I really wish they would ditch the elongated display ratio. It’s wasted space in landscape 99% of the time, makes the top of the display inaccessible with one hand and the phone unnecessarily large in your pocket. The premium on these could be justified when all the features hit that mark but this is poor human ux.
OpenWRT has a package called mwan3 that in tandem with dnsmasq can allow you set the IP addresses associated with a DNS entry to a particular VPN/country.
Finding a unicorn country where everything works and all traffic is routed is getting increasingly difficult. For example, if a US news site didn’t want to implement GDPR, it geolocates all users outside the US and blocks them, whilst other US services start to require ID/age verification to post content for non-US users so accessing both easily requires switching location.
I suspect we will see more services and technology to be able to deal with this complex cat and mouse game of destinations (websites/services) and origin counties. You can typically get by with a few rules/countries today, but I think that is getting harder.
CDN’s may pose a problem if the DNS resolves to a shared IP address, so IPv6 can help, but many VPN’s do not support it. For some services we may just have to accept there is no easy way to use them unless tools improve (e.g. the browser/application auto-selecting from multiple interfaces)
Replying from an Xperia 5 IV which is my first 21:9 display. I sympathise that they fixed the ratio but made the whole phone larger! They would also need to restore the compact line or make those slight reductions to restore it back to a more friendly size.
They added the double tap home to scroll the top of the screen down so you can reach it, and if they think that’s a necessary feature I’d argue the design is wrong!
Thanks for letting me know about the new ratio, not quite 16:9 but not as bad as 21:9.