My personal pet peeve is pre-installed, un-removable software and apps. My current mobile phone for example has apps that link to twitter, facebook, amazon etc. none of which I will ever use, but you can somehow not delete them. Why do I need to have that virtual junk in my phone?

I was going to mention the IR blaster. I had one on my LG G4 & G5 if I remember correctly. It was so cool! I was so bummed when they stopped having it.

Honestly this irks me to no end. We now have thousand dollar phones with all the speed, Ai capabilities, design, cameras, speakers, etc. Everything you could’ve wanted at its best in terms of performance, picture and camera quality, AI features… Except now you’re missing headphone jacks, replaceable batteries, Ir blasters, SD cards, extra Sim slots… Like, really, a thousand dollars for a phone and it has less features than a 200 dollar phone? Less features than phones from 6 years ago? Why the fuck have we sacrificed so much?? We had the chance to have a long golden era of long lasting, everything capable phones, but instead we’re stuck with boring bricks that do less than before, last less due to batteries wearing out, and come bloated with shit that you don’t need and can’t remove.

We seriously need some phone company out there to spec the fuck out of a high end phone with all these features, AND which meets GrapheneOS requirements and lets us flash the phone with whatever the fuck we want. We’ve gone completely backwards on phones, and it’s becoming more and more pointless to upgrade, you’re just changing phones for the batteries these days.

This comment covers it all perfectly

100% of this. It’s not just that I don’t need the screen space, it’s that my hands are not capable of holding my s22 without touching the screen because they had the fucking stupid idea to wrap the screen around the sides. I’m convinced the engineers at samsung are running an experiment to see how fucking stupid their phones can get without losing sales.

I suspect that the magnetic feature you desire is pretty unique to the usa. Anywhere else I’ve been in the world was chip or tap. Swiping the card would throw an error to use the chip only. So that country is just really far behind.

My current phone has all the things you listed except MST (never heard of that before though), and I bought it specifically for those reasons. Made by Xiaomi who still seems to want to give users features for some reason. Unlocked, rooted, custom rom, the whole shebang, I’m very happy with it.

It does still have a small front camera hole and a big back camera bump, but I don’t mind those personally. Though I do wish the camera bump wasn’t off centre. And like someone mentioned, I do wish it had an indicator led somewhere.

THROUGH THE ACTUAL CARD READER SO THEY DIDN’T NEED GOOGLE/APPLE/SAMSUNG WALLET WHATEVER THE FUCK

That’s not an issue, I’m assuming you mean the establishment didn’t need it, but just to cover my bases I’ll give you both scenarios:

• either you’re talking about your phone needing an app, which was still the case for the magnetic card thing, but I doubt you were talking about this.
• or more likely, you are talking about the place you’re paying needing a new PoS for receiving NFC based payment. In this case the issue is from the retailers trying to get another cut of the money by making you go through their app, when they can receive that payment via tap to pay which is also a thing on new cards, I have used them both in my country without any issue because we don’t have those ass backwards retailers, there’s an issue of the person taking payment being unaware and trying to enable another mobile based payment method instead of just setting it to card based payment.

Never knew there was something like a ‘magnetic field’ how did that work?