Phones Suck

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So I took some photos with my phone (Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra with cracked screen). I took about 3 photos of the same thing because my hands are shaky (thanks aspergers) and I wanted a better chance of a clear picture without motion blur.

I took a look through my pictures and the first two pictures had a lot of motion blur but the third and final picture looked crip and sharp. The perfect picture!

Then after a few seconds Samsung's Galaxy brain AI "enhanced it" into a blurry mess. Even the text is unreadable. I thought I could change it back because whenever I edit a photo there's always an option to revert, even after I saved the changes. Apparently that only applies for manually edited photos.

So I google my problem. No solution but many other people describing how Samsung's "enhancements" crush the levels and that even setting enhancement to minimum makes no difference (there's no option to turn it off because of course there f*****g isn't).

So I think, "That's it, for my next phone I'm buying a Pixel!" I Google Pixels and Pixel users are suffering from the same problem. Their photos are getting "enhanced" and there's no way to turn it off. Winston Smith had no way to turn off his telescreen and we have no way to turn off AI "improvements" to our photos.

I was just getting off the tram and I was so mad I almost wanted to throw my phone in the bin at the tram stop. I decide to vent to an old friend so I go into Messenger and I can't find her. She's probably in there somewhere but it's like finding a needle in a haystack because a certain galaxy brain named Zückerberg recently decided it would be a good idea to put every Facebook group we're in inside the messenger app.

I looked it up on reddit and saw a post about it from 6 hours ago and the people commenting seemed pretty upset about it. I guess it must be a recent update.

The enshitification of everything continues. I don't even know why I f*****g get out of bed anymore!

Yes technology does seem to be getting worse, from my perspective. Everything gets dummied down and automated, all the manual controls are gone and we're forced to trust the makers have got it right, which they often haven't.

I've never been a big fan of telephones. I carry a cell phone primarily in case I'm stranded somewhere and need to call for help.

As a kid, we didn't have a telephone at home. Instead, we used radios (later they came to be known as CB radios and the stupid CB fad ruined their usefulness. On the rare time we needed a telephone, we went over to my grandmother's house (1.5 miles across the field) and used hers.

I'd love not to need one at all.

By the way, regarding the camera, they are amazing.

In about 1990 or so, a Kodak rep brought an electronic camera they were working on by my office and I got to evaluate it (thatis, play with it) for half a day. It was one of only two prototypes in the world and each cost $30,000. For $30,000, it was strictly 256 grayscale and did 2,048x2,048 pixels.

^
I agree some of the cameras in smartphones are great, and it's probably cheaper than buying a top-notch standalone camera. Don't know much about which phone cameras are good and which aren't, but I've seen the results of some of them, very impressive. Assuming it's not prohibitively difficult to copy the photos onto a hard drive. I knew one guy who couldn't figure out how to get emailed mp3s off his Windows phone. There's probably a way to get files off a phone, but in many cases I don't think the makers really want you to.

And mobile phones are great at getting you out of certain kinds of trouble - e.g. if you get stranded you can call for help from your friends or professional services, and they're probably much better at airports when the airline cancels your flight - you can get alerts about flight delays and you can warn your loved ones about what's happening so they don't worry. I can in theory do most of those things with my laptop, but it's not very practicable trying to fire it up on the go.

One big snag is, apart from the initial expense of buying the phone (and they don't always last long), they always want a monthly fee, so I'd be paying through the nose for something I'd only use a few times a year, which is lousy value for money, depending on the crises that happen to me.

I worry that we're sleepwalking into a society in which we're dead if we don't have a smartphone. The currency-conversion website World Remit went smartphone-only, so I had to sack them and find a better service. I wonder how long it'll be before that one pulls the same trick. And I really need to convert currency at a halfway decent exchange rate. And try opening an email account without a mobile phone these days. It can be done, but it may take you a while to find a provider that doesn't insist on a phone number, and one of these days those providers will all have gone the same way.

I have a TracFone.

Typically, I sign up for a set volume of minutes for the year. That also comes with some number of SMS messages. This will run about $120 or so for the year (I haven't checked the most recent prices). Then, there is an option to add another year for about $60 more. With fees, I can typically get two years for about $200.

Last year, my call volume went up and I had to keep adding more minutes, so this past January when time time was up, I switched to a fixed one year plan for about $200. I'm not receiving all that many calls this year so I would have been better off sticking with the one year fixed minutes plan and extending it a year.

Also, with TracFone, they sell second phones at pretty good prices. I think that you can even get a flip phone from them for about $15. My current smart phone I bought two years ago was about $100.

There is another option if you usually have wifi available that I have been tempted to try. You don't even need a the SIM card. Instead, you just use it as a wifi phone and use a free internet phone from Google. Whenever and wherever you have wifi you can call and receive calls for free.

I do have one of those free internet phones. They try to give you a number in your area code, but I used a VPN to change my location and so my phone number is out of a state I haven't been in for over fifty years. It's really great for text messages because I can use a browser on my desktop and on my laptop to send and receive text messages.

I have an old 3G phone that had to be retired because they were shutting off the 3G. It's still in great condition. I'm tempted to take the SIM card out and set it up to use in this manner.