My favorite of all the phones I have owned:

Rather Unihertz. They basically have just the unusual phones.

Currently I have Ulefone Armor 24, but I'd want something like Oukitel WP100 Titan. Even larger and crazier.

Look at that 33Ah thing:

Almost brick size now. It's so ridiculous I want it. After all, what I have now isn't far from if, it's just that this is even bigger.

3.6cm (1.4 inch) thick, 877g (1.93lbs) heavy.

But somehow it still can't fit a headphone jack and MicroSD card slot, so that's a no for me.

Except with supposed technological advancement and bigger efficiency it's supposed to become more affordable on a competitive market, yet it doesn't. It just becomes cheaper for the construction companies.

Soviet serial housing was better planned. There were intended green spaces and microdistricts (those didn't turn out very well, it became apparent that they are convenient to small crime).

It's not really "capitalism", it's an oligarchic system where everybody having power feels that it's very good for them. Ask Sergey Brin if he wants to change anything. It's the same in construction and everywhere, because why wouldn't it be - an oligarchization of one sphere of economy leads to the same in others.

At the same time the ideas of authority and law in the Soviet space were kinda similar to what your "land of the free" is developing now. Easy to forget that in USSR your boss knew all your history of past employment, and when you'd be leaving could write something so nasty there that you'd never work anything better than janitor after them. Or that a kid living with their family in one small room of a communal apartment in a Khruschev-era serial building could go as guest to a kid living with their family in a three-room apartment in a Stalin-era special building, both given by the state, see and eat something there that they would never at home, and that was the normal degree of inequality in the USSR.

BTW, yeah, I've gotten a taste of mentioning the Soviet elites the justice against whom still hasn't been restored in any way, - so my family lived in a two room apartment in a Stalin-era building (my grand-grandfather was a railways analog of an infantry general, and my grandmother is one of the architects of the Boguchan hydroelectric station), and judging from Wikipedia, Sergey Brin's family lived in a three room apartment in such (it's also there who his parents were). That's about who those immigrants were who could afford to be otkazniks for a few months\years before leaving for the USA. Jackson-Vanik was basically targeted at a small subset of the Soviet elite with Jewish ancestry. Soviet antisemitism was sort of a Soviet version of "first world problems". Again, my grandmother's sister's family also emigrated then.

And in western stereotypical portrayals of "how people live in (ex-)USSR" of late 80s and early 90s they too often show such living places. As if that were normal.

Yet the absolute majority didn't.

So, one of the reasons Putin could do what he did, - the absolute majority saw how people who didn't live too badly in the first place got an opportunity to be "liberated" and play "discount USA", while their own workplaces which would feed them somehow stopped doing that.

It's a very particular feeling of collective injustice when those who benefited most from a system dismantle it and blame it on those who benefited less.

So, getting back to Soviet bloc housing, interpeted as Khruschev-era. It wasn't so bad, considering the green around and the fact that people would move there from actual wooden barracks. And Stalin-era housing wasn't bad at all and still isn't.

There were not "affordable", they were allocated. One could somehow improve the chance of being "given" that via connections.

And if you changed a workplace, it could be taken back. It wasn't yours.

Those phones were really convenient, taking just as much place in your pocket as needed, screen covered from being scratched by keys and other items.

Actually convenient keyboards.

It's just that why make ergonomic, optimized for the task, price-efficient things when a piece of useless crap called iPhone makes you more.

I swear, for market economies to work you need to outlaw advertising.

flip phones were great as phones, but terrible as pdas. iPhone combined the two in a non-chunky way (competitors? Palm Treo? Windows Mobile phones?)

Blame minimum parking requirements. An 800 ft^2^ 2-bedroom apartment is really 1200 ft^2^, when the zoning code requires one parking space per bedroom.

dude admits that it took him a week of suffering to go to the tv setting. no wonder tech is no fun for him.

Soviet Bloc Block Housing

Yep, 35 storeys and 400 units of plain beige whatever.

But you're missing the value of the modern mixed-use building. They just finished one nearby and it's insane:

• ground-floor light commercial - a pizza place, a daycare and I think a pet store in there so far
• parking is secure and underground, with a loading bay,
• 2 floors of professional - physios and notaries and some ad-hoc wework space
• 30 floors of apartments
• an entire floor of guest space - airBnB units, essentially - and common play-space.

All these pictures are accurate as I remember from the tour:

The units will look more familiar if you've been to Northern Europe, but a bit bigger. We looked at a 1150sqft 3bd unit with huge triple-pane windows and - 2024 building code - A/C built-in. If you don't count a garage - underground parking - the bigger ones are like small ranchers stacked on one another -- in concrete, so you don't notice you have neighbours.

They're not Bloc blocks; they put a few of these together and they have a small city.

I disagree with both.

They were good enough as PDAs, those keyboards' buttons usually used for navigation are not much different from what's normal under Android now. Fit in one hand, convenient display angle. They were just ergonomically all around better.

iPhones and Android phones I still have anxiety using.

I've got the Armor 21, giant speaker. Almost upgraded this year when the USB port died, but then I remembered the dock based charging that also exists for some unknown reason. Was looking at one of the Thermal options, just because they're kind of neat, not that I really have a use case.

I just love that they take some random idea and make a crazy phone.

I'm 50/50 on this one. On one hand, yes, absolutely. On the other, there's lots more to the design than just its outline. Materials used, touch and feel, hardware switches... I remember holding a very new but compact iPhone a few years back. It felt so fucking good. Sturdy. Those rounded corners were actually a metal band going all around the phone. Not too big, not too small. Not too thin, either.

I also sorely miss the Nokia N9 in this picture - another of these devices you have to actually hold in your hand, or know a little more about, to appreciate the design. I mean the design is cool to even look at, but the shell is also carved out from a hard plastic block. That's beyond sturdy, and feels very good in your hand.

the apt i live in isnt mine either. plus i have to pay to live on it.

Calling the big grey bezels of old TVs stylish is certainly an interesting take.

Smartphone where almost a solved problem til LG stopped making the V20 and made the next one with a sealed battery.

Combine the hardware features of an LG V20 and grapheme is, and you might have a phone actually fucking worth using. I want my DAC and 16 screw disassembly back, fuckers.

Nah, flagship stuff is overpriced. 3x the price for a bit better camera AI and a glass back that breaks after a drop from 10cm.

OK. Suppose so.

I've just been reminded that in the wonderful 70s people felt a bit similarly suppressed and the future dim as compared to 60s as we do now as compared to 00s.

Nothing is new.

What is important, though, is that nothing existing has been given to us be benevolent or harsh, kind or cruel gods. It has all been built by people just like us.

To dream and to work are the most important parts.

It’s funny to think that when everything is made more cheap, the more they cost.

Picked a great time to follow my dream as an industrial designer, only to graduate during COVID and realize that not a single company actually cares to improve the user experience of their products or systems.

Feels like I got a more exclusive and more expensive art degree.

Many years ago Nokia made a couple prototypes of an official Star Trek communicator phone

I would do some seriously regrettable things to have one of these that works with modern networks.