complaining about my phone
i just got a new phone a few weeks ago. it's a samsung galaxy s25 ultra, the current top of the line flagship samsung phone. i spent actual months trying to figure out what kind of phone i wanted to get while my old phone (a galaxy note 9, from 2018) slowly died until eventually it started boot looping when i took it too far outside of network signal.
my decision to get this specific phone was honestly just a big "fucking WHATEVER!!!" after weeks of deliberation because frankly i didn't want a new phone. truly the only deciding factor in this phone vs another phone is the idea that, if i get the newest one, i might be able to use it for another 7 or so years before i have to get another one.
what i really wanted, and what i absolutely cannot find anywhere, is a phone i can just fucking put linux on. i'm sick of having to be inside a samsung and google ecosystem, i'm certainly never going to enter the apple ecosystem. on my last phone it was a particular source of pure rage for me that my carrier had an app on the phone by which they could force install a bunch of shitty adware games without even notifying me. i also had virtually no ability to remove any facebook features that were present -- i could "disable" the facebook apps, but every system update they'd be mysteriously re-enabled.
now, on my new phone, the thing i can't remove is gemini. i'm considerably less anti-AI than a lot of my friends. i used to have fun playing around with the janky shitty image generation tools pre dall-e, i use chatgpt for various things on a near-daily basis, etc. i don't find the environmental arguments to be particularly convincing (cutting out beef and dairy from your diet has a bigger environmental impact than avoiding AI). i think a lot of the anti-AI stuff comes across as moral panic, and a lot of the pro-AI stuff comes across as vaporware hype, and an economic bubble. the thing about gemini features being integrated into my phone is that they're fucking annoying and they're not even useful. every built in tool in my phone now has a fuckin dumb little shiny sparkle button or an undismissable notification (evil) cluttering up the UI that i press on accident looking for other things. and the tools themselves serve no purpose because they're so heavily guardrailed as to be pointless. the text tools refuse to iterate on any text i have selected because they will not allow anything resembling a negative emotion, or like, the idea of hypothetical or metaphorical harm. the stupid emoji/sticker generator is the same thing and will only produce results if you're asking for happy smiling sparkle unicorns. (and needless to say, the results you do get are always going to be soulless and 10000x worse than a shitty notes app doodle) but i cannot make any of this shit go away or stop begging me to click on it. today, i took a cute picture of my cat laying on the bed, with my messy end table in the background. i thought, i know, i'll use the gemini editing tool to delete my messy end table out of the photo! so i tried it, and i didn't like the way the result ended up looking, but whatever. i went to post it on twitter and then i immediately deleted it because it added a watermark at the bottom that said "AI-Generated Content" and i didn't want people to think i was making AI-generated photos of my own fucking cat.
in general i think it is very rare that anyone else in the world has the same complaints about technology experiences and UI as i do so i do not think this is ever going to stop being annoying or that i will ever have a phone i don't totally hate ever again.
basically my dream is this: a phone i can install KDE plasma on. i want to use it to browse the internet, access my streaming services especially my selfhosted ones, text my friends, take photos, use notes, and like that's about it. play card games maybe. there is apparently no easy way to get this. if i were going to buy a second phone to try to create this experience with i would only want to pay like $200 for it and the flashable phone that only costs $200 doesn't exist.
honestly i guess i just do not want to keep having to buy new devices but that is exactly the entire point of the current tech user experience. they want you to constantly have to buy a new one.