Just a quick rant. This may be obvious to many folks, but wow, smartphones are so boring and awful (user-hostile) nowadays. They somehow find a way to get even worse. every. single. year.
Every phone release now is just a ever-increasing slab which looks just like all the other slabs. You get your iPhones and you get your Android phones, and that’s it. No company takes any risks at all, they just keep axing features (MicroSD, 3.5mm, replaceable battery, IR blaster, hw keyboard). And they’re increasingly locked down and controlled, so Apple and Google can spy on everything you do, and you just have to trust them to not leak too much sensitive info about you to their advertisers when they sell your data, which they absolutely are doing, and you can’t stop it. Apple literally listened to iPhone users’ microphone data and send it to third parties not under their oversight. Seriously, those links I put here about the most recent privacy violations are stories less than 24 hours old.
How did things get this awful….and on top of that why must every phone release be absolutely gigantic now? 6.7 inch screens as the minimum? What the hell happened here?
I’m leaving out one category in the above, namely ultra-minimal phones with either large T9 keypads, or just heavily restricted functionality, like the Light Phone series. I’m sure they’re great, but I do still want something that functions primarily as a smartphone, and I want more buttons and features, not fewer.
There are a ever-decreasing number of exceptions in terms of interesting non-hostile devices which are still actually smartphones:
- HMD has the Skyline and Fusion which allow some basic repairability, yet still has some basic ingress protection. Both have an SD card slot, and the lower-cost Fusion even has a headphone jack! And no one ever talks about these phones for more than 5 minutes. I’m going to have to get one and see if the camera is really the dealbreaker I’ve heard about in the very, very limited coverage they got. Unfortunately are also way too big
- There’s the new Minimal phone. Something actually unique, sporting an actual hardware QWERTY keyboard in 2025, an e-ink screen, and even an SD card slot. It was recently reviewed by the always great Mr Mobile.
- And that’s kinda it IMO, except for maybe some phones aimed at mainly the Chinese market with insane battery life, sometimes something exotic like an infrared camera, from brands like UMIDIGI and DOOGEE. Honestly I don’t really trust these phones with my personal data anymore, nor that they’ll ever get security updates.
At this point I’m really only interested in something I can eventually put a privacy respecting OS like /e/OS on, but I’m willing to wait a few generations to do this. But a lot of these vendors have no interest in allowing non-stock Android forks to be flashed onto their phones, yet don’t want to actually deliver meaningful security updates with any reliability. Why do we always have to be in the worst timeline…
But as someone who values size above all (seriously – how do people not injure their fingers using these things one-handed?), the last phone I plan to review is the last remaining option I’m aware of for non-insanely-large phones from a major brand, the Motorola Edge 50 Neo. It’s basically the Thinkphone 25 without the carbon fiber look. The TP25 didn’t even come to the US this year, because Moto is apparently so afraid that people will literally throw up on their phones if they don’t ship with 8″ screens.
Maybe I will try one of these few remaining options, even though they are filled with the Google spy ecosystem which cannot be avoided. Maybe the DOJ will get its way and break up Google and I wont need to constantly stress about how even the OS landscape gets more boring and restricted, and we lose more rights every year. I guess we’ll see.
