letank wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 10:51 am
Thank you for all your suggestions. Wally World has a bunch of options, so are the other wholesale platforms.
Yes I have a simple phone for overseas trip, it is quite nice to slip the clamshell in one's pocket.
I was an apple enthusiast from the early days, ca. 1985, but when the iphone2 could not be updated, rendering it a useless brick... it was time to move away.
This is the major issues with any platform, the upgrades will only be available for 3 years... what a waste or what a scam... Imagine buying a vehicle and after 3 years you may not get parts to repair it... I'll pass on the movement Right to Repair for one's purchase, being a phone or a combine. I guess this is why I still drive a FSJ, it can be upgraded without dealer interface...
Trolling the web, I discovered that the charging port and the microphone are part of the same "card", $10 for the card, description is on line either a video or a detailed series of picts
Apple has been pretty solid on 5 years of OS updates for quite some time now. iOS 14 (latest version) supports all the way back to the iPhone 6s that came out in 2015, and it actually still runs pretty good on it. But in the early days (like with the iPhone 3G) the hardware was changing so fast that the OS could not be made compatible for as long as it can be now.
Most androids might give you a years worth of updates, Samsung is one of the few that gives 3 years, but that's only going forward with newer devices. Unless you are ok with deploying Android base images to your device, then you can eek out more.
And yes, newer iPhones (7 and newer) do not have an old style Headphone port. Way back when I got my 7 I thought this would annoy me, but only once was it ever an issue. The phone comes with the little adapter that I just keep plugged into my head phones. Or you can always use bluetooth heaphones.
Samsung also no longer has headphone jacks, and other phones are doing the same. The main drivers for this are dust and water resistance, as well as device thickness.