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As I'm getting more and more into keyboards, I've realised I dont want a laptop anymore.
I want a powerful phone (16GB RAM, 8-cores) that I can:
That is, I can come home from work, slide my phone into a USB-C dock and start typing away on my Linux desktop with my fancy keyboard
Donβt quote me on this but Iβm quite sure you can run Linux on Samsung phones with termux/prootdistro
Edit: I specifically mentioned Samsung because of their Dex mode but it seems plenty of other phones also allow video out via usb these days. I canβt say for sure they work well with Linux but I do know itβs doable on Samsung.
I'll join the ranks asking for a perfect phone.
Mine would have:
i don't even need good specs or sd card, just a good camera, foss rom and good battery
Direct replacement for the wonderful Facebook PortalTV unit. Its digital pan and zoom to follow a speaker is excellent. It could start and end calls completely hands-free before meta killed the service to which voice control was tethered. It sits on top of the TV, it does its job, and does it well.
Now that it's abandonware by Facebook, I need something else before its hardware dies. I have 4 of these in the field and some of them are with remote geriatrics who have no tech support, and it has to work.
I'm gonna miss it.
My unicorn phone would be one that is both small enough to use with one hand (currently have a Zenfone 10 largely for this reason) and has a secondary camera lens that's a telephoto rather than an ultra ultra wide.
It bugs me that phones with a long lens are so comparatively rare, it's always just wide (verging on ultrawide) as default and when a second lens is added it's even wider again because people love distortions or taking photos in tiny rooms or something. Sometimes I just want to take a photo of something further away than a few metres and actually have it visible without zooming in, I'd even take a normal lens FoV as an improvement over ultrawide. Those phones that do have one tend to have it as a third lens and also tend to be huge, so get disqualified by the 'usable with one hand' criteria even before I reach the massively expensive part.
I'd also like an Instax back for the Hasselblad V series that was cheap enough that I could actually justify the cost of buying (say ~$200 AUD or less) though I will admit that's a pretty niche thing to be after.
why not use a tablet you might ask? i love the handling of a solid, non-detachable keyboard.
A Linux phone with colour e-ink screen and writing capabilities like the reMarkable.
I've realized that for a lot of things that a phone does, e-ink is too slow to refresh. Even web browsing becomes painful to navigate sometimes. Maybe a dual-screen approach would work with e-ink on one side and a regular screen on the other?
Yeah, maybe, not a bad idea. I'd be happy to use my phone less, though. Call, messaging app, note taking, and maps is all I need. I can leave browsing for when on the PC.
Data cassettes using current LTO tech, but in standard compact cassette format
LTO cartridges are shaped so much more efficiently, for so many reasons, so why specifically compact cassette format?
Although I'm also just realising now that LTO is specifically optimized to be used linearly from start to finish (It's even in the name) and is pretty inefficient if you'd want to use it a bit, remove it and using reading it later.
A decent brand of tws with multiple lights to indicate the amount of charge left. Also bigger battery.
All the branded stuff have single led with different colours to indicate charge percentage and also if paired or not.
I don't want to remember fcking rainbow to know all the features.
A high-quality laptop without any branding.
I'm currently using a 9-year-old, woefully underpowered laptop made by Xiaomi. Full aluminium unibody, and NO logo. Not printed on, not etched in, not glistening only in the right light. NO LOGO.
I'm not a billboard. I'm not responsible for your brand recognition. Ironically though, far more people have come up to me and asked "hey, what laptop is that" than ever would have cared if there was a logo on it.
It also just looks and feels fantastic, all-aluminium-no-logo just looks so sleek.
So yeah. I will not be upgrading until I find another laptop of the same build quality, with no logo. Tuxedo has that option for most of their laptops, but for some reason not for their only current full-aluminium body -.-
Oh, and don't come at me with stickers.
Fully agree with the sentiment, and at the same time I think it's a lost battle. Even more so with more niche tech like cameras (where one is usually invested into an ecosystem instead of having just one piece of gear that can be sold on its own 5 years in - like a laptop).
I'll extend that to every product as well. I hate branding specially in clothing.
Oh, and donβt come at me with stickers.
Well then. Maybe you could wrap your heart in duc-ta-a-ape! *runs away sobbing*
Phones with smaller screens
A power efficient e-ink laptop.
A laptop with a colossal battery life, I don't care how chonky it is.
A smart watch that can do much more than the simple crap they do now. Larger is fine, maybe a smart bracer.
Multitools that are specifically designed for trades. It's not tech, I would just love to have a multitool with specific tools for welding.
Some kind of wrist device where I can copy a file from one electronic device and paste it onto another device with hand gestures.
A Clockwork uConsole device that's a bit more powerful and can use m.2. Those things are neat little kits, but they're alway always always sold out of the good version. I wouldn't mind a laptop in this format.
Phone with dual sim card slots and a sdcard, plus pop-out camera (my present phone has all of that except the second simcard, and I refuse to replace this phone!) ** Charging port on top ** Slightly thicker to fit a larger battery - and possibly slightly better optics for the main camera.
Computer mouse about 15% larger than the "large" mouses they presently sell.
Detachable 10-key that's mirrored for easy left hand use.
In general, small electronic devices should have more than one button for interaction. It's easier to remember 3 different buttons than 3 different Morse codes to achieve the three different functions.
What phone do you have? I used to have a work phone that had 2 sim card slots and an sd card reader, a huge battery that was removeable without requiring restarting and an audio jack for headphones but no pop out camera and the camera kinda sucked. bluebird ef500r-anlt. no longer being made sadly. has an ir blaster too. love it, wish it still could operate as a phone.
Have you tried a vertical mouse? I have a Logitech MX vertical and a left handed generic one that is pretty much identical to it in size and love them.
I saw a mirrored one once, that wasn't detachable but on the left side of the keyboard and I regret not buying it because I haven't been able to find one since. Plus it was close to $1,000. I tried making a picture of the keyboard i dream of. It's still a work in progress, somethings aren't correct and i'm missing a few keys still. https://i.imgur.com/wBBxNf8.png
devices should only have one button if they only need to be turned on or off.
The phone is a moto hyper one. 4 or 5 years old, I fear the day i need to switch. Technically it has two sim cards slots. More precisely: one sim card slot and one slot that can be used either for sim or SD card. Since sd card is non-negotiable for me, it means one usable sim.
Audio jack yes, but not replaceable battery.
I haven't tried vertical mouse. Maybe I ought...
No luck with the imgur link :( I'll try again later
Google stopped making Chromecasts to push their stupid Google TV box, and secondhand ones are $150
So... That
So like, fuck walmart, but I believe their private label sells pretty much the exact same thing as the most recent chromecasts running android
A physical slide out keyboard case for iPhone.
https://clicks.tech/ is about as close as you can get right now, though itβs not slide-out. Overall pleasant experience if you donβt mind the size increase.
A device I'd really like to have would be something like a phone but would replace the need for having any cloud services. Imagine if it had a really large drive where you could just keep all your media, and if it had an API that's something along the lines of NextCloud where it could expose calendar, contacts, email, music streaming, photo gallery, video streaming, etc. that your other devices could connect to.
Since you carry your phone around everywhere anyways, there would no longer be any need to have cloud services because their whole raison d'etre is to act as a central server that allows you to sync data across different devices. If you just carry the server on you, that problem goes away entirely.
You could also have a dock with a backup drive where it would just automatically sync when you plug it in at the end of the day. This way if the drive died on it, you'd always have a backup ready that you could swap in.
Another neat thing you could do would be to have a dock in a shape of a laptop with a big screen, keyboard, maybe faster CPU, more RAM, a good video card. This way you wouldn't need a separate laptop, you could just plug your phone in the dock and voila.
This approach would result in way better privacy because all your data would always be on you as opposed to some server somewhere. It would also be way more reliable since you wouldn't have to worry about network connectivity. You'd still need some external services like a mail server, but these would just be endpoints you use for communication.
A SEGA Dreamcast
