Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Energizer P18K Android phone: we are being gaslit by smartphone manufacturers" video.

  1. Just a bit of info that might be worth checking out: There are some chinesium phones with bigger battery than your regular ol' brands that don't reach the ridiculous size of the Energizer phone... most notorious brands for that are Doogee and Blackview, upwards of 10000mAh. Unfortunately, afaik, the phones themselves are poorly optimized, so the actual extra juice you get don't actually reach 2x or 3x. Tests I heard about are more like 1.5x 1.6x. But the size is far more manageable as long as you don't mind the chinesium generic flavor, lack of updates and warranty, and all the other stuff that comes with chinesium phones. Removable battery with water resistance became a hard sell these days not because it's impossible to do, but because it became a trend not to... so we also have that to thank stupid shallow trends and a move towards design instead of usability. Admitedly, the direction Samsung Galaxy S5 took back at the time wasn't perfect: https://www.samsung.com/ca/support/mobile-devices/galaxy-s5-is-galaxy-s5-dust-resistant-and-water-resistant-ip67/ Rubber gasket based, so everytime you popped open the back plate you were probably letting dust in and reducing the effectiveness of it. So, it's also a problem with liability. It's only IP67 when you buy and never open it... from then on, the water resistance kinda goes down the drain. It also required some ugly tabs to close open ports, and they would wear out and fail eventually. Sony Xperia up to Z3 also had those. I had one, these external rubber gaskets didn't last long. These could have evolved overtime if they caught on, but basically it's just cheaper and easier to seal it all up with conformal coating plus glue. But the real main issue with removable batteries is that as soon as most manufacturers moved away from it, you just don't have R&D and mass manufacturing of removable batteries for smartphones anymore. They went extinct. Chicken and egg problem. Manufacturers don't buy removable batteries anymore, so there is no development and mass production for it. There are no batteries over 3000mAh in removable form in a shape adequate for smartphone in high volume production these days, so it's not even up to consideration. And to be fair, market analysis back when they were still popular came out saying that just a very tiny percentage of smartphone users bought an extra battery or more anyways, so it just wasn't worth it - problem with developing and pricing things for a mainstream market. I was one of the smartphone users that got extra external batteries up to my Nokia Lumia 1020... from then onwards, all sealed. If you absolutely need to have a removable battery modern smartphone though at all costs, low to mid range category is the way to go. Most people might not know this, but basically all major brands - Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola - still have removable battery phones... but in the category where they'll also have low RAM, low storage, crap camera, potentially Android Go, low end SoC and whatnot: https://www.androidauthority.com/best-android-phones-removable-battery-697520/ One thing to notice: they are basically using the same type of battery that the last high end removable battery phones were using like 5+ years ago... because development pretty much stopped. So we're talking about 2000mAh up to 2800mAh batteries. They are only useful these days because of the pairing with low end devices which consumer less power. Removing headphone jack is going the same way (R&D and mass production stopping), but just incredibly more stupid or anti-consumer I guess. Putting one there does not occupy that much space, it is an extremely useful port, and one of the few truly category wide reliable standards. You couldn't trust microUSB to have all functions, you can trust even less USB Type-C, but the headphone jack is always a simple headphone jack. It's also cheap as hell, so not really that much of a cost saving measure, perhaps a bit more for water resistance phones... dongles cost far more to manufacture in comparison to just shoving a jack there. The most likely true reason for that is to sell overpriced bluetooth headphones, which not only sound worse per price, they also have all problems around security, the entire pairing process, compatibility issues, range issues, interference, and whatnot. It's kind of a shitshow, and I have the impression that this is by design. Kinda like the USB standard - they wanna keep consumers guessing, so they have to buy extra accessories to get the functionality that was supposed to be there. You can even be a fan and have the perfect pair of bluetooth phones - you still have to charge them, and having a backup right there is always useful. Problem is, a ton of those smartphone brands also manufacture audio related equipment. And so, removing the option to connect cheap-o wired headphones that everyone already had from smartphones would force people to either buy dongles (official ones overpriced as heck) or buy way more expensive bluetooth headphones, so the industry as a whole profits from that. It's a win-win for them, we're the only ones losing from it. So yeah, as smartphone evolution plateaud, manufacturers shifted from relevant useful improvements towards trends and design, plus anti-consumer cost cutting measures. Making any very significant improvement in smartphones nowadays is a high risk high cost move, so companies will likely keep adopting more anti-consumer measures to keep a positive cash flow. And the big companies will likely not risk much to give consumers what they want, because it has already reached a point that if they don't sell phones in high volumes, investors will complain or take off, and then the whole business shuts down. Very common scenario in tech development unfortunately... Apple has several categories going that way, but you see in basically every other company with plateau'd products too.
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