I’ve been very stressed lately and have been doing some window shopping to calm down. I’m interested in gadgets, but a lot of things can just be replaced with apps. I realize a phone won’t replace very large appliances like refrigerators or washing machines so I’m trying to scope my question to portable devices. So what are some portable devices or gadgets that their specialization hasn’t been replaced by smart phone apps? Extra points if they’re super useful and reliable.
Security cameras. Smart sensors. Basically anything you can make based on a $2 ESP32.
I can’t vape weed with my phone yet.
Not with that attitude
Would you believe me if I said there is even a phone vape now?
I would need to see it to believe it.
Electric Toothbrush. Keeping up with Dental Hygiene is important too!
Own one. Definitely recommend it and ribbon floss.
Would love to have one, but my neurologist said even slight vibrations in my mouth can fuck with my epilepsy. That means a migraine because my medicine prevents seizures. Going to the dentist is an affair that wrecks me for the whole day.
It’s OK. My dentist thinks electric toothbrushes are too harsh on your teeth and shames anyone who even brings up the subject. So at least 1 dentist thinks it’s junk. He prefers soft bristles that you softly glide across your teeth by hand.
Soft bristles are pretty much the only thing anyone should use, regardless of whether or not it’s electric. Hard bristles are too harsh on your gums.
Hi-fi audio recorders with builtin microphones. As a bass player, I deeply resent phone mics and speakers.
Phones suck for anything audio related in general.
They’ve been bad for calling people in my experience for years.
My Ipod classic can run laps around my phone in terms of audio playback and its a recentish flagship.
also, a good music player is nice! not having the hassle of using a phone while driving or doing literally anything else is nice for listening to music and the like.
You underestimate my ability to find and download new music to my player. It’s not that I can’t, it’s just that I forget to.
i feel this, i totally forget to update my libraries haha
Paper and pencil: an analog data storage medium immune to power outages, data costs, EMPs, and remote surveillance.
bro, they can litterally listen to your pencil strokes through the walls man.
Most people don’t need to worry about the NSA listening to them write down stuff.
Nice try fbi guy
What about the CIA though?
They can listen to your thoughts man
Even if I pull out all my teeth?
Checkmate CIA!
Radiation detectors. Such as the Radiacode or the Open Gamma Detector.
Binoculars are quite portable, very useful, and phones don’t do a good job at zooming in like that.
Smart watches integrate with phones but the phones by themselves are not so good at measuring the heart rate and other parameters directly.
Mini projectors. UV flashlights. Tools in general… There is so much actually. What type of gadgets are you looking for?
https://www.wired.com/2012/05/softbank-unveils-worlds-first-phone-with-radiation-detection/
Your other points are valid.
Ooh, cool! 😁 That detector seems to be working only in “Geiger mode”, which means that it can count the number of X-rays/Gamma particles but it does not estimate their energy. So, the dedicated devices are still better in that they allow you to identify the source of the radiation by measuring the counts and the energy distribution simultaneously.
It probably would not be too difficult to build the open gamma detector into something like a pinephone. I don’t think that has been done yet.
There were a couple projector phones. Samsung Galaxy Beam 1 & 2
Samsung S2x Ultra has 10x optical zoom. That’s pretty much a <100€ binocular right there.
My experience with phone zoom has been underwhelming so far, but I would like to check out the Samsung S2x’s 10x zoom when I have the chance!
Still, I really like using binoculars because they transport me next to what I am looking at and do so in very high definition. I do have >100€ binoculars though, colors look very nice through them. I think it will be difficult to replicate via a screen.
Well the phone is a bit of a “jack of trades master of none”. You pretty much always will have a better time with a dedicated device, but the fact that the phone is always in your pocket is just so damn convenient.
Not comparable for viewing purposes, don’t bother. But it’s good for capturing a memory of it.
The light isn’t enough, there’s ai artefacts, lower refresh rate makes it obvious the movements aren’t real time. Not a monocular replacement.
Can phones “detect” really high radiation on the camera if it’s high enough or is that film only?
Cleverly, even low levels can be detected. I love how creative early smartphone developers could be.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rdklein.radioactivity
What do you mean? Early apps was all stuff like this that nobody used. Nowadays apps are useful fintech services and photo filter apps that cost less than a coffee per month and fun free games that everyone can play, isn’t that much better?
/s
Yes. The camera pixels generate a current in response to light. You can add some filters to block certain wavelengths of light (like UV) from getting to the camera sensor, and tune the pixels so that they respond more to to specific colors. But X-rays and gamma rays can just pass through the filter. Often they will pass through sensor as well, but, in the cases that they do get absorbed by the sensor, they can also produce a current that to the camera’s readout electronics looks like other light would.
The gamma detectors I mentioned are very very sensitive. They respond to single X-ray/Gamma ray particles. These detectors can count how many individual particles collide with a small crystal cube every second. These crystals are special in that they produce a very tiny flash of light when an X-ray or gamma particle collides with them. As an added bonus, these sensors can directly measure the energy of the particles by measuring the strength of the flash, and from this information they can construct not only the total counts but also a spectrum. With this extreme sensitivity these detectors can measure small quantities of radiation that come from space, from rocks, and from other materials.
I looked for a video of a phone going through an X-ray machine, and found these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8iSoPhtY3s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1YaroH6lHA
The white specks that you can see near second 25 (first video) and second 34 (second video) could be a result of the X-rays. I am not sure, but it seems reasonable to me. On contrast, when I put my radiacode through the X-ray machine in the airport the radiacode reacts very strongly and becomes saturated.
I believe they can.
Honestly most of the non digital functions of a phone are still inferior to it’s dedicated counterparts, but I would argue that a phone is good enough for 99% of people.
So get a pocket multitool thingy, I always carry one in my bag and it has helped me quite a few time in my life.
Which multi tool? I carry a Benchmade bugout knockoff and a genuine Leatherman skeletool, ifixit Minnow screwdriver set and a generic basic screwdriver with small/large Philips and flathead in my work bag. Oh and a small adjustable wrench… Covers 95% of my work.
Yeah, the issue with multi tools is the same issue with phones; They’re mediocre at a lot of different things. A dedicated multi-bit screwdriver will almost always be better than a multitool. A solid pair of pliers will almost always be better than a multitool. Et cetera, et cetera…
But in a pinch, a multitool is better than nothing. And a multitool is a hell of a lot easier to carry as a “just in case” thing than an entire toolbox of individual tools. As a freelancer I habitually keep a lot of tools in my trunk, but I don’t want to walk all the way out to my car just to tighten one screw. So I also keep a multitool around as a “good enough” solution.
Jeez, nice!
I have this thing from victorinox:
My stuff is pretty basic. I’d carry something like that if I owned one already, over the years I’ve pretty much shed anything I don’t use enough on a regular basis. My whole kit is probably $80, mostly cause of the Leatherman. The bugout is a knockoff from AliExpress and I LOVE it. $15 is a steal for that style/size/design for a pocket knife.
Pagers for Hospitals.
To be clear: Hospitals use pagers because they use a longer (and much lower bandwidth) wavelength, which is affected less by things like thick fire-resistant walls. Hospitals are built like bunkers so that things like fires don’t require the entire building to be evacuated. Pagers can still reliably get signal even in the basement of a hospital, when behind multiple fire-resistant walls and solid concrete floors. Texting has effectively replaced pagers for 99% of the population. But hospitals still use them because reliability is prioritized in the medical world; No hospital wants to lose a patient because a doctor was in the basement and didn’t get a text.
There was a good episode of Planet Money which went into this. I addition to what you said, when doctors would get texts, they were more likely to dismiss the message and not respond immediately which was more dangerous.
Also they don’t mess with radiology and it lets doctors have a way of being contacted that doesn’t give patients their number.
Handheld Radios, some are those “Walkie-Talkies” (I hate that term btw), others are VHF/UHF Ham Radios, or GMRS/FRS, MURS, or Meshtastic (I don’t even know how those meshtastic things work). AFIAK, phones cannot fit those antennas in such a thin build, so they won’t be replaced for a long time, possibly forever. I mean, there is no way to cram such antenna in there. There might be some phones that are also handheld radios, but those are probably so niche, that I’ve never heard of any such thing.
Very useful in like a natural disaster and the cell towers are down. (Or just something like war where the commucation infrastructure is just shut down by the destruction).
Idk about other countries, but in the USA, those walmart/target walkie talkies do not need any license, because they are just FRS radios that use FRS frequencies. AFIAK MURS and Meshtastic also is license free. Ham and GMRS will probably require licenses in many jurisdictions. Some GMRS and FRS frequencies overlap, but GMRS can (legally) use more power, and can swap antennas, which FRS radios cannot (not legally).
Baofeng radios are cheap and its only like $50 or so for a pack of two. They are supposed to be either Ham or GMRS versions, but apparantly I have those “Ham Radios” that can do both which is gonna make the FCC sad 👀
If you have a repeater in your area that your signal can reach, you can talk a long distance throughout your neighborhood.
Both Ham and GMRS require a license in the USA, but GMRS license does not require a test, which Ham license do. GMRS license is literally just a payment for a paper.
Even if you use a radio without a license, most of the time, nothing will happen. The FCC (at least, before 2025) wont care if you talk to your friends using radio without a license. And FCC rules don’t apply during an emergency.
(I mostly learned these things via looking around the internet in the past few months because I was interested in the topic of “off grid” communications. I don’t have any licenses yet 😅)
CB radios are still widely used by truck drivers. Listening to the CB on long trips can sometimes be very entertaining.
This is funny, just yesterday I randomly found phones with built-in VHF/UHF radios on Aliexpress. To be fair, they look super clunky and are very expensive for off-brand Chinese phones ($800+), but they do exist. I wonder who buys them.
Even if you use a radio without a license, most of the time, nothing will happen. The FCC (at least, before 2025) wont care if you talk to your friends using radio without a license.
Caveat to this: If you use these radios on amateur bands without licenses, you should expect legal problems. Operating them on FRS, MURS, GMRS, or PLMRS bands is far less likely to upset anyone.
Non-hams might not be aware, but amateur radio requires you to identify yourself with your callsign at the beginning of every transmission, and every 10 minutes after that. Failure to do so is conspicuous. The other bands mentioned don’t have (or don’t enforce) this identification requirement, so you aren’t immediately outing yourself with every transmission.
I have never used the RFinder but the guy who developed it is local so I’m aware of it. https://rfinder.shop/product/rfinder-m6-dual-band-dmr-4g-lte/ it looks awesome but is more expensive than a really good HF base station so ymmv
I had a Nokia phone (6070?) that had some kind of walkie-talkie-like function, but I never figured out what it did.
Edit: Apparently it’s called Push-to-Talk, and it uses PTT service, whatever that is.
I remember seeing a product demo in Australia by Huawei about a mobile phone with an inbuilt 2way radio marketed for mines.
Shank
The galaxy notes solved that… when thay were around.
Vicegrips. Wirestrippers. A light screwdriver with common bits carried on its handle like a Sidewinder. Rake lockpick. SDR. Elevator key. Punch. File. Multimeter. Multitool with good pliers. Crank radio. Survival guide. Poncho. Silver exposure blanket. Fire starters. Multihammer thing. MREs. Good flashlight. Beater laptop like an old x200. Serial console adapter. Flares. Camping stove. Throw it all in a bugout bag after you learn how to use them.
Best way to calm down would be to look into minimalism.
Wilderness beacon. Rarely any signal out there. Yes you can an arm and a leg for special service though
I know some phones are starting to work with satellite comms,
so these may be replaced by cell phones in the near futureheh, maybe not. See the comment below. At least currently, I have several friends who still have wilderness beacons.They’ll never replace PLB/EPIRBs unless they bake in 406Mhz and 121.5Mhz communication. Satellite devices aren’t reliable enough for SAR. I’d even argue that they won’t replace Satellite Communicators - battery life isn’t good enough and the connection stability isn’t good enough
Laptops! I have a gaming desktop computer and also a gaming laptop that I use if I’m going to be somewhere other than my house for more than a day. Mobile games pail in comparison to what can be played on a decent gaming laptop. I wouldn’t even think about trying to run even a rudimentary 3D game on my 3~ish year old smartphone which has 3-5 seconds of input lag for everything LMAO
Knife/multitool. There is a plethora of options. I enjoy the classic swiss army knife. Scissors, pincet, knife, saw, bottle opener, pliers… You can get it all in one small package.
Headphones/earphones can’t be an app.
Cup/bottle/thermos/liquid container. Drink more water, enjoy hot coffee.
A skill. Spend time getting good at some random non virtual things, penspinning, coin tricks, cardistry, calligraphy…
