That's pointless gatekeeping. Having the most expensive pencil doesn't make you draw better. For most professionals in most fields, more than 1080p is a waste of energy.
Good defaults are important. There have been constant legal fights against abuse of defaults for decades now (IE, Chrome, search engines, etc). It's time Apple gets served a lawsuit to stop abusing its position as the default software gatekeeper.
Fun fact: the reason why browsers sometimes zoom in on an input is because the input's font size is too small, less than 16px, which is considered not accessible. So it's ironic that to counter that behaviour some people make the page even less accessible by disabling use zoom.
To be fair, I don't think the current implementation of auto-zoom, at least in mobile Firefox, actually makes things more accessible. The zoom it choose is ridiculous so you lose all context (and often can't even see the whole input element) and the screen constantly jumps around when filling out a form.
I'm not an Apple user, but that has been pretty much the role of Apple since ever: dictating what you can and can't do in the name of "good user experience". This decision makes sense in the POV of forcing apps to use newer and safer SDKs, and better integration with accessibility features and whatnot.
I don't agree, which is why I don't use Apple, but if anything they are consistent in their values.
I wouldn't say that's always been the case. I used Mac OS from 7.6 to OS X 10.6. It never stopped you from installing programs from whatever source you wanted, even if the hardware was controlled and most applications did all look pretty similar due to the provided UI libraries and the strict UI guidelines. You were also able to mess with and delete random parts of the OS; I managed to break Finder entirely, which is how I ended up learning how to use the terminal and vim.
It was Mac OS X 10.7 when they disabled unsigned apps by default to try to force people to use the store and pressure developers into paying them an annual fee. That was also when I stopped using Mac OS.
I was really happy with Apple ruling their little UI fiefdom with an iron fist because there were alternatives. I do not like them having total platform control down to the silicon.
Apple is the only stifling innovation. They own 30% of the smartphone market is the west, so the EU wants them to be regulated as a fair platform where competition can exist. The US should take a hint.
At this point we need to be able to set our reported location manually on our phones natively. I don't want any number of apps to be able to sneakily collect such data. Android sort of allows it through 3rd party apps, but Google has all incentives in not making this trivial.
A long time ago, when I lived within dating distance of the default coordinate (maybe City Hall?) of a global-destination city, a dating site I used introduced a feature that let users set their locations manually. Within hours of rollout, the site was completely unusable due to being full of people from around the world saying "I wonder what the dating scene in $city is like?".
That is still the case on some big apps like OKCupid. There are green-card hunters from poor countries that fill up the swipe queue and all have the same giveaway line:
"I'm not based in [your city], I just change the location to talk to new people". It's frequent enough that I stopped using the app altogether. OKC was already going downhill well before this.
It takes a few seconds and they are really upfront about it. I can imagine OkCupid charging for such a filtering feature, but I've never paid for it just didn't seem "worth it". Especially since Match.com owns it, and I'm not really helping the underdog.
( I understand that I might not have been making a sensible economical decision, as I have many examples of not doing that in the past )
I would go further. At this point, the "sneaky snacky smartphone" approach to data collection (in which everything that can be collected is being collected, and probably used for things you can't imagine it would be useful for) starts to press heavily on the "And I therefore shouldn't carry a smartphone" side of the scales.
I've seen some fun papers of "Well, you could do this awful thing..." (comparison of accelerometer data to deconflict which nearby phones are in the same vehicle vs separate ones to better refine social graphs), in addition to all the stuff we know is being done (ultrasonic signals in various ads, tracking shoppers by their wifi/bt beacon MACs, etc). I assume the state of what's actually being done is far worse than what's in the papers, because someone, somewhere, though they could get a signal out of something.
Trying to "de-evil" this sort of system is, first and foremost, fiddling around the edges of what's possible (I expect various people are reading and thinking, "Oh, you think spoofing GPS will matter, cute!), but it's also remaining in the ecosystem that has, repeatedly, demonstrated that they're going to get their paws on everything they think they can justify, and then expand that over time.
There's no reason that a TV needs to be doing automatic content recognition on various inputs, but they're all doing it these days.
I've given up and I no longer carry a smartphone. I'd encourage those who can get away with it to do the same thing. You can't go hoovering up all my data from a dumber KaiOS device because it doesn't run all the apps, and if a company makes their desktop/laptop interface so painful to use to drive people to the phone interface, well, they're probably doing things I don't want to support anymore.
Trying to "reduce the harm" of smartphones, more and more, feels like trying to figure out how to mitigate the impact of a world class meth addiction by focusing on the symptoms - "Oh, you need to hydrate better!" "Here's some skin moisturizer and a toothbrush!" and so on - without ever stating that the problem is the meth and that you need to stop using that, not try to figure out how to avoid losing your teeth while doing it.
I sure hope so. And I hope that future is an awful lot closer. The past decade or so of teenagers can speak to just how nasty smartphone addictions can be, in terms of mental health, suicides, etc. I grew up with the internet, but we didn't have profit-driven advertising empires pretending to "connect people together" back then, either.
Part of my reason for not carrying a smartphone anymore is to be a better example to my kids, and I certainly point out couples staring at his-n-hers smartphones at a restaurant instead of actually enjoying each other's company.
Odds are good that instead of a smartphone, my daughter will just end up with her HAM license and a VHF handset instead. It'll cover the common cases direct simplex if I put a base station on the house, and my wife isn't opposed to getting her license either. :)
Someone wake me up when I don't have to pay for a PO box to avoid having to announce my address to everyone within listening range - maybe my own license will still be active by then.
Probably worse. After all, smoking mainly just gives people more health issues. Smartphones have far more insidious sociological effects on the very fabric of society.
I think a comparison that does it more justice is to the use of leaded gasoline and its downstream effects on crime rates.
This is really tough because the only purpose of Grindr is to give it your location to see who is around you. There also needs to be much stronger requirements for end user transparency about where their data is going.
It would still serve its purpose even if you spoofed your location to be somewhere nearby or elsewhere. Nobody needs to be able to figure out exactly where specific users are/live/work via the platform.
Removing that ability removes one of the key functionality of these apps and why they are popular.
Seeing that someone is 100 ft away is a common start of a conversation. Maybe they live in the same apartment, at a local coffee shop, work in the same building. Which leads to... well...
Plenty of people already spoof their locations on the app and the app itself offers location changing functionality, I'd hardly say that is removing functionality or defeating the purpose of the app.
It's a shame that LineageOS doesn't let you spoof apps with bogus data anymore. It's much easier to let them think they're getting permissions than try to play whack-a-mole with opt out settings that could get reset at any time by bad actors.
my understanding was that the first instance of that was way back in cyanogenmod back in the late 00s and that it was quashed when google basically said "we'll let you bootleg the play store, but only if you don't screw up revenue streams by feeding app developers garbage data"
They have come even closer to Google now, I'm sure they'd love to be an official distribution with play apps included out of the box if they could. Fair enough though, most of their userbase sideload Google services.
I use it with microg myself but I have to use a special fork. I wish microg had this option too, it would be great to be able to feed garbage.
Even if you use 3rd party apps, Google location services will side step your mocked location. Apps can detect mocked locations, as well.
Pretty sure SafetyNet, or something like it, from Google will also tattle on you if you spoof your location in apps that don't want you using mock locations, preventing you from using mock locations at all with apps.
Android 12 finally has a feature to select approximate location per-app. iOS has supported this for a bit longer, since version 14. The accuracy of the "approximate" location is also much bigger for Android 12 than it is for iOS, but it's a good start.
There's a funny thing about cellphone modulation: makes it hard to locate a device. Cell phones need GPS so they can give their location to the eNBs (towers) so that the best tower can be selected, the towers can't do it on their own.
GPS isn't required to schedule handovers in a mobile network.
Handovers can be signalled by the network or the handset, but they use the received signal quality and strength (and handsets can send their signal quality and strength to the network to facilitate better handover scheduling) to arrange handovers.
You can also triangulate devices effectively using just the cellular signal to them, if you are the mobile network operator, using signal strength, or other techniques like time difference of arrival, if you have good clock sync across your base stations.
There are different brains out there, and they think differently, and understanding that is half way to developing empathy, but also extremely important when developing accessible applications.
Maybe I don't want to see the clock whenever I look at notifications, or vice versa, because that's extremely distracting. Lack of customisability gives us less accessible software. Apple is really good at accessibility, but at the same time really bad.
Honestly some great ideas (better antenna, e-ink display for basic SMSing, quick dial, probably huge battery life), but they can't be serious about the rotary dial.
> Previously, phones with physical keys required a clamshell (flip) form-factor to prevent unintended dialing. Rotary dials are naturally resistant to butt dialing.
You can solve butt dialing with a number of ways, like another hardware switch. This solution seems much more cumbersome, and I can't believe this is not done simply out of novelty.
This particular kind of novelty is kind of appealing to people who want to be conspicuously, obstreperously Luddite, while still carrying a mobile phone. I admit I kind of want one of these novel bits of tech just to show off how Luddite I am.
Indeed... I want one too! Pocketable rotary dial phone? Just, $400 can cover a lot of other things.
I consider carrying something like this (I carry an AT&T Flip IV at the moment if I remember the thing) to serve as a reminder to other people that not everyone has, nor wants, smartphone-type capabilities. At the local farmer's market last weekend, a number of various political booths (on all sides of the spectrum) had "Sign our petition!" type signs - as QR codes only. My device doesn't decode QR codes easily, nor will the browser handle a standard website very well. I typically carry a laptop, but they don't print the URLs...
Of course, then there's the problem of being on the fringe and the absurdity of "And therefore follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of other big tech platforms!" - I point that one out often enough too.
I'm at a position in my life where there's really no downside to carrying "the weird alternative" and showing people that, yes, I do in fact continue to exist, can have phone calls, SMS text, and basic maps, while not feeding into the horribly human-toxic ecosystem that modern smartphones have become. I mean, I can even use Bluetooth to the car for making phone calls, or play music from my SD card to a Bluetooth speaker! But I don't have email on it, I don't have any social medias, the games are crap and I don't bother with them, etc. It's a minimally functional device that I end up leaving home a lot because I just forget about it - and that, coming from the smartphone world, is a huge improvement.
I get a lot of positive reactions, too - most people simply haven't thought about the fact that the smartphone is really only 10-15 years old for most people. We lived before it. We will live after it. And life is objectively better without one now.
This is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I love my phone, even though I don't use social media, or play predatory games, or whatever. It lets me talk to my friends all day, doesn't distract me unless I want to be distracted (all notifications are off), and entertains me when I'm bored.
Your post seems a bit "I couldn't use my phone responsibly so I got rid of it", which is fine (I can't have sweets in the house, as I'll eat them too often), but you shouldn't generalize your lack of self-control to everyone. Some people have a perfectly fine relationship with their smartphone.
The parent post even says, "I'm at the point in my life," which doesn't sound like they're saying it's for everyone.
Further, are you sure that "entertains me when I'm bored" represents a benefit? I think boredom serves a useful purpose, and quelling it with empty activity might defeat that purpose.
> "I'm at the point in my life," which doesn't sound like they're saying it's for everyone.
I took that as a generalization, but maybe they did mean in their specific life, rather than every human's life.
> Further, are you sure that "entertains me when I'm bored" represents a benefit?
I do, sometimes I'm bored and want to be productive, sometimes I want to be unproductive. The phone is for the latter. If I didn't have it, I wouldn't be productive, I'd just be feeling bad.
> ...but maybe they did mean in their specific life, rather than every human's life.
Yes, it's something I can do in my life specifically. I recognize not everyone is able to do it depending on work (I couldn't drive for Uber/Lyft/[insert food delivery service of the week here] with a KaiOS device, but neither am I trying to do that), and there are some downsides in terms of having to carry separate devices for other functions (typically a pocket camera for photos, and CDs in the car for audiobooks), but they're nothing I find particularly objectionable.
The reality is that I'm just dropping back to a 1990s or early 2000s way of doing things, which I lived through, and find a better way of handling things than a smartphone-mediated-always-on world that's become the default - not because people have thought through it and want it, but because it's the most profitable set of defaults to the tech companies and app vendors involved.
> The phone is for the latter. If I didn't have it, I wouldn't be productive, I'd just be feeling bad.
I find boredom quite useful. I typically have a paper notebook and pencil in my pocket anymore for those times.
> Your post seems a bit "I couldn't use my phone responsibly so I got rid of it", which is fine...
I was perfectly fine with my smartphone, I had it greyscale, heavily restricted in terms of what was installed, etc. It wasn't a particular problem... but at that point, neither was it a particular benefit. Battery life was "a few days at best," it was large and expensive, and I tend to enjoy playing in the weeds of "What's possible?" vs "What's the default?"
As I didn't know anyone who was carrying a feature phone instead of a smartphone, I set out to figure out what that looks like, with the constraints of "I don't want to annoy other people too badly with my choices" - so the first attempt, a Bananaphone, went out quickly because it couldn't do MMS based group texting. The Flip IV handles that, if not well, then "in a way that doesn't irritate other people, mostly." It doesn't render any emojis, but I'm fine with that.
By "point in my life where I can do this," I mean that people around me simply expect me to have oddly broken or limited computer systems and communications systems, so if I'm off in some weeds or another, it's no particular surprise. I don't need 100% reliably daily comms, people don't expect me to respond instantly, and everyone knows that if something's on fire, use the phone feature of the cell system and I'll pick up. Assuming my phone is nearby.
I hate what modern smartphones have become, and I'm fairly vocal about that. I think that they've turned into expensive, human-toxic bits of ewaste looking for a place to happen, and that they've been the primary enablers of the always-on surveillance capitalism systems we see today, to such great harm to humanity. To then continue using them, despite "Well, yeah, but I turned off notifications...", is a form of hypocrisy I try to avoid in life as much as I can. I can be as right as the day is long about the benefits of a vegetarian, low meat, or vegan diet, but if I'm talking to people about it while chowing down on a bacon double cheeseburger, I can reasonably expect nobody to listen to me. The same goes for tech habits. I can't rail against smartphones and social media, on smartphones and social media, and expect much beyond a well deserved eye roll.
I at least try to live out my convictions regarding technology, which means that things like the blog post I linked above are hosted on a server I own and have colo'd locally.
And I'll entirely admit that there exist a small number of features I've not found ways to replace a smartphone for, so I use my legacy device for those and only carry it with me when I need access to a particular building that has smartphone based locks (I don't like them, but I didn't install them, other people like them, and they don't have an easily usable key backup), or if I'm doing Part 107 drone operations for some reason or another.
I know this is off topic and it's not a criticism of your comment but I think it's a shame that Luddite has become so watered down. The real life Luddites put their lives on the line in the fight against industrial weaving. The didn't just avoid using a steam loom while drinking an almond latte.
I'm more bothered when "Luddite" is used as a slur against people who refuse certain technologies in a principled way. That is, when it's used in a historically-knowledgeable way, but still deployed as an insult.
first definition in a dictionary says Luddite is someone opposed to new technology. your definition has been moved to the second definition of the word. so the world has moved past you and you now seem to be a Luddite (of sorts) hanging on to a definition of the word the world has found less useful.
I think there are shades of gray to be recognized between obstreperously "Retro" and obstreperously Luddite. There are still a significant cohort of people alive that grew up in the era where the rotary phone interface was the only phone interface. Using this device in public could be merely a nod and a wink to others in the same cohort and a nice conversation starter rather than a position against the advancement of technology. You will pry my smartphone out of my cold, dead hands but I think it would be fun to have this device around to occasionally sport out in public for the laughs. And in a nod to yourself and the other comment, thank you for teaching me a new word (obstreperously).
I would've assumed something like "Ostentatiously" would've been the word; but I've seen "obstreperously" couple of times in this thread now, and had to look it up (it's a new word to me:) - seems to be "noisy and difficult to control", and that gives it a whole different, perhaps more negative slant?
P.S. FWIW, in my limited experience, it is typically the most technologically savvy amongst us that go through incredible effort to discover, purchase, setup, own, operate and integrate retro/Luddite devices in their lives :-)
> P.S. FWIW, in my limited experience, it is typically the most technologically savvy amongst us that go through incredible effort to discover, purchase, setup, own, operate and integrate retro/Luddite devices in their lives
Oh, absolutely! Part of it is the enjoyment and skill to make something like that work (it's a non-trivial bit of programming to interface modern electronics with a rotary dialer, cell modem, audio codec, etc, and to have it all more or less work reliably).
The other part, though, I think is that people in those spaces see just how wrong everything has gone - the piles of complexity that never quite work, the constant data leaks, the invasion of privacy for surveillance profits, the fight for attention based on what's good for the company and not good for the users, etc. And a lot of us, myself included, want no part of that.
My wife and I spent last night on the couch listening through a wonderful recording of Handel's Messiah, on 4 quite heavy vinyl LPs. It was a great evening!
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is Bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
I'm definitely on the second half. We still have a Nest, but only because I've not convinced myself that the HestiaPi will actually run our system properly... and I can't get parts for it.
I started the "obstreperously" thing in this thread, so I guess I'm honor-bound to explain. You've exactly pegged what I meant to communicate: loud, obnoxious, over-the-top obvious, like ostentatious, but no chance of being taken as non-annoying.
I suspect the main point of this whole phone is “having a big rotary dial on a cel phone would be funny”. “Naturally resistant to butt dialing” is a bit of deadpan humor.
Weight is helpful not only for fighting off assassins. A dial telephone needs to be heavy with good non-slip feet or you have to hold it down while dialling. The UK Trimphone weighed 800 g and people complained that dialling with it was difficult.
I have a couple of those around. I had to learn to dial them as a kid when we moved to a house that still had them hard-wired to the wall.
Someday I'd like to try to use them as an intercom/hotline between the house and workshop, but I haven't figured out how to power the circuit and (especially) the ring signal. (Grandpa always did his own phone wiring and told me you really didn't want to be touching the terminal when a call came through, something like 100V AC!)
Connecting two rotary phones (via 40 volt battery) is the easiest thing. They work as-they-are without modifications. When the phone is off-hook, the dialling rotator makes pulses and when the phone is on-hook those pulses cause the bell to ring. But not very loudly, because the real ringing pulses are 80 volts.
Source: I am rotary-telephone-era Telecommunication Engineer.
Thanks for the info! Sounds a lot easier than anything I was imagining. I'll have to dig up a couple of those 4-pin sockets and see if I can source a battery.
Completely overkill for just an intercom, but an analog telephone adapter would let you connect those to a VoIP server (like Asterisk, etc). Could be cool.
For just a hotline/intercom setup, I think a telephone line simulator might do the job, but those seem stupidly expensive!
EDIT: The other reply seems a lot more knowledgeable, ignore this one
Thanks! I was looking into a line simulator, but yeah they're expensive!
I thought about setting something up with an old PBX from work, but they're too new for pulse dialing. I was trying to figure out if I could build something with old modems but never got anywhere with that.
What's wrong with novelty? I agree with the next comment over, the rotary dialer is the best part. This is an interesting and beautiful creative project, not a mass market consumer product.
From my perspective it's a feature, if I were to switch to a phone like this it would be because I wanted my phone to only do one thing handle important communication. No apps, no internet, no texting, phone calls only. That said, I could see having both a regular smartphone and a phone like this. In that case I would treat this phone as a private line only given out to a small number of people. That would allow me to leave my regular smartphone off or at home if I felt like disconnecting for a while but I would still be reachable by phone call through a distraction free device.
Imagine a world where Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple were cooperating and building interconnecting blocks of a modern browser since the early 2000s. Instead, MS discontinued Edge, Mozilla has only 2% market share (still big in global terms), and 90% of the internet traffic is basically running on Chrome. No innovation is possible that is not in-line with the direction the upstream, or at the increasing cost of constant catching up to updates.
