Few smartphone features that we Forgot

As smartphones evolve so do the features that come with them. Some of them stick around for a very long time, some trend down due to lack in popularity or usefulness, and some simply fade away. The point is, we’ve seen a lot of smartphone features come and go over the years for a variety of reasons.

Let’s take a look at a handful of smartphone features that have trended down or no longer exist in the smartphone world.

PHYSICAL KEYBOARDS

Back when smartphones used to have a wider array of form factors and capacitive touch screens weren’t as prevalent, physical keyboards on smartphones were extremely popular. We had the popular T-Mobile Sidekick line, Palm Pre and Blackberries dominated the smartphone market. Physical keyboards were everywhere.

Physical keyboards did not go away instantly following the introduction of the capacitive touch screen, but it did play a huge role in why we no longer see many phones with physical keyboards. There were plenty of popular Android phones like the Motorola Droid, the T-Mobile G1/G2, Sprint Epic 4G Touch, and many others that kept this form factor alive, but it wasn’t long until this feature slowly got phased out.

Over time touch screens became more responsive and so did the typing experiences on them, and gradually the arguments in favor of physical keyboards diminished. Manufacturers at the time were also striving to make their phones thinner, and with slimmer phones, there just wasn’t room for physical keyboards anymore.

TRACKBALL/TRACKPADS

Mobile with a track ball

The capacitive touch screen really did change the way we use and interact with our smartphones in many ways and another feature that saw its demise from the rise of the touch screen were trackballs and trackpads. Trackballs made a lot of sense when smartphones didn’t have touch screens and they served as our primary source of navigation.

It was fast, accurate, and much easier than using a d-pad. Many Blackberries like the Bold and Pearl and T-Mobile’s Sidekick line were some of the most popular devices at the time that featured this legacy navigation method.

Just like the physical keyboard, trackballs stuck around for a short while, but its role on touch screen phones became quite different than it was on a non-touchscreen device. Many early Android phones had a capacitive touchscreen and a trackball including the T-Mobile G1 and the very first Nexus phone, the Nexus One.

The touchscreen became our primary source of navigating around the OS and the only time the trackball had a purpose was in situations where our fingers weren’t accurate enough i.e. positioning a cursor within a block of text.

The trackball eventually went away in favor of trackpads due to its lower rate of failure, and we saw many HTC made Android phones carry this feature, including the Legend and Droid Incredible. Blackberry adopted this change as well, but at this time Blackberries were still mostly non-touch devices so it still made sense to have them.

On Android phones or any touchscreen device really, they just lost their purpose. Using our fingers became the new and fast way of getting around our phones and eventually, software made acts that required more accuracy, like copying and pasting or repositioning a cursor, a lot easier to do with our fingers, ultimately making the trackball/trackpad irrelevant and unnecessary.

REMOVABLE BATTERIES

Removable batteries have more or less gone the way of the dinosaurs. Samsung and more particularly LG were two the biggest companies that stuck with removable batteries for a very long time, but the move to unibody designs was the trend that put an end to removable batteries. Unless you’re looking at an extremely cheap budget smartphone you’d be hard-pressed to find removable batteries on the current crop of smartphones.

Water and dust resistance is another trend that ultimately killed the removable battery. It’s much easier to make a phone water-resistant with a sealed-in design versus a phone with a removable back and battery. Samsung was able to pull this off with the S4 Active and Galaxy S5 but you had to deal with flaps over the ports to keep the water out and there was a much higher chance of failure. Water could seep in much easier which was a big issue with the S4 Active when it came out.

Removable batteries were great due to the fact that you could swap in a fresh battery and instantly have a fully charged phone, but with technological advancements in fast charging and external battery packs being so easily accessible, having a removable battery just no longer seems necessary.

But what do you think? Are there any features on this list that you wish were still a part of smartphones today or had become more popular? Do you miss physical keyboards, IR blasters, and are you sad that the headphone jack is slowly being phased out? Feel free to sound off in the comments below as we’d love to hear your thoughts!

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