Hacker News Reader

Comment by cobolcomesback | Hacker News Reader

I am so amused at the “HiLight” feature (lighting up colored LEDs for notifications so you can see them “at a glance” without looking at the screen). This is a feature that was on the Android phones of old (including the original G1) and I loved it, but it got phased out in favor of “always on displays”… which apparently now we want less of!

It’s funny how trends like this are a circle sometimes.

View on HN

One day I hope for a future innovation that brings back 3.5MM jacks and I can have audio as convenient as it was in the 1950s, but until then my bluetooth can connect to my speakers while I'm not in the same building and switch device automatically with no setting to change it and with no warning deafen the people in my house, where the only way to switch back requires a mere 20 screen taps (which i can partly blame graphene os for, not their fault i can use a wire though)

Maybe I take this a little too close to heart.

Just vote with your wallet and don't buy phones without a headphone jack. That's what I do, and I've always had a phone with one.

There is literally no way this can ever result in any impact on the market. Literally no one will ever be able to tell how many sales are made or lost because of whether or not there is a headphone jack. Therefore it is also impossible for it to influence anybody's future decision.

This is also my problem with people saying you can vote with your wallet about laptops. No company will ever be able to figure out which features someone bought the laptop for, or which choices caused others to pass it up. Therefore it is impossible for your (or anybody's) wallet to show companies what you want.

This also means it is impossible to vote about software. Or really anything that has multiple features. You can't vote about cars this way. You can't vote about houses this way. You can't vote about fast food this way. You can't vote about online shopping this way. You either buy all of something or you buy none of it. You can't buy into the parts you want while leaving out the parts you don't want. You incentivize the full package, or you don't, and lost sales are invisible and inscrutable.

Similar things could be said for voting itself.

Absolutely, you can often only really hope for the less overall bad option

Welcome to the world of trade offs. I also want a half decent camera. When I switched from. a Google Pixel to a Samsung s20+ to keep a headphone jack, the camera got worse, even though the pixel was at least half a decade old.

I can't trust Samsung again after that. So much marketing claiming how good their cameras are, but the Pixel and iPhone both blew it out of the water.

Nothing that runs GrapheneOS comes with a jack AFAIK, so that didn't work out. Have to use a different device for anything involving headphones.

I only take phone calls on speaker mode and don't listen to music on my phone anymore, it's that bad. I'll bring the dongle for an airplane, and even that is glitchy.

Plug a USB-C-to-3.5-mm adapter into the end of the audio cable. Plug it into your phone. Done.

You can even keep the connector on the end of the audio cable permanently.

you can also buy a "USB C to 3.5mm audio cable".

USB-C is far easier to break than rca plugs in my experience and then you lose data and rapid charging or charging completely if the phone doesn't do wireless. Until phones get repairable like the current generation of laptops where you pop the port out and can replace it we aren't in a great spot.

If Google ever fixed Android/AOSP to fully support Apple's adapter for complete volume control, that would be swell.

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/242221770?pli=1

After Google discontinued their own adapter, Apple's might be the next best alternative. But not with that issue unfixed.

fiy, the Apple adapter does seem to work fine now on Android 17 on Pixel phones.

It's annoying. Especially if you use those headphones on another device that has 3.5mm headphone jack and no easily accessible free USB C port. And if you need to charge and use headphones...

When I come home in my car, sometimes my daughter's phone (who's already at home) will connect to my car, and her music will stop in her headphones, and I get K-Pop. What a time to be alive.

Better than having your teen’s porn viewing come through the speakers. That was a fun conversation.

USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is about $5 tbf. The rest is just poor configuration on your part.

'You're holding it wrong'

Why shame a customer because they have a preference ?

Their preference is for 'audio as convenient as it was in the 1950s', but they instead go on to describe a basic configuration issue with their use-case.

The reality of consumer audio in 1950s was closer to a physics lab than a residential convenience. The expectation for the end user was an understanding of impedence and ohms in order to pair up an amplifier with passive speakers, terminating bare copper wire with Spade/Pin Connectors or Binding Posts to connect same, dealing with phase cancellation and ground loop issues, maintaining and operating valve based equipment... and that's before we even get into the vagaries of the cartridge, stylus and associated maintenance for a record player and its media.

For reference, Vinyl only replaced Shellac records in the early 1950s - with the very first 12-inch 33⅓ RPM vinyl record released in 1948, and the first 45 in 1949. Similarly, it wasn't until the early 1960s that transistor based playback units superseded valve based.

Thus I wholly refute the claim that the OP would manage in a 'convenient' way when compared with a contemporary audio enthusiast, and that even with experience they would struggle to match the dynamic range and fidelity of a mono AM Radio with a significantly larger degree of hassle.

...or they could just buy a $5 adapter.

This is precisely why I left Android.

Google can't seem to decide on a direction and stick with it. Years of new features that inevitably ended up abandoned 2 versions later resulted in a constantly changing and unpredictable user experience.

It was fun while I had free time in college and enjoyed flashing ROMs, but as I got busier with life this lack of refinement pushed me away.

The RGB leds were one of my favorite features of early Android phones. I even backed a terrible Kickstarter campaign that synced those colors to an RGB wristband (this was before smartwatches were a thing).

> Google can't seem to decide on a direction and stick with it. Years of new features that inevitably ended up abandoned 2 versions later resulted in a constantly changing and unpredictable user experience.

I'm guessing cultures that reward shipping new products (e.g. 67 different messaging apps) don't turn out great for consumers.

> The RGB leds were one of my favorite features of early Android phones. I

Right man. I had forgotten that my nexus 7 had this kind of LED and I really liked it and missed it later.

Conversely, I was surprised to learn that the temperature sensor introduced on the Pixel 8 Pro in 2023 was only removed this year. No one knew why it was there in the first place.

I heard that it was a COVID feature. I guess people thought you would be scanning your friend's foreheads before socializing.

That sensor would be much better if it was integrated with the camera and LIDAR, so that you could "paint" a scene with thermal data by moving the phone around.

That's the only plausible scenario, but it also came out in 2023 and people stopped caring at least a year before. And it persisted for a few years so either someone thought they could salvage something from it, or no one had a better idea what to put there.

That probably means the board was being designed a year or two before that... so quite possibly they had put it in the design when it still seemed relevant and the cost/hassle/delay of a new revision of the board design and manufacturing changes made it easier to just leave it there and ignore.

The sensor is damned handy because it has plenty of range and good options in the software for estimating emissivity. I use it in the kitchen.

How exactly do you use it ? Another app or default ?

I just use the stock Pixel Thermometer app (actually not even sure if it's stock or you have to install it from Play Store). Some developers online have complained that there is no public API for it, which may explain lack of other apps. I have never used it for its health purpose. I only use it for objects like walls and cooking pans.

its definitely a meme feature but I use it here and there to estimate ambient temperature (by measuring different surfaces).

also use it to measure the temperature of the bath, things like that.

definitely could do without, but its a fun feature.

I'm sad to see it go. I use it quite frequently for cooking and baking, and have used it for checking if the heating works properly or checking my own body temp. It also makes for a good party trick sometimes.

On BlackBerry i had an app that could do colour patterns, rhythms and so on depending who contacted you on which medium. Got a mail from you boss? Blue led. Got an sms or call? Red alarm. U could also group people and or mediums together (this was a basic feature of blackberry os)

That eventually became an OS feature, where you could set the LED color for every app.

Its a smartphone feature and not operating system feature. This is like saying "I left Windows because my Windows Laptops doesnt offer fingerprint scanner anymore"

Google only controls Pixel, but why did Samsung, and Lenovo, and Xiaomi and Motorola remove the LEDs?

Same reason almost anybody in the phone and laptop spaces seem to do almost anything these days: to copy Apple. It's the new sympathetic magic.

Apple hasn’t been innovating in the smartphone space since at least half a decade, compared to the android landscape

And yet every time Apple does something, Android vendors are happy to drop their innovations and realign to whatever Apple’s doing.

Case in point, the latest Samsung foldable that just happens to be the exact same unseen before form factor as the upcoming Apple foldable, released the month before, even though Android has been “innovating in the foldable space” for like 10 years now.

Because until now no one working on those foldable phones had the guts to say “wait let’s not just the take the existing phone screen aspect ratio and make it foldable, this new screen technology should make us rethink the overall form factor” - it took Apple to make that step.

1 month doesn’t seem like enough time to copy something so fundamental as the screen geometry.

Supply chain leaks around this device have been around for quite a while.

The iPhone came out almost 20 years ago, this is a very mature industry.

I don't want my phone to be innovative anymore, I want it to be good and reliable. And Apple has remained so consistent on that, their 2 notable stumbles over the past 2 decades (antennagate, bendgate) are still remembered as notable while Android devices from all manufacturers regularly have major issues like that and no one thinks twice because it's business as usual.

In reality it was because Always On Displays were deemed a better replacement.

My Nexus 5 had that feature and it was really useful to see if the phone had a message pending. They also did the same thing for wireless charging, dropping it and then bringing it back. The PM probably gets paid good money to go in circles.

They had it as a hidden feature up till the nexus 5 or 6 I believe. Someone bothered to include hardware for an LED even if the stock software never supported it.

I remember my old nexus had it, and it was very customizable. I had it flash different colors for different chats. Definitely funny seeing this make its way back as if it's some new revolutionary feature

> lighting up colored LEDs for notifications so you can see them “at a glance” without looking at the screen

My old Blackberry Bold had this feature and I loved it! I had it customized so it would pulse a different color depending on who had messaged me.

Blackberry got a whole bunch of things right but, alas, almost everything else was a bag of rusty spanners.

I do still miss mine, though, slightly.

I remember my little Motorola flip phones from 25+ years ago had an LED that would blink for things like voice mails or unread SMS. I can't remember if it also did missed calls, and maybe could do orange or green? I seem to recall it did a unary pattern to blink out the number of queued events.

The problem with this kind of feature is that it falls apart if you're the type who leaves things unread or gets them all the time. Then, it is little more than a beacon to say "phone still exists"...

This used to be a critical feature for me I used to customize the colour per-app so I could see what notifications I had at a glance. However always-on displays have supplanted this use case for me.

My Nexus One had that colored trackball, and rooting / custom roms allowed you to set specific colors to whatever type of notification or alert you wanted. Good times.

One day those autostereo displays and 3D cameras from the early Androids will return too.

I remember having this on a Sidekick in like 2007.

been waiting for this feature to come back forever. hope it's still around the next time I get a new phone.

Just wait until phones get headphone jacks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com