Too bad the Nothing Phone doesn't have a headphone jack. I couldn't agree more.

For anyone else who won't even consider a phone without a jack... I'm much more excited for the upcoming Asus Zenphone 9, which is roughly Pixel 5 sized and slightly smaller than the standard iPhone size, and features a headphone jack! It's the smallest (and headphone jackiest) flagship in quite some time, slightly smaller than its predecessor.

I go back and forth on the headphone jack debate. But the notification LED I just don't get. They aren't large and intrusive like a jack - so it's not space saving. I like to leave my phone on my desk and only check it if I see an LED blinking. Not constantly wake it up to see if I missed something. I assume most people want that?

I came to two possible conclusions - 1) it's about engagement, and for some reason companies want you opening your phone often, or 2) so many apps notify for everything anymore, the LED would just constantly blink. At least 2 could be solved by only allowing certain apps or classes of notification (like say, phone or text) notify the LED.

If you have an iphone, you can use the camera flash for this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210065

Not sure if you need a physical LED when many phones these days have OLED displays that can mimic the LED without consuming too much power. Some Android brands have this built-in and there are also some 3rd party apps that do the same.

The original Google Nexus type color configurable notification would be such a welcome addition. Got mail? Red blink. Got a tweet reply? Blink blue. Even Nokia E72/73/75 had beautiful breathing lights.

Librem 5 has an RGB notification LED and a headphone jack.

Always-on displays have basically obsoleted the notification LED.

I used to consider it a required feature when buying a phone as well and would carefully configure the colours of each app and their priority.

But these days I am happy with the default Android always-on display and a row of icons for the notifications. I can imagine that some people miss the colour but the detail offered by the icons makes it much easier to know what notifications you have.