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Comment by tabs_masterrace | Hacker News Reader

How about some more sensors. No phone can tell me the temperature, without checking weather online. What if I want to know the room temperature. Could put humidity, atmospheric pressure sensors in there too, IR cameras, all kinds of cool stuff. Think of the software applications, right know my "smart" phone has no way of knowing if I'm outside or inside.

Then, voice mail. Why doesn't this still not work locally? There is no reason the phone shouldn't be able of answering and recording messages by itself.

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> How about some more sensors. No phone can tell me the temperature

Electronics get hot when operating, and even more so when they are sitting in the pocket. Typical temp sensors are attached to 30cm long cables.

Nevertheless, I'm sure phones can do that already if you install a weather station in your house.

Someone figured out how to measure ambient temperature based on _battery temperature_ a long time ago, with high reliability!

How does it compensate for being in your pocket?

Locally recorded voicemail only makes sense for landlines; there’s a good reason it doesn’t exist in phones.

Visual voicemail is implemented if your carrier supports it.

I've felt that expensive (> $300) phones should have more than basic functionality for a while now.

In fact it does work the other way: for less than 300 euros, you can get a totally _normal, functional_ phone. See moto c plus, moto g line, moto e line, wileyfox spark x.

For more than 300 euros, you get essentially the same phone with a slightly better camera, which I suspect is mostly (custom) software doing the hard work. Or alternatively you get a finally FOSS device, which I understand pushes the price up.

Most phones already have a bunch of temperature sensors, air pressure sensor, magnetic field sensors, humidity sensors etc.

I'm pretty sure the iPhone has them too, but perhaps they don't make them available to app developers.

Off the top of my head, iPhone’s barometer and magnetometer are accessible via public API.

The Galaxy S4 had a temperature sensor. Believe me: It was very unreliable since the phone has a different temperature than the room.

What’s the benefit of local voicemail?

Well the obvious benefit is that you could access your voicemail recordings offline. Also for Android devices there would presumably be some way to access the raw audio files and transfer them to another computer for long-term storage.

Sure, but aren’t those extremely niche use cases? How is that innovation?

Well, I'm not sure exactly what OP meant when he said "innovation" I was just stating some practical use cases.

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