With careful reading, you'll find we largely agree. :)

You know you don't have to squeeze them like you want to crush them, right? Most phones today don't weigh in at five kilos, so you can be slightly lighter with your grip.

Indeed. I've got an LG v10 and they've dropped the navigation buttons and airplane mode button, so now I've got a volume up and down as well as a power button.

My previous phone called 911 quite a few times, even when it airplane mode before I figured out that it's impossible to disable the quick call mode. Whoever designed that ought to be fired for incompetence. A phone in airplane mode should not be capable of calling anybody or doing anything wireless related until the phone is taken out of airplane mode.

I remember when my mother got a cellphone nearly 20 years ago. When you locked the keypad, you locked the keypad. You couldn't do anything with it until you unlocked the keypad and that was specifically because they didn't want people butt dialing 911. But, apparently now the lock screen is pretty much completely superfluous as it doesn't actually do anything useful.
That's less of an issue with recent versions of Android as long as you aren't foolish enough to buy a phone without a MicroSD slot. I had to root my Nexus One because I needed to run things from the external card and the OS didn't allow me to do that without rooting.
Yes indeed. And if it remains a problem, LG has numerous phones now that have only 3 buttons located on the back. So, it's rather easy to pick the phone up without hitting any of the buttons. Or even touching them for that matter.

I concur. Bakelite FTW ! ;-p

My phone has suffered fewer problems with gravity trauma than it has with Android updates. Stupid Lollipop bullshit took a perfectly fine phone and turned it into an annoyance generator.

I don't know, but you're obviously luckier than me.

Yeah these are usually the cheaper 100-150€ models. I'd like to have both though, an internal memory of respectable size, and the ability to expand it with an external microSD card.

However, to me it appeared that some new Android versions have made the external SD less and less useful, and it seems it can be used merely for storage, not that much for installing apps and such. But even extra storage is better than nothing. It still irritates me that some of those aforementioned phones have a 32GB external SD memory which is almost empty, and you can't use it more efficiently to free up space on the device.

I'd like to note, i don't want a smart phone, i'll stick with cheaper 'dump' phones... actually i might drop having a phone altogether..

Although i'd love to make my own phone, perhaps use a 6502 processor and program the entire thing myself... That would be fun :) Depending on the audio compression used for compressing/decompressing i'm not sure how much power it would need though.

I personally don't have this problem, as i got used to cloud storage and i find it pretty useful. Having an Google Drive or Dropbox account where you can throw all the stuff you don't use daily, but that you need to be able to consult from time to time, it's great.

I have around 2GB off apps, some 200 MB of photos, and around 3 GB of downloaded stuff, mostly stuff that i got down from Dropbox/Google Drive, and i never got into deleting them from the phone. So, around 6GB ocupied out of 16 available. I don't have SD card and i never felt the need for it, and mostly due to cloud storage. Have around 15 GB of stuff on Dropbox, it's more than enough for me.

Oh, and i got used in keeping just the apps that i'm using. My phone used to freeze a lot, as i got into "install everything" mode for a while, but i got myself cured due to intensive training at "uninstall everything" camp.

I'm kinda curious about this one:
https://nextbit.com/

It seems to solve the space problems that some of you have, but i don't know how reliable it's going to be. I know that i'm disconnecting mobile data and Wi-Fi, especially when i drive around, as it's getting updates as crazy then, and i'm out of battery really fast with them on, so i don't know how a phone like that one will manage this kind of behavior. But seems interesting.

Looks to me like the next evolution in surveillance technology, having a device thats nothing more than a link to giant advertising machine that is the web. Me I am quite happy with copying pictures/music back and forth when things gets full, backing up totally offline on separate HDDs, and having no link to the web except when enabled. As for having stuff on Dropbox and such like, what you actually have is access to stuff on there, until the day when that access is removed for any number of reasons.

Why not base it off something like the Raspberry Pi?

Well, the beauty of it it's that it makes no difference. I basically have my work folders that i have on PC. I update them periodically on Dropbox and Google Drive, so i always have with me all my work files. Documents, some legislature, scanned documents. If they go poof, no worry, i'll get them on other similar service, as cloud storage will always be a thing until something better comes up.

Personally i'm not scared of "online" as i saw many people being, or of "surveillance". It happens that i saw how official surveillance is taking place, and, if the police is interested in you, they will find ways in studying you more closely, even if you are anti-technology, so yea, i don't see why i would worry about stuff like that.