I just use an unlocked S21 and my old S9 as a work phone/backup. Yes I know Samsung's one UI is bloated and all, but I don't really use the phone for much other than occasional calls, messaging, and sometimes taking pics and small apps like weather, checking my bank account here and there and news. Really I buy the S series for the gorilla glass and durability, even though I do use a case. I recommend Spigen cases, they're not very bulky and they work well.
So I've changed from my P Smart 2019 to a Galaxy A12 (a125f) and here is the kicker, Samsung in their infinite fucking wisdom have seemingly done something to completely break custom ROMs and rooting. THANK YOU KOREA.
Every day I find a new reason to hate modern phones.
So I've changed from my P Smart 2019 to a Galaxy A12 (a125f) and here is the kicker, Samsung in their infinite fucking wisdom have seemingly done something to completely break custom ROMs and rooting. THANK YOU KOREA.
Every day I find a new reason to hate modern phones.
It's not really hard to just obliterate all that shit off the phone usually, OneUI itself is for the most part in terms of like UX/UI and shit is actually just fine. Don't get me wrong though, it's fucking annoying you have to do that in the first place, should just be clean out of the box.
This might be common knowledge already, but I strongly recommend buying refurb phones from Aliexpress. Pay half price for a one year old flagship device that some consoomer swapped out with his carrier. The only downside is that the battery might be a bit aged. Everything else will appear as brand new.
On a side note, I'm not sure why people want SD-card storage back. I've had those fuckers go corrupt on me twice, losing a lot of data. Rest In Piss.
One good reason would be if you're a heavy picture-taker and you want to have those pictures in a different location separate from your actual phone storage because since the default resolution for cameras is super fucking high, they wind up taking more space than something like 1024x576. This also includes videos and those motion jpgs that seem to be all the rage.
Still got my Galaxy S9+ thinking of upgrading since it's gotten a bit fucked up from years of wear and tear. Any particular durable model I should be aware of?
This might be common knowledge already, but I strongly recommend buying refurb phones from Aliexpress. Pay half price for a one year old flagship device that some consoomer swapped out with his carrier. The only downside is that the battery might be a bit aged. Everything else will appear as brand new.
On a side note, I'm not sure why people want SD-card storage back. I've had those fuckers go corrupt on me twice, losing a lot of data. Rest In Piss.
One thing I don't do is buy used phones and storage devices. I'd rather get it new for peace of mind since I don't need the flagship device of year x. SD card storage is great for recording videos and storing music libraries. I also store offline maps for osmand. I've used my phone in over 100F temps, had it thermal throttle off on me, and still no issues with the sd card.
I hail from the land of guns, fat people and armed fat people. You know, that one. Carrier locks are still a thing here, but it's easy enough usually to unlock a phone. I just buy factory unlocked ones to avoid the inconvenience. You'd be surprised how many people here are clueless about carrier locks.
> GoPro can shoot 10-bit color, 5.3K, 60fps in a tiny box
> phones won't even let you take RAW images, literally just saving the sensor data in full
I'm not uncle TED, yet. But I do think that this is 100% bullshit! I know for a fact that many phones today have the hardware for this. Deactivate everything on the phone, only for it to become a camera and we can have pretty high quality vlog cameras. I swear there is some behind the scenes agreement between phone manufacturers and budget camera manufacturers. or it's because they want you to pay +1500$ for a phone that has these features (reminder, GoPro and insta360 action cameras are in the ~500$ range).
I know phones are shit in terms of them them having small sensors and the lenses are limited, but them "ignoring" 10-bit color video and RAW photo features is very suspicious.
Part of me also think it might be that NSA and other national "security" organisations want access to your video files at all times remotely. This can only be done without you noticing (looking at the mobile data and battery usage) if your video files are already in a compressed format (8-bit, 192kbit audio). If you were to have to have 10-bit, 320kbit audio on your videos on the phone as your prefered settings, it would be more difficult to remotely access them without your phone having to either converting them first (using even more memory and battery power), or you have to just tank multiple GB of data from this phone. This would probably make autists nootice too much and reject smartphones even more.
> GoPro can shoot 10-bit color, 5.3K, 60fps in a tiny box
> phones won't even let you take RAW images, literally just saving the sensor data in full
I'm not uncle TED, yet. But I do think that this is 100% bullshit! I know for a fact that many phones today have the hardware for this. Deactivate everything on the phone, only for it to become a camera and we can have pretty high quality vlog cameras. I swear there is some behind the scenes agreement between phone manufacturers and budget camera manufacturers. or it's because they want you to pay +1500$ for a phone that has these features (reminder, GoPro and insta360 action cameras are in the ~500$ range).
I know phones are shit in terms of them them having small sensors and the lenses are limited, but them "ignoring" 10-bit color video and RAW photo features is very suspicious.
Part of me also think it might be that NSA and other national "security" organisations want access to your video files at all times remotely. This can only be done without you noticing (looking at the mobile data and battery usage) if your video files are already in a compressed format (8-bit, 192kbit audio). If you were to have to have 10-bit, 320kbit audio on your videos on the phone as your prefered settings, it would be more difficult to remotely access them without your phone having to either converting them first (using even more memory and battery power), or you have to just tank multiple GB of data from this phone. This would probably make autists nootice too much and reject smartphones even more.
Thinking that somehow people "wouldn't notice" HD video being transmitted from their phones just because it's compressed is extremely delusional
although LLM hash data could actually be small enough to enable something similar to this, although it would only allow training the AI from the data without any way of recreating the original, but even this would require the phone to broadcast signals of the pre-processed hash data on some schedule, which cannot be done secretly, even if the phone wouldn't announce it.
As for camera quality limitations, I agree that it's likely that there are backroom agreements about these things, but at the same time this is not a large market and so it's not surprising that it isn't being serviced. If you care about hdr and having raw files to edit, you are a real photographer who is not likely to accept the inherent quality limitations of a thin slab. If you don't care about these things, they are actively detrimental to you (if enabled) because they eat up disk space. You can say they might as well have an option, and I agree, but like I said there are likely backroom deals.
> GoPro can shoot 10-bit color, 5.3K, 60fps in a tiny box
> phones won't even let you take RAW images, literally just saving the sensor data in full
I'm not uncle TED, yet. But I do think that this is 100% bullshit! I know for a fact that many phones today have the hardware for this. Deactivate everything on the phone, only for it to become a camera and we can have pretty high quality vlog cameras. I swear there is some behind the scenes agreement between phone manufacturers and budget camera manufacturers. or it's because they want you to pay +1500$ for a phone that has these features (reminder, GoPro and insta360 action cameras are in the ~500$ range).
I know phones are shit in terms of them them having small sensors and the lenses are limited, but them "ignoring" 10-bit color video and RAW photo features is very suspicious.
Part of me also think it might be that NSA and other national "security" organisations want access to your video files at all times remotely. This can only be done without you noticing (looking at the mobile data and battery usage) if your video files are already in a compressed format (8-bit, 192kbit audio). If you were to have to have 10-bit, 320kbit audio on your videos on the phone as your prefered settings, it would be more difficult to remotely access them without your phone having to either converting them first (using even more memory and battery power), or you have to just tank multiple GB of data from this phone. This would probably make autists nootice too much and reject smartphones even more.
A company called Red or something owns the patent on raw image files which is complete bullshit. In theory the patent will never hold up in court but nobody wants to be the one that gets sued.
A company called Red or something owns the patent on raw image files which is complete bullshit. In theory the patent will never hold up in court but nobody wants to be the one that gets sued.
Ironically I just wrote a post defending intellectual property, but owning the concept of doing real-time compression on a video recorder is bullshit. If it was a specific algorithm I would get it, but as far as I understand it is that they patented the concept of doing it on a digital camera. I think it expires 2028 (quick google Ai search, probably wrong), but I hope some chink brand just releases a bunch of cheap RAW cameras fucking over RED by that time.
A company called Red or something owns the patent on raw image files which is complete bullshit. In theory the patent will never hold up in court but nobody wants to be the one that gets sued.
All professional cameras can record RAW just file, like the Nikon Z, Canon EOS R, Sony Alpha lines. Even most professional photographers don't bother with RAWs since they want to get to the next contract fast, so they don't even edit whatever the camera outputs. The only people still want RAWs are hobbyists and enthusiasts.
Another difficulty in RAWs is that different sensors will output different formats. Unless you have the same sensor model, it is going to record differently, so that means dozens of formats for each model and every phone. Different sensor dimensions? Different sensor pitch? Different sensor microlenses? They will all emit different values that need to be interpreted by RAW editors. It's why when new cameras are released, photo editors would refuse to open the RAW files from them until an update is out.
I know I spent way too much on camera gear.
So I can put media files that get read way more than they get written on it without filling up my internal storage. You can buy a 128 gb or even larger card for next to nothing these days and I can fit every song and audiobook I own on it with space to spare. And then when I get a new phone, I can easily just move all my media without going through a fiddle-fucky transfer process that's somehow still a pain in the ass in 2025.
And the downside is... nothing. I really struggle to see the problem here.
What chink phones are considered good? I heard about OnePlus, but I cannot buy Huaweis or Redmis since I believe they are still restricted in the US. May stick with Motorola after mine bites the dust.
