And for how expensive portable consoles can be, I’m not calling anything a “steam deck killer” until I’m also confident it can be repaired and upgraded for years after I buy it.

The situation has been getting MUCH better. The thing a lot of these articles overlook is just the strange structural difference between Android and iOS. We still seem to be primed to look for the big OTA, that’s “THE Update”, but increasingly more of the bug fixes, security patching, and feature refinement are being delivered by individual app updates and Google Play system updates. I’m OK if the OTAs are a bit more sporadic if I see work from the manufacturer and from Google to push better code throughout the year. I’d rather not wait for a big OTA, when a small component needs to be updated. The situation for Android updates has gotten a LOT better.

We care so much about our users’ privacy and security, we make sure their messages fall back to SMS when chatting with non-iphones. We COULD have dictated the future of messaging in North America, and demanded standards that would have benefited us, but we know we make more money by letting out customers bully the green bubbles.

I worry mediatek might have made the jump one gen too early.

Keeping old tech out of landfills is the right way!

It is 😊

It’s a double edged sword. DO we want Android to be more like Windows? That’s the only way you won’t have OEMs making their own unique hierarchy of menus in settings. It’s all a part of a “familiarity” strategy. Get someone used to the way one phone is organized, then they will complain that another phone isn’t “intuitive”. Either we teach people to lean on search, or we ask for Google to take over more of the “unification” of Android.

I get that some people are annoyed when different phones have settings in slightly different menus, but we should just be teaching people to rely on search in settings rather than memorizing where each phone puts individual settings.

This dimensity looks really interesting. Benchmark scores should be high, but I’m concerned about sustained performance.

I stopped paying for extra drive space, so this is a feature that would eat up a ton of space. I probably won’t be using it much…

I’m back to a full computer again too, and if you don’t have a laptop handy, the new little mini PCs are surprisingly affordable too. If you don’t want to build a raspberry pi.

A lot of techies don’t seem to understand just how much Sony is pushing the camera functionality on XPERIA. It has a headphone jack to monitor audio while recording or to add a mic, just like a Sony Alpha camera. That it can be used for entertainment is the distant third place benefit for including it.

Bendy folding screen tech is REALLY cool. I’m having a lot of fun playing with folding mini-tablets that turn into awkward sandwich phones. It’s pretty nifty stuff. I’m still not convinced this is the next phase for practical consumer daily mobile computing. It’s an interesting niche to be sure, but I think the actual screen tech will have other applications, especially in automotive and industrial capacities.

2021 - Apple collects more types of data than Google https://www.tomsguide.com/news/android-ios-data-collection

2021 - Apple Do Not Track basically a placebo button https://www.techdirt.com/2021/12/10/apples-do-not-track-button-is-privacy-theater/

2022 - Apple tracking you despite your privacy settings https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-when-off-app-store-1849757558

2023 - All the Data Apple Tracks on You (Privacy guides amount to roughly 70,000 words of legalese) https://www.wired.com/story/apple-privacy-data-collection/

2023 - MAC address “filtering” has basically been broken since launch https://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-users-who-dont-want-to-be-tracked-need-apples-ios-17-1-privacy-patch/

Apple still links services like device bricking to the Find My network. If your iphone is stolen, and you don’t want someone to reset it to use or sell, you HAVE to submit your location data to be a part of the tracker network. Disabling that, Apple sends users a scary nag email that their device is no longer protected.

Performance testing is still incredibly important. It’s how we determine improvements from generation to generation, and it’s how we discover there might be issues with products.

Someone with a Snapdragon 865 probably didn’t receive a better phone overall by “upgrading” to an 8 gen 1. Someone with an iPhone 13 might not understand an iPhone 15 doesn’t bring battery improvements, and might throttle more in heavy lifting tasks.

The problem is, all our chips now are in a race to score well for synthetic benchmarks. Those scores rarely help us predict performance in real world apps. The design of the 888 and 8 gen 1 seemed tailored to delivering a big number score in a synth bench, at the expense of battery life and sustained performance. Consumers don’t user their phones by randomly testing a batch of little pieces of apps and math.

We would mock a laptop or desktop or gaming system review if all they had to offer was a pair of synth scores.

The issue is, phones aren’t ONE thing. Performance testing for a communicator phone matters more that we look at performance per watt and battery longevity. Performance testing for a gaming phone should lean harder on a collection of different game types and genres, and looking at sustained game play. A productivity phone needs a healthy balance of CPU and GPU performance to tackle laptop grade compute tasks.

We live in a time where phones are the first computers people reach for, and in many regions the only computers someone might own. We increasingly use them for tasks that required laptops and desktops, and it matters how we evaluate the claims of phone and component manufacturers.

The problem is, we’ve bought into the “average consumer” narrative which only describes the most basic level of use from the broadest swath of users in more affluent developed nations. The next billion Internet users won’t have the luxury of owning multiple computers to do individual tasks. They’ll own a phone. Probably only a phone.

We need more folks who will test devices in a variety of tasks, and will grade more than the performance of one or two games, to help consumers make more informed purchasing decisions. That takes a lot more work, which does not pay well on YouTube.

Running geekbench and antutu is insufficient to educate consumers, and aggregate scores will often misrepresent the actual daily performance aspects those consumers are likely to care about most.

Your glasses are an external monitor and can accept input from an HDMI port with the right cables. There are some adapters that will get an image out of a Pixel to a portable or face monitor, but they’re garbage.

None of the adapters are worth using with a pixel. It’s been the most consistent gripe I have with the Pixel line.

Mastodon link https://androiddev.social/@MishaalRahman/111213109085755687

The Dimensity 9000 and 9200 have both been great performers. If the Snapdragon 8gen3 is fabbed by Samsung, and the next Dimensity is made.by TSMC, we could be in another tough year for qualcomm.

Not just the fab. Google has to get away from Samsung radios too. Even a mediatek radio would be better at present.