“I…am Steve (Jobs).”

3 years of updates for flagships is not great.

Also, one of the upsides of Sony devices retaining critically endangered features like the headphone jack and microSD slot is that they appeal to geeks, which generally leads to to good custom ROM support. So it’s 3 years of updates from the manufacturer but you can often stretch their lifespan out a lot longer.

What’s all the processing power even for

Gaming and the camera are the least niche use cases I can think of.

OnePlus has designed “a very interesting function” for the button, which will be revealed soon.

inb4 AI assistant, just like Nothing. Kinda funny how quickly we’re circling back to the days of Bixby buttons.

I agree that the future is bleak. I also agree that it makes life more difficult for those of us who don’t conform to this “I own nothing and pay a subscription for everything” lifestyle that people seem to be blindly moving in the direction of. I don’t pay for Spotify or any other streaming service (not that they even have all the music I listen to, I always hate it when people justify their existence with the “iT hAs EvErYtHiNG” line), I have my own music collection that I’ve curated over decades which is entirely offline. It won’t fit on a smartphone unless I pay a ridiculous amount of money for a model with tons of storage or convert my entire library to inferior quality. Ultimately it’s not a deal breaker feature for me so I do use a modern phone without external storage. I am fortunate that I own an MP3 player and multiple older phones with microSD support, including an XZ1 Compact which is what I currently use for portable music instead. It would be more convenient if I could just have everything on a single device like I used to, though.

I’m not sure if “things have gotten so bad”. The native English speakers who actually use this stuff are probably the ones who struggled with writing in school and have always been terrible at it. That’s obviously not everyone though, a lot of people are still competent enough to type their own emails.

MELVIN USED MORAL SUPERIORITY

BUT IT FAILED

IT HURT ITSELF IN ITS CONFUSION

They’re not that great in practice. I have an LG Folder, it’s not very enjoyable to use and is probably best as a treatment for smartphone addiction. Old people are better off using actual dumbphones or smartphones with simplified settings, people who want flip/small phones are better off with flip smartphones.

I’d considered the Razr but was uncertain on the durability of it. Reviews were about 50/50 last I read.

I have owned a razr 40 for well over a year with no issues. I take pretty good care of my phones and have never dropped it, though. The smaller flip folding phones seem to be a lot more durable than their larger siblings, I guess because the hinge and fold is a lot smaller.

I do need to make sure I can find one that’s bootloader unlockable. Kind of a hard requirement for me and necessary to de-google it to my satisfaction.

I wouldn’t bother with flip smartphones if running degoogled Android is something you’re unwilling to compromise on. They don’t have the user base to attract custom ROM developers and are unlikely to receive that kind of attention unless Google releases a Pixel Flip or something. You need to decide whether the software or hardware is more important - I chose the hardware which meant giving up on degoogled Android for now.

What is a widely-known fact? From the “uH yEaH” you sound like you’re trying to argue with me but I’m not really sure what your point is. I never said piracy can’t be a service issue, what I said is that people who trot this line out literally every single time to defend their pirating should follow through when piracy becomes more convoluted and time consuming than the legal alternative. Many don’t, the line has become a convenient catch-all cop out that people hide behind so they can pretend acquiring everything for free makes them some kind of morally superior consumer activist. I wasn’t having a go at OP specifically, but the logical conclusion when you get to their point should be to give up and pay or rent through a library or something.

If I really couldn’t find something and I was really that desperate, I’d just try to buy it somewhere. Assuming it’s also difficult to buy, I’d be looking at online marketplaces and op shops. If pirates are going to keep hiding behind the “piracy is a service problem” line then at some point they do need to admit that paying for the product is actually the more sensible and straightforward option if they have reached a deadend elsewhere.

Not really sure why Samsung has started returning to that style of camera module on their newest phones. It isn’t old enough to have any kind of nostalgia value and still looks dated to me. Maybe that’s the point and they have decided their high end phones need to be more visibly distinct from the rest of the lineup? Or maybe they are trying to copy Apple again? Sony are the only manufacturer I can think of that retained this design consistently and they are a bit of an outlier since they often ignore industry trends.

The 5T still has official LineageOS support here. You can also get a microG version here.

It looks like someone is maintaining an unofficial LineageOS fork here. There doesn’t seem to be a lot out there, unfortunately. DivestOS being discontinued was quite a big blow to some of these older devices.

The majority of their servers support port forwarding. “Only available on paid tiers” is a completely meaningless crticism, because a) you wouldn’t use a free VPN for torrenting unless you were an absolute moron and b) very few VPNs support torrenting in the first place because it requires so many resources. If you want a good VPN with port forwarding, you need to pay for it. Nothing about this makes Proton VPN “fishy”.

As the other person said, the owners of PIA also own several other VPNs and their history prior to this was pretty bad. One of the biggest selling points for PIA, the “no logging tested in court” claim, also occured before these new owners took over so it’s questionable whether that is as believable today. A big part of trust in privacy-related software comes from financial incentives and motivations driven by the business model, and the parent company does not have a good track record in terms of prioritising security and privacy above financial gain.

I believe Private Internet Access also offers this feature if people need a cheaper alternative, although it comes with tradeoffs regarding trust and ethics.

Yes, Proton VPN is a better option if you require that feature.

LineageOS support would definitely make me more interested in the Jelly Max. I have considered it a few times but there’s just no way I could justify the purchase with the doubts I have over its long-term viability.

RIP, this was a good project.