With the advancements in technology, particularly AI now, what is the smartest smartphone in your opinion? And I don’t mean in terms of raw power or tech specs, but rather the likes of the OS, UI, or features and functions.
You’re going to have to be more specific or this will turn into a shit thread of Apple vs Samsung vs niche models.
HEADPHONE JACK! /s
Remove that /s and I agree, my current phone doesn’t have one but there are days I wish it did. Same for laptops no longer having a DVD drive.
I was really pissed off about the headphone jack, but now I don’t have one, I honestly don’t miss it.
Got a £20 pair of over ear wireless headphones, the sound quality is indistinguishable from wired, the battery lasts ages and I never get headphone cables caught up on anything anymore.
I like to have spare earbuds just lying around, e.g. some in the car glovebox. With wireless earbuds, even if a buy multiple sets, they would need charging.
And plugging in is far fewer steps then finding the BT connection option is I’m not just using them with one device.
USB C earbuds are a partial fix, but i have sometimes wanted to be charging my phone.
I don’t know about your phone, but my headphones connect with just one button push.
Android 14 is drag down twice, hold finger on Bluetooth button, select from list.
IOS on iPad is drag down from top right, hold finger on network buttons, hold finger on Bluetooth button, select from list.
Windows 11 is just 3 taps.
Do you mean that you have a button on the front screen that connects specifically to one Bluetooth device, or do you get a popup when your headphones are on?
My Bluetooth is always on, so I just click the button on the headphone and I’m connected.
Heavy x to doubt, passable wireless start at 100ish and 20-30 bucks of wired smash them out of the water.
If you seriously think your 20 buck wireless are as good as a decent pair of wired, I have to assume you have never had a set of decent wired headphones. Either that or you have found a very interesting unicorn.
Pshhhhhh, yh maybe if you’re an audiophile or a professional musician, you could tell the difference. I’d put an average pair of wireless against an average pair of wired to the pepsi challenge any day of the week
Nah mate, while there’s plenty of bullshit in the audiophile community, do not underestimate the difference headphones make.
Theres too much the average cheapo headphones get wrong, theres instruments you would never have noticed in songs because the headphones just lacked that resolution. The spatiality of the audio too, its not just on your ears or in your skull. The difference after you try decent headphones is night and day. You quickly run into exponentially diminishing returns, but the first decent headphones you try are a pretty big leap.
Its already a feat to make a good wired at that price point, but theres at least good contenders in this price bracket, you could easily get your forever headphones in this category for wired. Especially if you are not an audiophile
Theres no way you squeeze enough value out of 20 bucks to make a good wireless can. You need good drivers, good build for the headphones (well engineered driver housing and even the earpads and screens above the driver matter a lot), you need to tune them right, you need to have a passable BT receiver, a passable DAC, a passable AMP. On top of it you need to have a battery and probably some circuit to control it all.
For wired cans at least you don’t need to ram all the electronics in, you only have the first three hurdles and some wired cans in this pricerange are shockingly good. While for wireless you start running out of your 20 bucks just assembling the electronics.
A lot of other things in the audiophile world? Yea, I agree, a lot of it is not going to register to most people, especially now that sound output on most devices is good enough where you don’t really need a dedicated audio stack, if your headphones can be driven by the output.
But if you pit me in a pepsi challange vs 20 buck wireless phones even vs my daily drivers (or something else, decent, from the sub 35 buck bracket), let alone my at-home cans (or, basically, anything from the 200 buck wired bucket), ill take that bet any day of the week and even for random people I bet they could easily tell the difference if you just let them blind A/B test on just a few songs even if like short samples.
If you say so
I miss headphone jack so bad.
I have to buy two pairs just to go through the day.
They cost twice as much for same audio quality.
You can’t split audio with someone else.
Price and battery don’t make them most convenient thing to throw in bag, glove compartment to have for a rainy day.
three things battery to keep track of.
You can’t split audio with someone else.
You can. How depends on os. on Samsung it’s in the “media output” menu from the swipe down menu.
Just buy wired cans and either a bluetooth DAC, like a FiiO Btr, or a usbc - 3.5 dongle (the apple one is like 10 bucks and a great quality).
I agree with a headphone jack
True. The smartest phone would probably just be a computer at that point.
I want a phone that folds like a brochure.
The Fairphone probably, as it’d be pretty dumb to unnecessarily use materials from child labor and other inhumane conditions where available.
It follows from this that even smarter is to just keep using the phone you are using instead of upgrading, of course.
I’m not thinking of upgrading, it was just a question. So why not get off that high horse.
With skin that thin, I’m going to assume your username is not in reference to your time spend in the military.
Can’t say I’ve ever had military experience
Entirely depends on the software you install on it?!
I mean the OS and UI don’t give you “smartness”. And I’m not completely sure about the definition. I for example think it’s smart not letting big tech companies steal all your data. So I might choose a different OS and different Apps than somebody else.
Concerning AI: I think ChatGPT runs on all of them. And I think all the assistants also run more or less in the cloud and don’t depend on the exact phone model. However, there are AI things that run on the phone itself. Camera picture enhancement and speech recognition for example.
Manufacturers often advertise with new AI features and unlock them on their newest flagship models. So the answer to your question regarding AI in preinstalled apps is probably: The current most expensive flagship models of Google/Samsung/Apple. One will have a slightly better camera AI, one a better photo editor and one a better AI assistant.
You nailed it, the question is far too vague to be meaningful.
I consider my phone not giving away all my data to be smart.
Someone else might think smart is giving away all your data so AI can make sense of it and improve the convenience.
Any phone that can run GrapheneOS, which is arguably the most secure full-featured (as in: all the functionality you’d expect in a modern smartphone + compatible with popular mobile apps) mobile OS right now.
GrapheneOS is heavily focused on protection against attackers exploiting unknown (0 day) vulnerabilities. They employ techniques such as attack surface reduction (stripping out unnecessary code, disabling insecure components etc); using hardened system components (such as the kernel) that makes it much harder for hackers to exploit; and finally using sandboxing technologies (eg per-website browser sandbox, app sandboxing, media codec sandboxing etc).
A more interesting thing is the sandboxed Google Play Services support, which allows the option to use Google apps (such as the Play Store) in a fully sandboxed environment without granting them any special privileges.
You should check out the full feature set, it’s a LOT more impressive than what I hastily summarised above.
This focus on both privacy and security, with minimal negative impact to the user experience, IMO makes GrapheneOS probably the smartest choice for users concerned about mobile security and therefore, phones which run GrapheneOS (currently only Google Pixel phones) would be the smartest smartphone.
This is like asking “what computer can run Doom the best?”
My dude, they all can.
Right.
It’s absolutely not worth buying the latest and greatest flagships anymore. The experience to the user is almost identical whether you’re spending £1000 or £300.
Personally I’d much rather spend that £700 difference elsewhere and just buy a new phone that’s a couple of generations old.
The one you can keep for at least 5 years and still receive updates. I’m rocking a OnePlus 7 pro with crdroid 10.2 (android 14). No need to change unless it dies or 4g stops performing.
That’s fair, I’m still using the Blackberry Key2, because it has a physical keyboard
Yep. Still rocking my Samsung note 8, works fine for what I need it to do (listen to music/audiobook, make calls, text, and occasionally browse the internet).
Fairphone. Most forward thinking. Perhaps that isn’t smart. Perhaps it is wise.
Even better: it’s intelligent.
My Nokia flip phone from 2001.
something listed on this page: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
A Pixel with grapheneOS? Get full control of your phone.
I’ll have to go for PinePhone.
Quite underpowered, but the available software… It seems it’s like having a Raspberry Pi in your pocket.
But I don’t know what you really mean by “smartest”. It could also mean a phone that oversimplifies thing for its user.
I left that open to interpretation, as I think people have different definitions of smart. I’m in a similar mind that a “smart” phone makes tasks easier for the user. Or as someone mentioned, security and privacy features with Graphene. Just opening up for discussion
particularly AI
The Google Pixel 8 Pro is the only phone I am aware of where local AI capability was mentioned heavily in its marketing. (It’s also the only phone that is produced by a current leading company in the AI space.) I italicized “marketing” because my understanding from what I’ve been reading is that a lot of deeper Gemini AI integration won’t come until the P9P, though it might be possible to be backported to the P8P.
I will admit, I’m quite outdated in terms of the phone industry at the moment, I just assumed with all the different AI tech over lock of few years might have been implemented into smartphones. Every day is a school day!
Most of it happens “in the cloud.” From an article I just saw posted on Lemmy:
The Gemini LLM comes in three model sizes: Nano, Pro, and Ultra. Only the Nano model is small enough to run locally on high-end Android devices like the Pixel 8 Pro and the Galaxy S24 series, whereas the other two models run on Google’s cloud servers.
https://www.androidauthority.com/gemini-nano-ai-article-summaries-3425331/
I don’t know how much I even want from a phone these days. Just seems like things have stagnated in the mobile market for the past few years.
I honestly don’t know what I enjoy more about my current phone compared to the one I had 10 years ago.
They can be used for communication, payments, maps, music, YT and browsing the web. I think I’ll just get a small, cheap phone next time, as it’ll still check all those boxes.
One without stupid bullshit on it.
Money is no object?
It’s not even a phone, it’s a personal assistant service.
