The golden age of mobile phones was 2011 to 2014.
In 2012, the Note 2 brought Air View functionality with the S Pen.
It allowed previewing information such as overflowing text contents and message previews by merely hovering over it!
In 2013, the S4 had the same for fingers. It was fascinating, using self-capacitive touchscreen technology that co-existed with the normal, mutual touch.
The Xperia Sola had it too.
In later 2013, the Galaxy Note 3 combined both S Pen and Finger AirView in one device. The only device to have both.
The S5 had finger Air View only? and the Note 4 only S Pen Air View.
But in 2015, toxic mininalism took over Samsung.
The Galaxy S6 was still a good device with numerous improvements, especially at the camera.
But none of these core Samsung features were available anymore:
- MicroSD (back in 2016)
- Water resistance (back in 2016)
- MHL HDMI
- Replaceable battety
- USB 3.0
- Many manu features (<irony>thanks, Hyun Yeul Lee!</irony>)
- Air View
Also, they sacrificed battery size for crappy slim design. If one wanted that, therewas for that.
Samsung disowned their power users when the Galaxy Note 5 also followed that design trend, instead of being the ultimate supreme power-user device (2013: Galaxy Note 3).
The LG V10 was still there, and it had a marvellous camera user interface with many adjustable parameters and settings during video recording, like real camcorders (e.g. Sony FDR-AXP33, their compact flagship back then).
Then came the LG V20 in 2016. Sadly the last LG V series device with replaceable battery.
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