I carry a compact 10,000 mAh power bank on hikes or trips outdoors.
It wouldn’t save my Samsung Tab. I think that battery shorted internally. Won’t charge or allow the device to boot.
This is plenty to charge my wife and I phones. It’s reassuring on hikes and camping trips.
The aesthetics aren’t totally disconnected from practicality, at any rate. There’s a reason why glass and metal are seen as more premium than plastic, and that’s partly because they’re more durable. Cheap plasticky junk gets scratched up easily. Less so for glass and metal. Sure, in the mind of a consumer, the material choice becomes a mere proxy for “premiumness”, but nevertheless there is some real association there.
Here we just have a difference in personal values. I consider my phone purely utilitarian and mostly use it as what we used to refer to as “a telephone”, plus occasional texting. I use data only within range of WiFi, mostly at home, and mostly just for occasional email. So, as a notorious cheapskate, I keep it as long as possible, and if anything happens to it I whine to my service provider to give me a new one free. The previous-minus-1 phone about fifteen years ago broke, and the previous phone about four+ years ago was going to stop working when the provider notified me that they were upgrading their wireless protocols. In both cases they couriered a replacement phone for free, no contract required (I’ve been a customer for a long time). Sometimes it takes several attempts and several different CSRs to get the freebie, but it hasn’t failed yet. I am the diametric opposite of the high-tech types who always have the latest phones and the latest high-bandwidth data plans. I consider myself a lover of tech, but in completely different domains. To me a phone is just a phone, not a freaking data center. 
Which means, among other things, the smaller and more durable the better. I didn’t even want a smart phone when they sent me the J3, but there were no other options available.
Motivated by hiking, I’m now all-in on the biggest and most powerful phones. They are still small enough (~8oz) to still be portable for hiking. And the screens are large and clear enough that I can have a vast number of maps, trip beta, plant & bird guides, geology guides…all instantly available and legible in daylight. Camera quality that’s only going to be beaten significantly by taking a >$3,000 camera weighting >3lb. And once you’ve figured out how to tweak the settings, over a week of battery life “off the grid” (I only use GPS rarely to verify position, that chews up battery much quicker).
And although hiking was the major motivation, I now no longer feel the need to have a second backup laptop at home. The phone is so powerful that I could get on with it fine for a week as a backup computer.
I spend ~$1200 on an unlocked phone, trade it in for ~$500 after two years; my 5G 1Gb plan is <$20 per month. So the all-in cost of having the best high end phone new every 2 years is about $600 per year. Very much worth it for me.
“Phone” is close to dead last on my list of priorities as well. #1 is internet access device, #2 is camera/video platform, #3 is app platform… and then several steps beyond those is “phone.” Though even at that I’m more likely to use video calling than not.
I don’t upgrade my phone as much as you, though. I still need a keyboard/mouse/big screen for actual work. A Pixel 2 XL still has a great camera (in fact identical to the very latest Pixel), and is fast enough for everything I’ve thrown at it.
forget the battery i wish the app and os makers would realize that memory is finite and there’s no point in having google play and such if they make updates to the appa/os so large it crowds the games off that I have play for in the first place
That or let us directly install things to the sd card although they might do that now but since I have a budget galaxy tab a6 that’s 2/3 years old i wouldn’t know…
It depends on the app and the OS version, but in many cases you can partly move the app to the SD card. Go to the app settings page, and if you’re lucky you may find an option that says “move to SD card”. You’ll probably have to do it manually, though, and it won’t work for everything.
yeah thats how it is now … i was hoping since the os had changed at least once since we accquired this one maybe it had gotten better
The funny thing is that just about everyone who buys a new phone immediately wraps it in a protective/decorative case, so the scratchability of the phone’s body isn’t a real issue (except in the mind of the phone’s new owner when they first unbox it).
I have a Google Pixel phone with a plastic body, and it doesn’t have any scratches on it (because it’s lived its entire life in a protective case).
Seems to me that they’re all rectangular, based on watching the youtube how-to replacement videos.
But I think that there’s probably some sort of confluence of factors; the batteries look very thin, and maybe thin batteries are more fragile when being replaced by the consumers, or the connectors required for consumer replacement are large. The phones themselves are getting thinner and sleeker; having a back that comes off doesn’t always work with the modern glass-backed phones. And finally, there is probably a large segment of users who replace them frequently- either they lease them, or just get new phones when the newest ones come out, and at any event don’t use their phones to the point where long-term battery endurance is an issue. Or maybe they just want to push everyone to that last model by removing user-replaceable batteries.
My suggestion: “upgrade” from a Samsung to a better tablet. I was a Samsung tablet user for a really long time, since about 2012? And kept buying replacements. They’re expensive.
But what got me to drop them was the fact that even the newer ones were only able to use older versions of Android OS. Meaning, my newer tablet would have the same issues as the older one. So I instead went with a Lenovo. Here’s how the Lenovo is good:
I agree that if you want android (and not a fork like FireOS which can be a pain), Lenovo is probably your best bang for buck in the tablet world. They’ve more or less got a better sense of compromise than Samsung (which as I stated earlier tends to be either really low end or really high end only). Lenovo has a wide variety in the $150 to $400 range, but as always watch the compromises, less expensive is normally a bit short on RAM or processor, but for people using them as media machines, these are not really big issues.
Lenovo makes good laptops. Their tablets are priced right. I may get one and try.
I watch movies on my tablets. I have a tab stand on my bedside table.
To add on to this, make sure your SD card is formatted as adoptable storage, and not portable. The downside is if you move your SD card to a new device, you need to reformat it, and you’ll lose all your data. Make sure you back everything up to a PC.
I was pretty unhappy with Samsung when they started making the batteries in the galaxy series non-replaceable. I think their excuse had to do with enabling wireless charging which I find about as useful as having an extra pinky toe.
Well, I have to out myself once again as one of consumers they are marketing to! I have two charging stands at home and one in the car, not having to mess aroung with a charging cable is a huge boon. No wireless charging would be an absolute dealbreaker for me on a new phone.
Interesting. Are you using your phone while it is charging wirelessly?
With the range only being a few inches I find it very frustrating to try to use my phone while it is charging with a wireless charger. Not to mention I can go from 0% to 100% in 90 minutes with wired fast charging. Wireless charging takes much longer.
Not at home. It just sits in the charging cradle, which is also an upright stand so I can see it, I just pick it up from the cradle to use it. I have one charging cradle/stand by my bed, one in the kitchen.
In the car, I have a charging cradle / holder that positions the phone in a high “heads up” position. The screen is so large and clear that I no longer bother with the built-in car screen. Again, just plop it in the cradle when I get in the car, grab it from the cradle when I get out - not having to mess with a cable is so much better.
For what it’s worth, the non-replaceable batteries were a thing well before the wireless charging. As stated earlier, it had more to do with making phones resistant to dust and water, but Apple, the style leader, had gone for the unibody construction long before bothering to make a resistant phone. Everyone else copied them. I want to think 2018 ish was the last time a major manufacturer had replaceable batteries in their main lines.
And yeah, I think it was style over substance, and with a huge chunk of forcing people into the classic 2 year upgrade path as well.