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Comment by pearjuice | Hacker News Reader

The OS is not 14-year-old but actually the newest reiteration of S40 which has no problems running Whatsapp, native Facebook apps, Exchange support et cetera. It is not a dumb phone but a feature phone. The OS still has its raw edges here and there[0], but it is anything but old or dated.

[0] I tried it for a week or so on a Nokia 301 and an example of a raw edge is that when using the music player and you accidentally remove the head phones, the music continues over the phone its speaker immediately. It should pause instead.

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>when using the music player and you accidentally remove the head phones, the music continues over the phone its speaker immediately. It should pause instead.

Isn't this the case for a lot of devices? Every desktop and laptop I've used, on Windows and Linux, follows this behavior.

Yeah, pretty much. I'd be pissed and amazed if the default was to pause the song. I don't want the device to try to figure out what I'm trying to do, I want the device to do exactly what I tell it to do, which, in this case, would be to simply do nothing. I just removed a physical cable, I don't need it to do anything on the software side other than make sure it updates the current audio output.

The purist thing doesn't tell us much. You could equally as easy interpret things as, I didn't tell it to output music on another speaker, I only told it to stop outputting music on the headphones. Different people have different ideas of what the correct behavior should be.

Also, Android, iOS, and (if my memory serves) Windows Phone all exhibit the behaviour of pausing music on disconnecting headphones. Whether right or wrong, it is common and expected behaviour - doing differently (without good cause) is bad design.

I use dumbphones. Dumbphones do not pause the music (at least not the ones I've been using for the past 10 years), which is probably why I'm against this behavior.

Yes, devices should always do exactly what you mean them to do.

Yeah. Some defaults are mildly annoying on all phones. Very true.

Every Android that I've seen (incl. Nexus 4) tend to stop playing, if you remove a physical cable. Not nice. Especially if your headset is old and sometimes looses connection for a millisecond or two...

But much much worse, is when the Bluetooth is disconnected/connected. The thing stops playing. And upon connecting resets position to the start! And starts playing! So if you are listening to a 70 minutes chapter of an audiobook, suddenly you have to search for a precise minute in the chapter. A bit frustrating. And even dangerous, as you might have been driving a car at the time.

... sometimes makes me wonder just how many car crashes could have been prevented by a slightly better designed interface of Google Music ...

The audiobook player app don't do this.

Hmm... Which one? I'll take a closer look.

Audible app never looses position. But I do sometimes play MP3s... Is there Google audiobook player?

This is the one i have been using: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.frma.audio...

Not for phones. On iPhone, the assumption is that removing headphones while playing music is a mistake (e.g. jostling the cable from jogging) and if you're going to take it out of your pocket to plug the headphones back in you can restart the music too. On Android, I think headphone removal triggers a global intent that your music app can listen for. Whether it does something when that intent fires is another story.

The stock music player pauses when that intent fires.

Spotify also does, most of the time. It does occasionally fail, which is really embarrassing when I'm listening to Carly Rae Jepson on the train and I drop my phone.

Right, but what I was alluding to was that if someone wants a different behaviour on Android that all they had to do is write their own music player (or fork the stock one, or similar).

All the Maemo music players do this too. I expect it - and if I'm going somewhere where I don't want it to switch to the external speaker, I just mute the external speaker volume.

Question for those who use either iPhone or Android - do they have independent volume levels for speakers vs. headphones? I honestly just realized that I don't know.

On my Android (not sure which version, i think its v2) when you unplug the headphones the music stops, but it has only one volume for headphones and speakers.

It never occurred to me that there'd be a single volume for both, just because I can't think of a way to relate the volume level of speakers and headphones.

And to think that I was annoyed that my phone didn't automagically spawn a third volume level for my bluetooth speakers:)

On my Android 4.1.2 it has different levels for speaker and headphones. Maybe that's an TouchWiz addition but if so, that would be about the first useful one.

> [0] I tried it for a week or so on a Nokia 301 and an example of a raw edge is that when using the music player and you accidentally remove the head phones, the music continues over the phone its speaker immediately. It should pause instead.

I can imagine that a software trick like that is patented by for example Apple who iirc were the first ones to have music pause when unplugging, and a license wasn't taken on the technology to cut costs.

Android has this baked in, too. How can I determine whether this is actually a patent which requires a license? I wish I could file an issue for Nokia somewhere so they can comment.

Sony Ericsson's dumbphones have also stopped the music when you unplugged the headphones since they added MP3 support. It always annoyed me that Nokia's didn't back in the S60 days.

I once biked too close to a fence in a crowded area, got caught and flipped the bike, and if that wasn't embarrassing enough, I was listening to some pretty terrible music at the time which then started blaring out of the speaker. I went back to my Sony Ericsson after that event. Didn't help that Sony Ericsson's dumbphone OS was better at multitasking J2ME apps than Symbian was at native apps (and in ways better than iOS 6 since it let me run an IRC app if I wanted to)

There are too many raw edges on a Nokia 301, probably related to new features (which are not many). One can google for them. To me the most annoying is that panorama mode fails to save the photo ~20% of the time on a large and mostly empty SD card. 39 days standby is a lie. Mine barely manages a week of standby on 2G only. Earlier versions of this platform are more robust and seemingly less power hungry. I wish I had bought a 2-3 year old one.

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