My phone's battery is absolutely fine, although it isn't expensive in the slightest (weird of you to assume it is...) but regularly hits below 30% battery towards the end of the day even without playing games. I could use a battery bank, but I'd still need that external controller which is yet another thing to carry and is awkwardly shaped and wouldn't fit anywhere near as well in a pocket.

Again, weird to think I'm "worried" about anything. I'd just rather reserve my phone's battery for when I need to use it, instead of wasting substantial amounts of it playing games.

In what way? I use them and it works just fine. Plus, I already had one so it cost me nothing to use it with my phone.

Well, I have to either attach it to my phone with a clip of some kind (which makes for sometimes questionable ergonomics or for a very wobbly, insecure setup that makes me fear I'll drop my phone) Or I have to put my phone down on something, which for the sort of thing I use devices like this for just isn't doable.

I've found clip-on ones to be very insecure and wobbly generally. I have an 8bitdo controller with their phone mount clip thing and the setup just feels way too top-heavy like I'm going to drop my phone at any moment.

Besides aren’t you already powering two devices when you carry this thing around with you

Which is exactly the point I'm making. I want to split that battery life up between devices, so my phone is less likely to die on me. I can deal without a handheld game console but if my phone taps out it's more of a problem.

Another unsung nicety related to this one is that you can fully update your system but only start using it once you reboot. Too many times I updated the kernel on Arch only to find everything stopped working until I rebooted, hence why routine updates can just be done automatically with no issues to the user.

ARM boards are just a pain to use right now. There's always some stupid quirk or driver problem and that's if you even manage to find an up to date image for your chosen OS that works (because I can just about guarantee the 'generic ARM' one won't). Feels like every few months someone announces something that'll make all these problems go away yet here we are.

External Bluetooth controllers are always a pain and those clip-on ones are always awful. Plus it's splitting the battery life between two devices, nothing bugs me more than using my phone for everything only to be shocked that the battery dies twice a day.

Peertube is a crazy impressive piece of tech. Just like Lemmy and Mastodon, it needs something to happen to push users over to it (or something like it). YouTube keeps doing stupid things like this, so one day users will be pushed away from it and the creators will have to follow or die.

Yeah pretty much. The privacy invasion of ad companies is terrible for sure, but the whole seeing ads all over the damn place in the first place is also annoying enough that even if they were somehow completely tracker-free I would still block them.

Android 15 beta... so it'll be available on phones, out of the box, without anyone having to build/install a custom, on phones actual normal humans buy in about 2030 then.

Yeah this pretty much. Why would I drive a car? it's a huge waste of money for absolutely no benefit to my life.

I've considered learning/getting my licence just to have it "just in case", that way at least if that once every few years thing comes up where I absolutely need a car and a taxi just won't cut it, I can hire one or something? but it's just kind of not come up yet.

What kind of battery life do you actually get? I can barely scrape a fully day out of my phone right now so anything similar to that is fine by me!

It sounds so weird to call "a few hours of walking" lazy but I completely get what you mean, and I'm all for it!

I assumed they meant the travel walk was probably within that time then they spent the other hours walking around the shops/market stalls etc. Which is pretty standard where I live! We're not a "walkable city" but we get the bus into town and then spend a few hours walking about buying stuff before getting the bus back. Like OP its doable by bike too, both methods work depending how lazy you're feeling and how many shops you want to go in.