Honestly, I still keep all my music on my phone. All MP3s, over 3K of 'em. I don't always have reliable service everywhere I use my phone to play music, and hate subscription models so streaming is out. I'm also immune to forced app updates to streaming apps, since offline music players don't depend on them.
I've never had a music app change into a streaming app, though that might be because I don't use Google's music stuff (Google have always been a "keep it in the cloud" company, so I'd expect nothing else from them).
And sure, I store music on device as well. Lots of places where streaming doesn't work, and it doesn't cost me money to listen.
We had plenty of spectrum for 5G, LTE, and 3G until AT&T and others cried foul at it. They were happily coexisting fine until February of 2022 (and Verizon until January 2023) and I'm still miffed about it. I had great device that defined me and they literally cut me off despite paying my bill on time for years. That's technically illegal, and no different than if they cut my electricty off because I lived in a home with knob and tube wiring.
You mean they didn't wait until things started to fall over before upgrading? I am not a fan of corporations, but I understand the concept of "planning ahead".
Like it or not, we aren't doing anything different today than we were in 2010. We still use our
phones to play music, chat/message, and do social media.
And people do other things as well. While you don't do streaming, or join videoconferences using mobile data, etc, many others do. More people use the mobile web than in 2010, and it uses more data per page than it did (most of that is crap that's not needed for the end user but makes money for the site or the advertisers, but unless you think the service providers can stop that they still need to provide capacity). Messaging has switched from 160 characters via a service channel in the network to data usage with images, voice and video clips. And voice is no longer distinct from data, voice calls use the data channel as well. Heck, in 2010 smartphones were still far from universal, so there are also simply more of them out there.
Like it or not, bandwidth requirements have increased in the last decade, even if your usage hasn't changed much.
Personally the consipiracy theorist in me thinks that since these are mega-corporations we're dealing with here, they want to maximize $$$ any way they can, and if folks aren't buying as many phones now than they did years ago because well, phones today are boring and aren't really upgrades (including many being nothing but feature removals that many covet, such as headphone jacks and removable batteries) the only way they could get those few people on board is to force them to upgrade against their will, gambling on them being gullible enough to fall for this whole 'we need 5G and spectrum is limited' nonsense.
Thank you for calling me gullible, but I am quite certain the actual facts are on my side there.
And actually you do have a chance to get removable batteries back, though only due to a recent EU rule which will mandate this from 2027 (delay being to give manufacturers time to adapt designs - seems over-generous to me, but they aren't immune to commercial lobbying). Of course that's only in the EU, but it's unlikely that the manufacturers will want to go to the expense of creating separate EU-only phones with removable batteries, or pull out of the EU market (larger than the US market), so I'd expect them to at least be available in other markets even if they continue selling some sealed devices in those. And that means that people in other markets will finally have a chance to show a preference for user-replaceable batteries, which is something that nobody has at the moment.
However I don't know that that necessarily means a return to phones where you press a catch, pull the back off and swap the battery. If the motivation is extending device life and increasing recycling of batteries then any design where the user could replace the battery without special tools or removing glue would be sufficient ("right to repair" seems to mean in practice "the manufacturer must be willing to sell you a proprietary kit which those who are brave enough can use", so this would still be a considerable improvement). So in practice it might mean that the battery is still a soft pack of the sort that are used internally and that a small screwdriver is needed to replace it, rather than a (lower capacity) rigid package that you pressed a catch, pulled the back off and swapped when your battery was running low. We will have to see what the manufacturers do. But phones will still have ingress protection, because we had that with removable backs before sealed units became the thing, just as headphone jacks coexisted fine with ingress protection (and still do in the Sony Xperia 1, 5 and 10 ranges and the Asus Zenphones) even if a number of review sites happily repeated the story that IP ratings were a reason both of these were removed.
Unfortunately I don't think there's any chance of phones with keyboards like the topic of this thread coming back: I don't think anyone has been making that design since about 2012 (HTC and Motorola also tried this, but it didn't catch on).
The reason that matters is that the USA has been turning off 2G and 3G networks, and that's all that that phone supports, so that's my guess as to why the "data function" has stopped working (I'm actually surprised that voice still works). Or in other words, yes, what you read is true. And if that is the cause there is nothing you can do about it: the phone's hardware doesn't support 4G or 5G, and no software fiddling can change that.
