JAjauntywundrkind·Jul 16, 2025Recommendation phrase
In past lives, I've clung to 3.5mm jacks and battery swaps (although I consider myself much reformed, yes I maybe would buy an updated LG v20 if one were released: that was an amazingly built metal slate of a phone with both. Just hot and slow, on that Snapdragon 820).
Today, bluetooth works quite well for me (I love not having cables... but it sucks that performance with a microphone is trashfire). 3.5mm adapters are cheap and easy when needed (rarely. I also have a $10 bluetooth->3.5mm in my travel kit that does get used once a year!). And with usb-c providing fast charging, I rarely feel like I'd benefit from battery swaps. I can give myself 50%+ in 30 minutes, with a portable battery that will power not just my phone, but any other device I run into. With Qi 2.2 releasing with 25W wireless charging, and magnetic coupling being standar
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d now, you don't even need wires anymore. Carrying a bespoke phone-only battery seems like a massive downgrade today. (It also felt like a massive fire hazard!) Time to update your expectations!
Worth mentioning that battery swaps make water-resistance much much trickier to pull off. There' a real cost to battery-swappability.
I do wish we saw something like Ara, some phone modularity & extensibility. Fairphone has some modular parts, but it doesn't feel like an open ecosystem, and the parts dont seem super designed for expansion but more just replacement. I guess maybe Framework is doing the best work, albeit in a bigger form factor space, with their Expansion Cards, which are basically just a card form factor USB-C. Licensed CC-BY-4. https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionCards