Wild popularity? BlackBerry had the entire physical keyboard mobile market to itself and still failed catastrophically. Its only successful period was prior to the existence of the iPhone. As soon as that was on the market, with its touchscreen keyboard, BlackBerry sank like a brick. What does that say about the popularity of the physical keyboard? Its last release was nearly 8 years ago at this point - it’s a dead, irrelevant brand and its major selling point, the physical keyboard, is an extreme niche in today’s market.

They’re the kinds of people who could never even conceive of the possibility that they are not completely virtuous ("they’ as in themselves, not POC. I’m not claiming some reverse racism BS).

I cannot imagine them being called racist and them not feeling angry at the accusation. I cannot imagine them admitting to fault.

You could say the exact same for the major parties, or any group of people beyond loud and proud racists like neo-Nazis and white supremacists. This is literally how everyone thinks. Even Pauline Hanson - arguably the most racist politician in modern Australian politics - gets extremely offended when people use that word to describe her. You seem to hold the mistaken belief that people closer to the political centre are somehow less virtuous or less concerned with being “good” people, but that’s an assessment of society that is just fundamentally wrong. They don’t look at The Greens or anyone else further to the left and think “we don’t try to be as perfect as those guys, we accept our moral flaws” - they think their position of relative pragmatism and compromise IS the morally superior position.

DeX was released a pretty long time ago. My Galaxy Note 9 from 2018 could run it, I’m sure many modern phones are equally capable of running a desktop mode.

The start of something good!

(Until Google kills it.)

Yes, and landline handsets with buttons existed at the same time as rotary dials…what’s your point?

I don’t think they are “so bad”, it’s really just the big American blockbuster market that has declined significantly. It seems to be a common occurrence across all sorts of mediums that people confuse a decline in the quality of the mass market stuff with a decline in the medium as a whole. Additionally, there’s always a bias that occurs with these comparisons because people are often comparing the slop from a brief period of recent history with the greatest hits from the entirety of recorded human history.

It doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of weight behind those claims, but I’m sure Labor and the right wing media will have a field day with it nonetheless. Kinda funny how quickly hopes of a closer Labor/Greens relationship in this term have been derailed. Albanese really seems to hate The Greens and when he’s not punching down himself he seems to be encouraging others to do it on his behalf. No doubt he has been egging Cox on behind the scenes.

But why have the Government cut ABC funding?

The current Labor government hasn’t, it actually proposed a funding increase late last year as well as plans to increase the funding terms to 5 years (to reduce the frequency of cuts). The cuts referred to in the piece by The Guardian are cuts to particular areas as the ABC shuffles its limited budget around, not new government cuts.

Seems like it clears the airwaves for right wing propagandists to fill.

Yes, that was the point of all those Coalition cuts. Reduce competition, reduce media scrutiny, reduce the level of accurate information available to the public.

I do wonder how many people are still watching that show now, though. Politics is so divisive today, people really do no not like listening to anyone other than “their side”. Politicians also seem less willing to engage with the mainstream media and outside of their own curated interviews. There is nothing stopping them from running the show without politicians, but they’ve always made up at least 2/5 guests on a standard panel so it would be a big shift. Back in the day, the live Twitter watchalong where they’d broadcast your tweets was also a big selling point of the show (one that The Chaser enjoyed spoofing) but social media is also becoming increasingly fragmented and this kind of thing no longer works like it used to (I believe they dropped it years ago anyway).

Here’s the Four Corners report mentioned in the article.

I had no idea there was a body double in all of those seasons, his acting and the face technology was so good. I just assumed they were stitching together two separate performances of Jordan as each brother.

No, but I will die from cringe.

You could say that for any piece of old and irrelevant technology. I’m sure people thought rotary dial telephones were amazing too before something better came along.

Additionally, Google has already been targeted for its monopolising behaviour in the advertising space. It probably doesn’t want to add fuel to the fire by completely locking down its mobile ecosystem.

There was also torrentgalaxy.mx when the site was alive.

You can install F-Droid and any open source Android app.

I think the general idea of these phones has legs but the addition of a physical keyboard on the Minimal Phone puts it into an extreme niche. It feels more like a passion project designed specifically for the use of the company founder than something tailored to the market, and is stuck between the practicality of the smaller Mudita Kompakt and the performance of the Bigme HiBreak Pro. If the Minimal Company makes a Minimal Phone 2 I’ll be interested to see how different the design is.

Since you’re an existing Samsung user who is concerned about weight, what do you think about the new S25 Edge? Is a substantially thinner phone something that interests you?

Yes, Proton VPN is a better option if you require that feature.