I agree that modern smartphones are too big, but that’s what the vast majority of the options are nowadays. I don’t know if you can call it a “gimmick” anymore if literally all of them are like that. It’s getting harder and harder to find a reasonably sized phone. But believe me, if I didn’t have a folding phone, I’d be looking out for small phones like the Zen phone.

I just have my mail set to silent notifications so I still see if I got an email but it doesn’t interrupt anything.

? Just because it’s not practical for everyone doesn’t mean it’s “just a gimmick”.

Modern smartphones are freaking gigantic. Women’s pants pockets are comically tiny. Modern smartphones physically would not fit in the majority of my pants. I bought a Z Flip so I could fit a modern phone in my pants and not be forced to carry around a purse.

The length is important for women’s pants pockets, not necessarily the thickness. It is practical for me. No, it’s not practical for everyone.

Yes. The Flip 5 has a different cover screen than the 3. It’s significantly larger. Just look up a a photo comparison of how significantly different they are. Yes, you can run literally any app or APK file from the cover screen on the Flip 5. The ones I use most are Discord, Spotify, YouTube, Google Messages, Voyager, my notes app, and Red Reader (Reddit).

Sometimes they can be a bit buggy or don’t function very well (esp games), so I don’t like using certain apps on the cover screen.

The only caveat is you need to install a free app by Samsung called Good Lock from the Galaxy Store first. Evidently it is not available in certain regions. In these regions, then yes, the cover screen functionality is locked down to only a few approved apps.

Sorry, I didn’t mean you could run full apps on the cover screen of the 3. You can’t really. I mean you technically can, but it doesn’t work well at all because the screen is so tiny and usable.

What I mean was that on the Flip 5 and beyond, you are able to run full apps on the cover screen. It’s not only the Razr that has this functionality.

I have the Flip 5 and I am able to run full apps on the cover screen, not just Samsung approved ones

The annoying thing is that this feature is just not enabled by default. You have to download an extra (free) app from Samsung that unlocks the full app support on the cover screen. It’s called Good Lock and it’s in Samsung’s Galaxy Store instead of the Play Store.

Not sure why they do this…I guess because they don’t want the average user to think that the cover screen will feel buggy if they try to run a non optimized app on it.

I suppose that’s possible, but I didn’t see the word “Bitlocker”. Would that not necessarily appear on screen? It just asked for a product key, which I thought was odd.

It wasn’t blocking me from logging into Windows (which would blue screen though). It was instead blocking me from using certain recovery options.

Edit: After some digging, that is likely what it was even thought it didn’t say Bitlocker on the screen. From screenshots, it looks like it occasionally doesn’t say that. Would make sense for security purposes and I’m sure many companies had something like that enabled. It made fixing the whole ordeal a much more slow and manual process though instead of just giving users some instructions!

Also sorry idk who downvoted you!

For context, I do not work in anything remotely close to an IT department. I work in a hospital. This affected my work the other day too. I am a bit more tech savvy than some of my coworkers, so I was attempting to see if I could fix the issue on my own by reverting to the previous windows update in recovery mode.

However, doing so prompted me for a Windows product key, which I obviously didn’t have because I didn’t install Windows on that computer.

The IT department had to come around individually for every single affected computer. They had to manually look up and type out the unique Windows product key for every single affected computer in order to be able to fix the problem.

Not sure if most installs of Windows act that way or not, but it definitely made the process more manual and annoying than it had to be. I have no idea why many of the recovery options required me to look up and enter a Windows product key. Seemed very odd to me and just made the ordeal more manual and time consuming than it had to be.

I believe some hospitals even ended up having to cancel surgeries.

I didn’t at first, but imo it actually would be a decent alternative to sleep tracking so you don’t have to wear a bulky smartwatch with a shit battery to sleep. But at $400, that price tag ain’t it, chief, like at all. I’d honestly consider it for like $100 though.

Same! People (especially on Lemmy I’ve noticed) love to rag on folding phones. But I think it’s fantastic companies are trying to innovate and make something more interesting than the same old same old we’ve had for the past 10 years. Phones used to be bizarre and weird and come in all sorts of shapes and sizes! Folding phones add a little variety back into the mix!

Yeah I agree with the person you’re responding to. For some reason, a lot of companies are really getting into researching the larger folding phones…the ones that unfold from a regular phone into a tablet.

And there is definitely a market for these phones, sure. But they are incredibly expensive and not everyone who is interested in a folding phone really wants a phone-tablet combo or the pricetag to match.

I’m not sure why more companies aren’t trying to make the “collapsing phone” style of folding phones like Samsung’s Z Flip or the Motorola Razr. There is a big market there and you’re limiting yourself as a company if you only are researching the phone-tablet style folding devices like Google is doing.

Lol glad to hear it!

Are you alive today lol

Stop making sense!!!

I do totally get paying to support something you use a ton.

But I don’t get comments like this calling blocking ads a cat and mouse game. It’s always been incredibly easy to block ads on the devices I own and I rarely ever have to mess with anything after installing a single browser extension or a single app.

On my desktop/laptop–ublock origin. I would install this regardless of whether or not I care about YouTube ads because ads on websites in general can be pretty cancerous. So I would already have it on my device to begin with. Install one extension and forget about it. Very occasionally ads start coming through, but then the extension auto updates itself and I don’t have to worry about it. It’s effortless and I absolutely never need to mess with the settings.

On my phone–YouTube ReVanced. Just basically download I think two APK files and you’re set. I’ve had to reinstall this a single time over the maybe decade(?) I’ve been using it as YouTube had some sort of breaking update or something. But having to install it again once every many years is hardly an inconvenience. Oh I guess I have had to install it again when I’ve gotten a new phone, but that’s really not that odd or inconvenient to me either…and generally I don’t get a new phone that often.

On my android TV device–SmartTube Next. It’s a single APK file. Set it and forget it. I’ve never had to reinstall the app.

One caveat with this is that it seems harder to watch YouTube ad free (without paying for premium) on Apple devices. So if you use a lot of Apple products it also makes sense.

I’m using Voyager. I can zoom in on the image

How do you pronounce Wafrn?

I haven’t used Jerboa in ages because of how buggy it was in the beginning, but that looks very pleasing to me as well. So many of the apps out there just look too “busy” for me. I am also coming from Reddit is Fun, so I like as simplistic looking an app as possible. Voyager fills that role for me and fixed the bugginess issues I had with Jerboa.

I’m sure Jerboa is much more stable now, but I just haven’t had a reason to leave Voyager yet.

Also in terms of games…I know Steam compatibility is supposed to be great, but if you use other platforms, you might run into some issues. Most of my library is in the Epic Games store (I know, terrible to admit this online…but they give you a lot of free shit), and I just could not get it to work at all the last time I tried Linux (maybe 6ish months ago).

Whenever I try switching to Linux, there is always something that doesn’t work right and takes forever to finagle with to fix if it’s even possible. I’m primarily a Linux Mint fan (daily drove it on my aging desktop until it died of old age a few years back), but I’ve also dabbled in a few other noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu (was really into it when everything was still orange and brown lol) and Pop OS.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love using Linux to breathe new life into older systems, but it just isn’t a good option for me personally if my device hasn’t gotten sluggish yet.

As an example, I have an aging laptop that started blue screening a bunch. It doesn’t support the Win 11 upgrade due to it’s processor not meeting minimum specs. So I thought it was finally time to see if Linux would improve it.

First of all, I had a hell of a time installing various distros without having them boot to a black screen after installation completes. Took absolutely forever to finally sus this out on the various distros I tried. Then I find that the couple extra buttons on my basic Logitech mouse don’t work. These are essential buttons for me that I use constantly. I go through a million troubleshooting steps before finding out that it’s a Wayland issue, so I switch back to Xorg and everything is cool. But then I start running into lag issues which never occurred on my Windows install. I also tried playing some games I had in my Epic Games library. I could not for the life of me get it to work, no matter which platform I tried. I get that Steam has better Linux compatibility, but not all of us have all of our games on Steam.

Finally got tired of the whole ordeal and switched back to Windows. Did a bit more troubleshooting and seemed to have resolved the blue screen issues and now it seems to work perfectly and much better out of the box than Linux. It’s not an old enough device a Linux refresh to be worth it yet.

I get that Lemmings are die hard Linux fans, and I think Linux has some fantastic use cases…but for many users it actually isn’t a good alternative. I find it works best when you want to breathe new life into older hardware or if you have every component specifically built to work for a particular Linux distro. But when basic features don’t work properly without hours of troubleshooting (if you can ever get them to work at all), it’s a little hard to just recommend it to your average Joe whose Windows/Mac computer works just fine.

This “everything just works” Linux experience a lot of people talk about on Lemmy/Reddit has absolutely never been my experience, even though I’ve been a casual Linux fan for over a decade now. Meanwhile, I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows (unless you’re talking really old Windows versions like Win XP and older).