@novasurp Opinion? Replaceable batteries are objectively superior. Batteries are the shortest-lived part of electronic devices. That is a fact, not an opinion.

Do I need to mention that the Galaxy S4 sold over 80 million times?

I searched for this! Thank you for posting it!

@electrineer 2027 is 14 years late.

https://androidforums.com/threads/...

Better late than never. However, in an ideal world, non-replaceable batteries would be banished before the next sunrise.

@TheCommoner282 Users are obviously more likely to need free USB ports than to bring their laptop close to a pool.

@Lensflare What do you mean with "MIB"?

@CoreFusionX From what year is your MSi laptop? 2014?

That was before MSi became cucked. That was when their gaming line-up had six USB ports. Today's laptops waste most of the space on the side for a useless "minimalist look" that no one asked for.

@TheCommoner282 Perhaps a laptop can be built in a way that the ports are isolated from the mainboard so if it gets wet, the ports might take damage but the important internals are protected.

Lenovo has already designed their keyboards splash-proof, and regardless, one should not bring a laptop close to a pool anyway. Doing so is foolish.

@Nanos MTP is Media Transfer Protocol. It is used by computers to access mobile phone storage through a USB cable.

Sadly, it is bug-ridden.

@DeepHotel The "mv" tool already copies and deletes files automatically when moving between devices or partition. That's how moving always worked.

Moving within the same file system only changes the file paths. That's like renaming. The benefit is that it nearly finishes instantaneously.

@CoreFusionX And what about laptops? Can they be custom-built too?

@TheCommoner282 There are already water-resistant smartphones and tablets, and actually outdoor laptops exist, such as the Panasonic Toughbook.

However, ports can be made waterproof. Samsung did since on the Galaxy S5 Mini and since the Galaxy S7. The port of the S5 Mini is not covered by a flap.

@retoor At least the water provides excellent cooling. Don't forget to bring oxygen bottles though. And if you need waterproof data storage, you can use optical discs (CD, DVD, Blu-ray discs).

@IntrusionCM The 2020 news: https://techradar.com/uk/news/...

@Nanos Luckily, you have upgradable memory slots.

Nowadays, more and more computers have soldered RAM. Another thing that needs to be outlawed.

@joewilliams007 Unfortunately, those third-party YouTube apps with background playback (in the past: FREEDi, MixerBox) also stop working some day, defeating the benefit.

They also lack tabbed browsing and a browsing history.

@aviophile And those need recharging.

@electrineer "IMO something that long should already hang from a cable. It's just designed to break."

Ever seen external M.2 USB drives?

Even longer and still cableless.

@electrineer It actually has an OTG ending too, and a switch in the middle to move out or retract the connectors for protection during transportation. No more covers that can get lost are needed.

@netikras No, still works thanfully. But a few more centimetres to the right would be all needed to break it.

@IntrusionCM Big talk, no action. There were such news in early 2020, remember?

Politicians make big promises and forget them instead of acting on them. Nothing out of the ordinary.

People wanted non-replaceable batteries outlawed as early as 2012, and what happened in a decade? You guessed it. Nothing.

https://androidforums.com/threads/...

If the politicians are serious about this, they need to declare non-replaceable batteries illegal before the next morning. No more of the usual procrastination and slothiness.

@IntrusionCM

"If you CHOOSE to buy a slim product, it's your CHOICE."

As long as it remains what you said, a choice, it is alright. However, then it might become no longer a choice, as has happened to replaceable batteries in mobile phones being eliminated. This situation is referred to as a slippery slope.

There is an competitive incentive for mobile phone manufacturers to make batteries non-replaceable. If this was illegal, that competitive disadvantage would be eliminated and smartphones could have replaceable batteries again.

@joewilliams007 Actually, many people were forced to stick to an earlier version of Kiwi Browser for Android because YouTube background playback, an essential feature for productivity, was removed at some point.

If those people were to update their browser, they would sacrifice this essential productivity feature.

@myss Supporting Internet Explorer would be excessive, however, supporting a post-2015 (ECMAscript 6) browser should be no big deal.

Funnily enough, Windows Explorer's integrated FTP implementation sometimes only reads the date and not the time of files, but FileZilla solves this problem anyway and retaining the date and time attribute can be enabled in FileZilla using CTRL+U. It should have been enabled by default, but that's a different topic.

I now realize what luxury we had in 2009, back when mass storage was an option for smartphone file transfer, before it was locked away by our "benevolent" smartphone and operating system vendors.

I imagine MTP is the only allowed method of transferring files in hell.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

MTP is one of the darkest stains in the history of computer file management. It belongs to the same place in history as the Galaxy Note 7 and the Fiat Multipla.

If MTP was created by 13-year-old computer science students as a school project, it might have been somewhat respectible. But it was created by well-paid programmers from a billion-dollar corporation.

To manage files using MTP is to walk on eggshells.

Comparing Miserable Transfer Protocol to mass storage and FTP is like comparing a chinese scrapyard car to a German luxury vehicle. On mass storage and FTP, files' date and time stamps are always listed correctly and retained when transfering either way, files are actually moved within the device instead of copy-deleted, large directories with thousands of files load within few seconds compared to minutes on MTP (if it even reaches the end without hanging up in midst of the process); and mass storage allows keeping the date and time attribute when adding files.

Here is even a report of the entire internal storage disappearing:

https://reddit.com/r/Android/...

Internal storage = no data recovery software available due to lack of block-level access. I wonder how many terabytes of data MTP bugs have destroyed.

Isn't Microsoft who designed MTP for their Zune player? Then how come their file manager has a worse and less stable implementation of it than Linux file managers such as Nemo? You'd think the creator's implementation is the most stable and functional, but no. That's especially embarrassing regarding that Microsoft is a billion-dollar corporation with paid employees whereas Linux software such as Nemo file manager is largely developed by volunteers for fun. Granted, Microsoft implemented UDF packet writing (live file system) on optical discs very well starting with Windows Vista.

When trying to copy a large folder with several thousand files, Windows just indicates "calculating time to copy files" for several minutes. This apparently is intended to excuse the time it needs to get a list of paths for transfering. The Nemo file manager from Linux at least shows how many files it has counted so far. This is a huge benefit, since it lets the user know whether it is doing anything at all, or, as often happens on MTP, is frozen and not doing anything.

It almost seems like MTP was designed with the goal to be as annoying (to avoid using an s-word) and buggy as anyhow possible. It almost seems like there was a competition to design a transfer protocol that fails as hard as imaginable.

By the way, while a MTP file transfer is in progress, guess what else you can do. Nothing! That's because MTP lacks parallelism, the ability to do more than one task in background. So you would like to browse photos on your phone while files are being transferred? Bad luck! MTP can't do that! Additionally, MTP lacks random access, meaning if you want to watch that 3 GB 4K 2160p video file, tough luck. The file manager will have to copy it to your computer first so it can read the MOOV atom at the end of the file, which is necessary for playback on "program stream" video files. If your operating system runs on SSD, that's 3 GB of weardown just so you can play a video once. Technically, sequential reading could be possible without downloading the whole file, but many files require random access.

Did I mention yet that MTP sometimes disconnects or freezes up during file transfers?

Sometimes, I get a "data supplied is of wrong type". Other reports of this error:

* https://forums.androidcentral.com/s...

* https://bleepingcomputer.com/forums...

Sometimes, instead of files, blank placeholders with a HDD icon with a Windows logo appear! ( https://imgur.com/a/iosQaL5 ).

When double-clicking two folders in quick succession, it might end up showing the second folder as path but show the contents from the first folder! I hope I don't need to clarify how lunatic this is.

@electrineer Perhaps it would not have survived without being bought off by a large corporation. It had funding issues prior to acquisition.

But indeed, as history shows, economic incentives are prioritized over users' interests. Google does not just discontinue many services, but also many features within their services.

Not as good as eXerCEO ;-)