the Joneses. As a result of that and buying things on sales/deals, I average $5-$10 per blu-ray movie, even very popular blockbuster releases. My movie collection now spans over 400 movies, most of which are blu-ray. And I know friends and family with more.
One might point out that if I had taken all that money, I could have instead paid for 25 years or more of Netflix or what have you. The issue there is that then I'm at the mercy of whatever movies the streaming provide decides I can watch today, and maybe will pull tomorrow, as well as the condition of my internet connection. I've already had maybe a 10% success rate searching Hulu Plus/Netflix/Amazon Prime for a given movie we want to watch, as well has seen frightening lists of what movies Netflix decides to "discontinue" from time to time.
No thanks. I'll keep my physical media, thank you.
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No MicroSD slot and no removable battery means no sale for me. And from the posts on this forum, I'm far from alone.
When my S2 died a couple weeks ago I had already read the rumors that the S6 would lack these critical, basic features. So I went ahead and bought an S5. So glad I didn't wait for the anti-consumer S6.
Removable batteries are both about getting through a full day of hardcore usage without ever being tethered to a charging wire, as well as increasing the overal longevity of the phone by being able to replace it 2-3 years in when it no longer holds a decent charge.
Expandable storage isn't just about having more storage in the device. It's about being able to have safe storage independent of the device that can survive the device failing. Every night my phone does an automatic backup of all my apps and data to my MicroSD card. I can't tell you how many times this has saved me over the years, on multiple phones. More than once on my Samsung Captivate (original Galaxy S). More than once on my S2... including this most-recent time 2 weeks ago. I moved my MicroSD card over to my new S5, restored my data and I was right back where I left off.
And don't give me that crap about backing up to the "cloud". The "cloud" is a joke, and those of us in the Real World don't have data, let alone wifi access 24/7. Just because I don't have wireless signal doesn't mean I don't want my data backed up that night.
Every cell phone I've ever owned has had a removable battery, and every smartphone I've ever had has had a MicroSD card... including some non-smartphones from back when they were called TransFlash. There's no way in hell I'm going to start giving up these basic, core features of owning a phone. If Samsung doesn't get its head out of its ass, stop being stupid and stop being anti-consumer then the S5 could easily be the last Samsung phone I ever buy. I'll miss the OLED screen but they won't deserve my money at that point. I'll vote with my money and give it to a company that isn't into the business of screwing the user and forced-obsolescence.
Unless you ever want to upgrade or repair it. But of course hardware never fails and 8GB RAM should be fine for years.
Epoxied batteries, soldered RAM, nonstandard SSDs... it's insane anti-consumer BS.
Also, there's no reason cellular 911 service shouldn't be ultra-reliable.
http://www.mychamplainvalley.c...
What are the odds that all 4 of them will have ALL their overlapping cell towers in an area knocked-out?
What are the odds your family isn't all on a single cellular carrier, making you unable to take advantage of such redundancy?
What is this land line you speak of?
If you care enough about 911 and emergency situations to be reading this article, and you don't have a landline, then that's on you for being irresponsible. People spend more on texting than it costs to have a landline. No excuses.
The monthly cost of a landline is cheap insurance in the event of an emergency. Cell towers go down, fail, become over-congested, and cell phone batteries die.
whats a landline.
If you care enough about 911 and emergency situations to be reading this article, and you don't have a landline, then that's on you for being irresponsible. People spend more on texting than it costs to have a landline. No excuses.
The monthly cost of a landline is cheap insurance in the event of an emergency. Cell towers go down, fail, become over-congested, and cell phone batteries die.
What landline?
If you care enough about 911 and emergency situations to be reading this article, and you don't have a landline, then that's on you for being irresponsible. People spend more on texting than it costs to have a landline. No excuses.
The monthly cost of a landline is cheap insurance in the event of an emergency. Cell towers go down, fail, become over-congested, and cell phone batteries die.
Wake me up when there's a Nexus device with a MicroSD slot. Until then, I couldn't care less about Nexus devices as apparently they don't care about me or all the other countless users who have learned and conditioned their usage of their smartphone around what used to be a standard, logical feature.
My old Northgate Omnikey keyboard had the keycap letterings not printed in paint, but as plastic molded throughout the entire thickness of the key. There was no possible way to wear it off. It was also full-mechanical with a metal base. Could be switched to Dvorak layout in 2 presses.
I miss that keyboard.
Holy shit, ISCABBS is still around? I spent a ton of time on that back in the early 90s and made a lot of friends there (none of whom I have heard from in eons of course).
Soon you won't be finding this Slashdot article in EU Google searches either.
Burn-in is also a problem on OLED screens (having experienced it first-hand). As we see more and more of these, the issue will regrow.
But I agree: auto power-off is preferable.
Dell most certainly does still offer FreeDOS. Perhaps just on some of their business line, but it's there.
We've chosen it to save money when we were just going to put our own non-MS OS on there. Ubunutu is also an option on a number of models. RHEL too, but that'll cost you.
I ditched Linux Mint as an option for my clients when I discovered that major updates required a complete, clean re-install. I switched to Xubuntu and have been perfectly happy. Since kicking Mint to the curb I haven't paid much close attention. Is this still the case with major version upgrades?
You're joking right? Consumers are pushing a desire for thinner lighter devices capable of longer and longer run-times with higher loads.
Believe it or not, consumers also like to not have to replace their device in 2 years because the battery only holds half the capacity it used to. Just because it's not on the box or part of the advertisement's spiel doesn't mean it's not something consumers care about. There are plenty of consumers who can see into the future beyond the length of their nose.
Something has to give when you are designing around these requirements. A lot of modern devices are thin because their batteries lack any kind of protection. Using flat lithium cells gives the designer far more flexibility to design a product rather than having a full battery pack with protective case and protection circuit.
You seem to be under the misconception that these rule each other out. Do you do much electronics repair? How many devices have you owned? Opened? Replaced the batteries on? I am on a tablet right now that is thinner than a Microsoft Surface Pro 2, but unlike the Surface it has a user-removable battery and doesn't sacrifice run-time to get it. My cell phone is thinner than an iPhone... and guess what? Removable battery.
Manufacturers aren't making non-removable batteries because of design constraints. They're making them non-removable because it ensures that when the battery wears out, the consumer is forced to buy a new model. Otherwise why permanently epoxy the battery into the device? I know all about unprotected lithium cells... I'm a certified Apple technician and have opened plenty of MacBooks. But you can have a battery that uses the case of the device to protect it without gluing the damn thing in so it can't even be serviced by someone with the proper training and tools.
The average consumer is likely to damage the types of batteries used in these devices and burn their house down in the process.
I'm well aware of this... it's made quite clear in our training and quite obvious when you're working on them daily. But it's not as necessary as you've been fooled to think. The "design constraints" and "users are demanding thinner" is just the bullshit lines they've come up with as an excuse to mask the actual reason: enforced obsolescence and increased revenue stream. If it were actually true, there would be no need for the epoxy, and no other manufacturers proving them wrong.
Given the pace of technology and the average use life of such devices, replaceable battery is one feature I really no longer care about.
That's nice. Not everyone is rolling in cash and prepared to buy a new phone or tablet every 2 years, especially when there's no technical reason to have to do so. Consumers have been conditioned to accept a worn-out battery as a legitimate reason to trash their otherwise perfectly functional and adequate device, which is insane and inexcusable. This would've never been accepted pre-iPhone/iPod. My sister's HTC One X is less than 2 years old and already can't hold a charge worth a damn. The phone is already 3 times the phone she needs, so why should she be forced to buy a new one? It's criminal. Luckily I am willing to replace it for her but HTC has made it unnecessarily difficult for no legitimate reason. There are thinner phones with user-replaceable batteries... they could've made it so she could do it herself, but that wasn't advantageous to their bottom line.
And if the batteries actually fail a quick and quite cheap trip to the repair shop will see it swapped out.
WHAT "repair shop"? Maybe for the lucky subset of people who live in cities near an Apple Store or some other electronics shop. But guess what? There's a lot more to the USA and world than the big cities. And the fact remains: there's no need for it to not be replaceable by the consumer. There's no need for them to pay $80 to have som
How about Core War?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.koth.org/info/akdew...
http://blog.codinghorror.com/c...
Does this have a removable battery?
I've stopped buying consumer electronics that take the markedly ANTI-consumer and needless action of making non-removable batteries. I realize this eliminates most tablets* but I really have little use for a tablet (my job has provided several for me to use but I really couldn't care less about them, having tried them).
* - And all Apple hardware, but I'm ok with that too.
You obviously haven't lived or even traveled anywhere where there are mountains.
Newsflash: the world isn't flat, and radio signals have difficulty passing through hundreds (or thousands) of feet of solid rock.
There's no cell service where I live. Radio reception is fuzzy. I can barely get satellite TV due to the position of the mountains. My internet has to be DSL as Comcast will never run cable out here.
And Netflix/Hulu/Amazon will happily stream you that fast? I highly doubt it. I have a 6Mbit/s DSL connection and Netflix won't even saturate that, although Amazon and Hulu do a better so it's not my internet connection throttling Netflix.
My car can go a lot faster than the 20MPH it was stuck in traffic the other day doing for a long time too. The potential of the pipe is only one factor.
Sounds like nobody wants to live there. Wonder why that is..
Yeah, I wonder... it's so awful here:
http://www.peterurbanski.com/d...
http://www.michaelyamashita.co...
http://vtsports.com/wp-content...
http://summit.jacksonwhelan.ne...
http://mediad.publicbroadcasti...
https://img0.etsystatic.com/00...
http://www.usappleblog.org/wp-...
http://www.discoverkillington....
http://qcc-vt-photo-media.s3.a...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
http://girlgonetravel.com/wp-c...
http://www.bangngangan.com/ima...
http://www.discoverbristolvt.c...
http://www.waterskiingvermont....
The comparison was about legit physical media versus legit streaming services. Not about illegally pirated movies. That's an entirely separate issue and has nothing to do with what I was talking about
Most of the USA isn't cities. City folks have an awfully distorted sense of what is "normal" and have no concept of what the rest of the world live like. My town has a population of less than 4000. The largest "city" in my state has barely over 40,000.
I have a movie collection numbering in the many hundreds. All are on original physical media.
All the reasons that people have for streaming versus playing off discs I agree with... but there's one kicker: once you get past the annoying menus, notices, and previews, and actually get to the movie, the quality can't be compared. Not many people have a 30-50 Mbit/s internet connection that can handle the full bitrate of 1080p video with lossless 5.1 sound, and I can't think of any streaming source that would send that even if someone did. They're all horribly compressed up the ass with lossy compression... noticable even on my 40" TV but especially so on the 92" projector.
Unskippable menus suck, and online libraries are certainly convenient... but when it comes time to watch the movie, I do kind of want it to actually look good. But I guess I'm a dying breed.
Actually, they had done a safety study and determined that a large number of injuries were caused by keys being driven into the driver's knees. So the relocation was mostly a safety issue.
Not to mention they crash-tested their cars against dummy moose...
All these comparisons with Netflix fail to address one critical point: video quality
I can stream the same movie on Netflix and Hulu on the same device (Roku), at the same time, on the same internet connection. If I stream that movie on Netflix, the stream doesn't fully-utilize my internet connection and is noticeably poor. If I cancel, then immediately start streaming the same movie on Amazon Prime, same device, just moments later, it saturates my internet connection and looks considerably better. I can switch back and forth and the results are consistent. I can also recreate this with other movies available on both. I've done this on multiple different nights... the test results are always the same.
Not to say that if Amazon ups the price of Prime that we'll keep it... I'm not a big fan of streaming in-general. But to compare Netflix and Amazon one really needs to take into account the video quality. Netflix quality is absolutely HORRIBLE and I can't stand watching content off it, and choose Amazon or Hulu whenever possible. Of course, in this day and age people seem content with Youtube level of over-compressed shit so it's probably a lost cause...
If you're paying $30/blu-ray disc you're either impatient or doing it wrong. I don't feel a burning need to watch a movie within some arbitrarily-short timeframe after its release just so I can keep up with the Joneses. As a result of that and buying things on sales/deals, I average $5-$10 per blu-ray movie, even very popular blockbuster releases. My movie collection now spans over 400 movies, most of which are blu-ray. And I know friends and family with more.
One might point out that if I had taken all that money, I could have instead paid for 25 years or more of Netflix or what have you. The issue there is that then I'm at the mercy of whatever movies the streaming provide decides I can watch today, and maybe will pull tomorrow, as well as the condition of my internet connection. I've already had maybe a 10% success rate searching Hulu Plus/Netflix/Amazon Prime for a given movie we want to watch, as well has seen frightening lists of what movies Netflix decides to "discontinue" from time to time.
No thanks. I'll keep my physical media, thank you.