I feel like a boomer in my 20s with the fact that I fucking despise having to pay 30-40 dollars a month just so some guy from work can reach me and tell me I need to work extra hours. Everything and everyone else I can contact online using my work’s PC or my personal laptop. It’s also dogshit-garbage because it’s getting to the point where most services entirely give up on their desktop/browser ports or websites because they just assume people are going to use their phone.
Instagram was like this for a long while. Indeed recently removed their “distance” feature and other filter features from their desktop version. Reddit is another example. Enshittification of the internet to put it all on a phone is awful.
Yeah touch screens are one of the worst input methods that exist. Whenever I use them they never work reliably and there is also some noticeable input lag that makes everything feel more sluggish than it is. They’re tolerable with a stylus but still inferior in every way compared to physical buttons. Using a touch screen for any serious stuff sounds like purgatory to me lol. My parents are still using their “dumb” phones for basically the reasons you described.
I have a Pinebook Pro which has the same processor as the Pinephone Pro but slightly higher clocked and with a docking station it’s a pretty usable machine (aside from some buggy proprietary drivers that require a custom Kernel). Most FOSS games just work on it without issue but 3D games are a bit problematic since the libre graphics driver is the product of reverse engineering. I got OpenMW to compile and run on it once but it was barely playable due to lacking OpenGL features. Minetest runs a lot better but had random slow downs in large open areas when I tried it.
Unless chip makers start publishing low level documentation none of these machines will ever work 100%. I do have hope that China will change this sometime in the future.
i know people that use tablets and phones to type out entire essays and stuff… how?! the keyboard feels really bad no matter what i use, i’d rather use my laptop. i don’t care that i can use my actual keyboard, a computer feels smoother for that purpose alone
another example are kiosks. like in a fast food restaurant. i tried one of those and it didn’t feel responsive just as you said
how is the pinephone pro in general? i can’t afford it and i don’t know if it’d be viable sooner or later. currently i have an s9+ and i’d need to switch to a new one, hoping for a xiaomi or anything with support for custom roms. i won’t be able to get my hands on a pixel tho
i also hope china breaks new ground chip-wise to be honest
I don’t know about the Pinephone Pro since I don’t have one (I was talking about the Pinebook Pro which I do have and since the Pinephone Pro is basically just a Pinebook Pro that fits in your pocket most things apply to both) but I would only recommend Pine64 stuff in general if you’re into hacking and tinkering with hardware. Any smartphone that is supported by a Linux distro like postmarketOS or Armbian will probably work fine.