“I didn’t do anything to deserve this. The phone sat on my desk while I wrote about it, and I would occasionally stop to poke the screen, take a screenshot, or open and close it. It was never dropped or exposed to a significant amount of grit, nor had it gone through the years of normal wear and tear that phones are expected to survive. This was the lightest possible usage of a phone, and it still broke.”
This can happen to any phone of course — there are numerous threads on reddit of faulty S23 phones that are only days old, and of course the first Galaxy fold phones were problematic — but still. Rough start!
My single tablet use case is ebooks. I despise the ugly “e-ink” readers and love the simplicity of a cheap tablet. It’s really the only way to read in any situation because reading from even a small laptop is inconvenient in the places I read in.
Of course, my smartphone use case isn’t that big – emergency calls/texts, typing out grocery lists, and portable storage. I have a simple talk/text plan, no mobile data. Never understood the need for one. In an absolute need, I can seek out somewhere with wifi and use that, but I don’t really even do that. Just never been a smartphone guy. Wish payphones and pagers were still around so I could ditch mobile phones completely.
Computers are still so far ahead of any mobile device in usability and convenience that it’s not worth using mobile devices casually.
Dang, you’ve got eyes of steel. I could never read books on an LED screen - the eyestrain is just too much. E-ink doesn’t have that issue.
I don’t get that, really. I get eyestrain from e-ink. It’s just so hard to read because of the way it looks. Reading on a tablet is just like anything else. Also, you should know that using a tablet isn’t like reading a piece of paper – it emits light, rather than absorbing it. Dark mode is your friend. I think that’s people’s problems trying to read on a tablet, they don’t use dark mode and end up staring into a bright light for hours on end.
Dark mode should be the natural, default state on all computers, tablets, smartphones, etc. You’re goinjg to ruin your eyes staring into a white screen.
I do already use dark mode (Dark Reader ftw) but for me, any emissive display seems to cause eyestrain over a long enough period. I rarely use the backlight on my e-ink reader, so it reads like crisp print on paper.
Maybe you were using really low-res/first gen e-ink? Or perhaps we’re just built different :p
Nah, I think we’re just built differently. Well, I’m built differently, with spare, broken, defective parts. Such is my life. Even modern e-ink readers give me eyestrain.
Honestly, I’m jealous. Being a programmer means I spend a lot of time staring at LED displays whether I like it or not 🙃