Oops: Carphone burps up new Google phone details Google executives have been hyping tomorrow’s Android event as the most significant since the platform was first announced in 2008. But there’s little need to tune in for one part of it, thanks to British mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse. Google plans to use the event to take a more prominent role as a phone maker, all …
You really think waiters are writing down credit card numbers and selling them to eastern block crooks? Fraud in the US almost exclusively happens now because card numbers are electronically stolen - something equally likely to happen whether the card is taken away for a moment or never leaves your sight.
They strike me as incredibly boring ...... and when they pumped the price up it was a definite no no.
Be interesting to see if this handset is "special" or just another bland, sub-contracted overpriced unit.
There's a lot of competition now so Google really need to pull something out of the hat here. From the CPW page both models are a bit meh, have massive bezels and look like they've been designed by HTC which isn't great as their phones are, well, average.
Your "incredibly boring" is my "all the features I need with no unnecessary gimmicks".
Horses for courses I guess, though I would be interested to know what you think the Nexus line is missing (apart from the perennial moan about a micro SD slot, which will never happen in Google's own handsets).
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I had Nexus 5. Too bad the power button stopped working after 13 months. And that rubbery finish becomes sticky in the tropics. Many gadgets don't last long here, batteries overheat and die early, soft touch finishes become icky sticky, white plastic turns yellow. So these things get tested for use in tropical climates at all?
These Pixel phones certainly strike me as very dull. They look like an iPhone 4 with the home button missing... What's the deal with the huge top and bottom bezel, those are horrid... A bit of bezel on the sides is preferable to allow for squashy hands (are you listening Samsung Edge - stop it, it's silly!).
And I'm a self confessed Nexus boy too!
Guess I'll be sticking with the Nexus 6 for another year... And hell, why not, it's still a superb phone (QHD Amoled, NFC, Wireless charging, 64gig, surprisingly good camera)... It's big, and I love it (as the actress said to the bishop!). It's got stereo front facing speakers too, and still smaller top/bottom bezels than this new iPixel thing!
As for Nexus (vanilla) phones being boring, that's all down to you... It's Android, you customise the crap out of it! I didn't like the new launcher with it's odd application scrolling, so I've got Nova launcher, and it'll act in any way I want it to.
Now.. well short of some incredible "as yet hidden feature"..Well I'm not getting one now, and that's ignoring whatever the price is.
I'm a fan of Nexus/Pixel, HTC - and 6P last year looked like the perfect phone, but I was still mid-contract.
HTC are making the Nexus again - hurrah! I'll wait for this, it's going to be awesome!
Then I saw the HTC One.. erm where've the boomsound speakers gone? They seem to have blanded it down to their Apple-aping mid-priced models... and now I see they're continuing on with this..
I am sad.
I'm glad Google will never put a SD card in a Google phone. Nobody wants to deal with moving data between slow external storage and fast internal storage. I see too many people wondering why despite having a big SD card, they can't understand why they have no space left...
Yes, Android does support combined storage spanning, but it will slow your phone internal storage to the speed of the external storage INTERFACE (not the card).
Anyone wanting Google to put a SD card in, doesn't understand the problems of doing so, and why it's far better to make phones with big internal storage.
@AC
Not all of us use streaming for music - some of us have data plans that won't tolerate that level of usage.
So - as a boring old fart, I load up an SD Card with lots of music - stuff that I regularly listen to but so much of it that I can have a huge degree of variety. And my tastes are eclectic - it can go from classical to rock to jazz to folk depending on the mood.
An SD Card is perfect for that purpose. And even better, as I upgrade from one phone to another, I take my music with me.
Simples!
Only if they implemented FAT. Google can implement an sd card however they want. Including their own software that you install on your pc to recognise the card.
Personally i use an sd card as the availability of 128gb phone models is close to Zzero when i look for a phone. Buy a 32gb one and pop in an sd card for movies/music/satnav maps andbim good to go.
I thought I'd want a removable battery but I've got used to managing without, although in a year's time if my battery is dying I may have changed my mind.
However a micro sd card is a deal breaker for me. Phones without are those that assume you have ultra-reliable, fast, cheap/unlimited mobile data. Which is just unrealistic.
I have all my music on sd card, occasionally videos. I don't need to pay for it again to some streaming provider. Just let me take it with me.
"However a micro sd card is a deal breaker for me. Phones without are those that assume you have ultra-reliable, fast, cheap/unlimited mobile data. Which is just unrealistic."
Or... you could just connect your phone to a PC by Bluetooth/WiFi/USB and download your music that way. No need for an easy-to-lose micro-SD card.
"Or... you could just connect your phone to a PC by Bluetooth/WiFi/USB and download your music that way. No need for an easy-to-lose micro-SD card."
The point I was making about mobile data was regarding streaming vs. local storage. I know phone storage is getting bigger but it still doesn't compete with SD cards, especially on cost and absolutely not on upgradability.
And as someone else pointed out, it's not a typical use case to remove the SD card unless replacing it with a bigger one. As you said, you could just connect your phone to a PC and add to the SD card that way.
Support, yes. But very very few models do dual active 3G.
Which is the issue as 2G networks start to get turned off.
SIP for 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc lines is a great alternative. But the issue for me is that I can't get a SIP number that has a mobile dialing code (so callers easily know there calling a mobile) and there's no (easy) way to get SMS to/from a SIP client. And until one of the many IM options becomes as ubiquitous as SMS, that's an issue.
Must Have Min spec
Swappable battery
SD Card
Decent camera that is fast rather than a giga-pixel pretend SLR
Headphone socket
Bluetoof, Wifey, GPeas of course and NFC for Android pay
LED Flash cos I use the torch function a lot
Nice to have
FM Radio
Water Dust resistant
Infra-Red Blaster for remote controls
OTT
Big HD screen pretending to be a telly
Stereo speakers pretending to be a Hi-Fi
I would say best option is actually an IR capability in the phone. I have that in my Samsung Galaxy Mini 5, and I'm sre it's not the only model on the market with that feature - there were plenty of IR-based universal remote control apps in the Google app store when I looked, so hardly a niche feature
Swappable battery
Seriously - phone's don't need swappable batteries. The additional interconnects, shape and therefore space and design issues and dust/water ingress that removable batteries entail just doesn't make them economically or design-wise viable. I've had phones with swappable batteries, and gone through the battery swapping and charging rigmarole and external battery packs are easier to use, usually cheaper with better capacity, easier to store and charge and can be easily used with a new phone or even shared with others. A reasonable quality phone battery should easily last 3 years without too much noticeable loss given a decent charging circuit and it's generally accepted that most phones are changed at least this often and usually rather more often.
SD Card
I'd rather have much higher capacity without being price gouged on it. The number of times that I swapped SD cards was minimal and again this inflicts space and design issues on the entire phone design as well as dust/water ingress. I can pick up a 64GB class 10 card for £15 yet the bastard phone manufacturers often feel the need to charge hundreds for this extra capacity. They could even market it them as something like "64GB phone with 256GB media storage capacity", but no...
Decent camera that is fast rather than a giga-pixel pretend SLR
I'm still waiting on the "next gen" vertical stacked sensors to be put into production :( The more pixels there are doesn't always make for a better image but unfortunately that's what the public expects. The other side is down to the optics and the slight physics challenges of fitting in lens and focus arrangements in just a few mm. Fast response, optical stabilisation, great low light response and a colour range more similar to the human eye is all I'd want :)
Headphone socket
Totally with you on this one. Another device to charge and manage for little benefit but enormous cost really doesn't do it for me. Shame about the socket being a great way to let in dust/water but we can't easily remove all of these problems.
Bluetoof, Wifey, GPeas of course and NFC for Android pay
LED Flash cos I use the torch function a lot
Definitely - these seem to be standard features these days.
Nice to haveFM Radio
Why bother? Seriously. More and more places are dropping FM radio and switching to DAB. Or there's Internet streaming and this is another arial circuit that doesn't need to be in the phone (affecting the others as well). OK, so DAB's often hit and miss as is Internet streaming, but why isn't DAB built into modern phones? While it might seem like a fair idea, it's possibly worth considering the change of radio given the Internet and how it's use is steadily dropping. Except in cars of course.
Water Dust resistant
I'd rather have this than swappable batteries or SD cards. And I'd like this without annoying rubber flaps as well.
Infra-Red Blaster for remote controls
I'm not sure how useful this would be and I'd find it more of a gimmick. I suppose if a phone that had it then I might use it but the last time I looked most IR apps seemed to be some ill conceived attempt to replicate a bloody physical remote control on a touch screen they tend to dimish the experience somewhat. Dependency on IR and line of sight comms (but keep the sensor clear of sunlight) is something I'd rather be past now.
OTT
Pretty much my point about FM radio :)
Big HD screen pretending to be a telly
Just install Kodi. Or maybe we could do with a built in projector function? :)
Stereo speakers pretending to be a Hi-Fi
If you want a stereo sound experience from something only a few inches from end to end, wear headphones or use external speakers. You'll piss off less people as well. While doable on a larger tablet held relatively close anything else just doesn't enough of a stereo effect to matter.
While I've never had the need to carry more than one battery with me, I have still had good reason to want a swappable battery, and that is the ability to hard power-off my phone. I've run into problems several times over the last few years where my phone has just stopped responding to the soft buttons (including recently when a new phone got stuck in a boot loop) and removing power would have solved the problem neatly.
Swappable battery is a must-have for me because:
- There have been times when my phone has crashed/hung and the only way of reviving it is a brutal reset by yanking the battery.
- Over time the battery will degrade after charge/drain cycles. Modern battery chemistry is better than it was years ago, but a decrease in battery performance is observable within the life of the phone. I shouldn't have to replace a perfectly good phone just because a single component is getting towards the end of its natural life
- Some phones that I've had in the past have offered the option of a upgrade high-capacity battery (my old Galaxy S2 for instance)
> Over time the battery will degrade after charge/drain cycles. Modern battery chemistry is better than it was years ago, but a decrease in battery performance is observable within the life of the phone. I shouldn't have to replace a perfectly good phone just because a single component is getting towards the end of its natural life
I agree with this, but in reality, it is relatively easy to swap a batter in most phones. A few tiny screws and a bit of sticky tape, and it'll come right out.
For the once-every-3-years operation taking 20 minutes, I'm willing to take the design benefits of not having a "replaceable" battery. As others have said, a power bank is a good enough solution in the situations where a full charge isn't enough.
"I shouldn't have to replace a perfectly good phone just because a single component is getting towards the end of its natural life"
Bit of an over reaction, pretty much every market I've ever seen has a bloke / blokess that can replace batteries on most modern phones generally for a for about a tenner.. so anyone making a fuss over something like that is just looking for problems.
Cant seem to edit atm. You are almost describing a galaxy note though. My note 3 ticks all the above except dust and stereo. I have a case that keeps it fairly clean and the speaker isnt too bad for what i need. The IR works well enough for the tv but i havent used NFC on it (it is capable of nfc)
" the inability to update the installed base with the platform updates that new Google services require"
Google Play Services does exactly this, updates the base platform, delivering new functionality, without needing a new underlying OS. It's compatible all the way back to Gingerbread. (Android 2.3)
Google Play Games, Remote Device Wipe, Google Cast, Nearby (Beacon support), Cloud Messaging, Smart Lock, Wear Support, SafetyNet, Wallet, loads more besides.
All these things get updated on ALL Android phones back to Gingerbread...
Yeah, a swappable battery isn't just about charge, it's about what happens when you need to kill the charge.
My old S3 would occasionally act up and freeze, and even resetting did nothing. Popped out the battery, popped it back in again, and all was fine again. If it hadn't been removable, I'd have been screwed.
Which is why my following phone was the G4. My next one won't have a removable battery though, figured I'd give the Xiaomi brand a try, a decision I'm expecting to regret when something happens that would be solved by simply removing the bloody power source.
Eeek. I'd manage to block that pain out of my memory... I had to battery remove reset my S3 on occasion as well. I think there was a fallback power off function on the thing as well but just removing the battery was easier and given the quality of Samsung software, most likely required as well.
It's bad manners to start a post with "Boooring", but I nearly did. Does every blasted phone have to look like an iPhone? Would it have killed Google to do what it's actually good at, and innovate? Only Samsung, that I'm aware of, have dipped their toe back in the flip-phone waters with new smartphones, and I don't know why.
The flip or clamshell design was once enormously popular, for the good reason that it protected vulnerable screen, provided oodles of extra space for keypad/more screen, and made call management dead easy: flip open to answer, close to finish, and never have to worry about butt dialing.
The market is overdue for the reuniting of modern smartphone power and the clam design. You could have double the screen real estate, if you wanted, with a phone that flips open, with one for display and the other available for keyboard duty as needed. Busted displays would be a thing of the past (again). The exterior could have a little subsidiary screen for notifications and reminders. The flip-open doubling of size would immediately solve the problem of putting mic near mouth and speaker near ear, for ergonomically friendly use. You could even get cute and bung a camera on each wing of the flip for 3D photos and recording. The possibilities are endless.
But no: let's all just follow boring Apple, every single phone has to look like a small tile of glass, the display ready to be shattered with a rude word ....
+1 for clamshells. Good luck in this brave new world where thinner == better and having the mic close to your mouth will in no way justify having a phone that becomes 2x as thick when you don't use it. But then... didn't some really old (~25y) analog cell phones have just a thin plastic keypad cover that flipped down and accomplished the same? I'm sure they could make it a tad bit thicker and put another LCD in there (if they HAD to)-- after all, my 5 yr-old laptop screen is about 7mm thick, just a LCD in a plastic sleeve really. I wasn't specifically shopping for "thin" so now I like to joke that the strongest thing in it is the glass.
P.S. obligatory xkcd ref
+1 for clamshells. Good luck in this brave new world where thinner == better and having the mic close to your mouth will in no way justify having a phone that becomes 2x as thick when you don't use it.
Dunno. Given what has been done in the past (think Motorola Razr2, Nokia N76, etc) it shouldn't be that farfetched to think it would be feasible to construct rather tasty clamshell phone with reasonable battery and bit bigger screen than the examples mentioned.
Always feasible, rarely profitable I'm afraid. I like a flip phone and the way it can follow the outer curve of my head unlike phondleslabs. However I expect thintards to cry that making a super-thin half of a clamshell also represents an admission that the phondleslabs could be even thinner-- i.e. half as thin as that clamshell. So fragility-as-a-feature and screen locks will probably (sadly) stick around a while longer.... ugh.
Also I should have said 'some kind of OLED', thin enough and less fragile I hope :/
Thats some pretty low resolution right there.
Will I have to buy 2 million of these things to watch a movie. If so ive no idea where ill store them and ill need an articulated lorry to carry them around.
Is google specifically targeting Chris Eubank? Thats a very narrow market indeed.
Then again if one person buys 2 million phones thats job done right?
My experience is that, thanks to crappy software, cell phone batteries last one year. That's it. Just one year. A LiPo battery is good for about 300 to 500 full charge cycles. When the shovelware from Google and the phone maker run the battery dead by the end of each night, you're doing a full charge cycle every day. When that shovelware is buggy for a few months and running the battery dead in the afternoon, that's 1.5 to 2 charge cycles per day. I think I've just purchased my last fancy phone with a permanent battery. The next one has a removable battery or it's dirt cheap.
microSD card isn't negotiable. I need offline storage.
Use two devices.
My Nexus 10 still gives 11 hours usage and that's after, well you tell me. I got it when Google released it. I'll only replace it when Andromeda devices (merged Chromebook/Android) are plentiful. It's my non work device and using it now.
My phone is a samsung flip phone. It's a phone, does texts has few (!) Security vulnerabilities. And the battery still lasts for two weeks.
Let's face it we're complaining that the new Pixels are incremental, yet we're all Android users. As are 85% of the world mobile device users.
If you really want an android flip phone, there are a few.
I'll stick with my old Nexus 6 and Project Fi. For what I need and use it's pretty close to perfect.
For me the big plus with Project Fi is that I get off the plane in a new country and it connects to the network with no hassle, I keep my US phone number and when I get home I have a phone bill for a months use that's under $50.
No SD card - I don't care - but no wireless charging? That's the nail in the coffin for the recent Google phones but I love the minimal Android interface without all the vendor customization crap.
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