And why should you need permission to do this?
Xiaomi historically had a problem with resellers installing malware in custom ROM on their phones, so they started putting up more and more obstacles to unlocking the bootloader over time, while still providing an avenue for legitimate customers to unlock.
I don’t know what spurred the current action though.
It’s worse than that. All this China big brother talk is just a variant of xenophobia. It’s a talking point they’ve been trained to slam their foreign “enemies” about without ever thinking about it at all of what the actual harm they’re concerned about would look like.
This is such a eyerolling take based on stereotypes.
Before America banned Huawei, Huawei was widely recognized as having the best camera system on a phone. Under your worldview they can’t invent anything themselves and somehow borrowed their way into being the best.
It’s addressed in the article. It’ll just share the credentials from your phone.
Name one modern phone >= the size of the legendary Sony Z Ultra.
Really annoys me how Android is always closing my apps in the background like how even I switch back to the browser it has to reload the whole page. More RAM sounds good to me!
Turns out it costs more to make things in Europe.
It seems useless if I was forced to unlock my phone by someone violent, like the police.
My life seems a great deal more boring and uneventful than most people around these parts.
Good article, but it doesn’t support your thesis that the sanctions are about China hacking at all. The idea they’ve managed to achieve this through hacking to steal technology is completely non-existent in the article.
Unsolicited notification spam ads is in pretty poor taste for a major brand. Doesn’t seem wrong to me to infer their sales department is getting desperate if they’re resorting to that.
Amazon is making over Alexa the same way Google is doing to Assistant.
This probably means a new lease on life for all of these types of products. Version 1.0 didn’t make money, but generative AI is the new hotness, so they’re getting a whole new chance to prove themselves.
One thing that drive me nuts on Pixels is how uncustomizable the launcher is. Can’t even change basic things like the grid size or whether I want Google widgets locked permanently on the homescreen. Then, if you replace the launcher, gesture navigation gets all janky.
I mean, their message is a little weird, but so is the scaremongering that’s been going on against them ever since they changed ownership. From comments on the Reddit post, Branch is actually integrated into Google apps, Samsung Launcher, and a ton of other stuff and nobody really blinks an eye at that.
There literally is no evidence they do anything unseemly with peoples’ data, yet the scaremongering persists, including a lot right here in this thread. What exactly are they supposed to say other than to emphasize this fact? Anyone who would distrust them based on this post was already definitely inclined to distrust them.
It blows my mind that half a year after the public launch of ChatGPT that Google Assistant seems to be getting dumber instead of smarter and Bard is a completely different silo’d product still.
My Google Assistant a while ago picked up a problem. I use it to set timers all the time. Suddenly, one day it wouldn’t understand “set a timer for 3:30” anymore and I’d have to say “3:30 pm”. Then its dementia progressed and it was setting timers for the next day unless I specified “today at 3:30 pm”. Then the day after that lucidity returned and it regained the ability to do the basic “set a timer for 3:30”. It doesn’t feel like it actually understands language at all. I appreciate that they’re making updates, but I wish they were updates for the better.
The first company that will sell me a smart speaker that works like ChatGPT/Bing/Bard/etc. and I throw my Nest speakers in the garbage and switch brands.
So her biggest issue is that the tablet wasn’t on the dock when it needed to be used. Because she took it and wanted to use it for herself. Having a smart home hub means you can’t take it away and use it to surf the web.
Is this to downplay the pain points she encountered? Because reading it another way it seems like a total indictment of the concept behind merging a tablet with a smart hub.
This send like the relevant bit: