They aren’t necessarily silly, but these options were definitely quirky, especially LG Wing.
waterfall displays
Finally someone agrees with me. I swear it felt like I was the only sane person around. The curved edges made no sense design, use, or otherwise.
I managed to mostly skip that BS by going with phones that didn’t use it, but I still had the occasional misstep whenever using someone else’s phone to check out their photo or whatever.
Frankly, I’m happy to see it become less mainstream.
They also made the screens ridiculously fragile, one clonk on a normally-safe corner and the whole thing shattered
They were annoying from a reparability perspective but they did look good. I suspect many of the people who had problems with accidental touches didn’t understand how to hold a smartphone (using pinky as support at the bottom). I actually saw a reviewer complaining about this on a new phone recently, and the way they were holding it made absolutely no sense.
Wait there is a phone with a temperature sensor? That actually seems pretty useful. I’d love for phones to start adding more sensors you can access.
There’s several companies that make phones with built in thermal cameras.
I might have to look those up before the next phone change
My pixel 8 pro has one. It’s kinda helpful when determining when to open the windows of my home
They should all have two, one for battery and one for the CPU.
There’s a lot more than just two temperature sensors inside your phone. Your screen has sensors, there’s a few chassis sensors, your CPU has probably 30+ inside of it etc.
The pixels is external which is unique I guess.
But that won’t tell you how hot your water is
Your phone is waterproof, isn’t it?
Caterpillar used to make the C60 which had a thermal camera
Man I’m surprised Samsung didn’t dominate this list. My galaxy S4 was filled with so many garbage features that I never used.
Samsung and their garbageware was like 50% of the reason why I switched to iOS for my main phone.
It was jokingly called LagWiz for a reason
Samsung is really good at shipping software garbage software. Also known as bloatware.
I like the term shovelware.
Shovelware is what you find on the Nintendo store. Software that comes pre installed on a device is specifically bloatware.
Shovelware and bloatware really aren’t the same thing though.
Shovelware is low effort and often times copy pasted software. Bloatware is software a vendor decided you wanted without asking you. It can sometimes have some utility but usually only to some people.
It also a nice term… but for some reason bloatware term exactly describe the issue behind the problem.
There is no real silly, just how limited our imagination is.
I honestly thought cameras on phones were silly and I think the first gen camera phones were rubbish. Never did I know and maybe nobody knew that mobile web/web 2/social media would be as popular as it is and would probably suffer without them.
This is very subjective and almost no research low effort article, I think.
I bought an LG Wing on eBay for cheap after LG left the phone business. The intent was to upgrade from my previous phone. I managed to tolerate it for only a week before crawling back to my old phone.
Hand ID is definitely the worst on that list I think, partially because it was introduced at a time when LG’s mobile division was really struggling and needed a phone that would sell. They needed a dated notch design for it to work, at a time when competitors like Samsung were bringing in much more modern looking hole punch cutouts. It’s no wonder LG pulled out of the marker shortly after, whoever was in charge tbere had zero understanding of what was important to the average consumer.
this too doesn’t sound that silly
We also had a year when Google decided that short-range radar was the future of interacting with your phone, so it crammed a Soli sensor into the top bezel of the Pixel 4 series. It was the culmination of five years of work and was designed to let you skip songs, silence phone calls, and snooze your alarms with nothing more than a lazy wave.
i tried this app for a while ☞ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.jarsilio.android.waveup but it didn’t work as well :/
If it had worked, it would have been cool. Sadly, it often failed to register movements.
I still have this built into the google nest I have. It was neat when my 1 year old toddler could pause music by thrusting a hand toward it, but it would often activate when just walking by so it’s disabled now.
I have an LG wing somewhere. Cool phone, but really heavy and the second screen is not useful
Samsung Camera Phone Samsung Pico Projector phone Yotafone
