Posts by Dave 126 10662 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
I'll happily take your word for your preference for 16:9 over 2:1. However, without knowing what you use your phone for, the size of your phone, the size of your hands and fingers, and the acuity of your eyesight, it's hard to put your preference into any context.
If you watch a lot of videos, I can see you preferring 16:9, for example.
What the consumer *knows* is the feel of their past and current phones in their hand and pocket, and they'll have seen and felt their friend's Galaxy Note (big) and their sister's iPhone SE (little). Some of them will even look at and handle a range of phones in a shop before buying!
Unlike TVs where, all else being equal, bigger is usually better, people have their own informed reasons for not necessarily buying the biggest phone available - they might have small hands, or they have a physical job, or they primarily use their phone for one-handed texting.
> given my experience with other portable aerials, it's more likely that DVB-T just isn't suited to portable use.
Even in the home where people have reliable DVB aerials and/or satellite dishes, a lot of content is either watched over the internet or has been previously recorded. Since phones can play both on the hoof, the demand for a mobile TV receiver must be very small. Possibly handy if you're camping in an area with no 3G and your phone has no storage and you can't read a book.
I'd be more concerned about the fire risks of people carrying 3rd party (from deity knows where) batteries around in the bottom of kit bags where they might be pierced by screwdrivers or whatever. Of course the battery could be housed in a 2mm ABS plastic case, but then your phone would contain a total of 4mm ABS that could be better utilised for a bigger battery in the first place.
Whilst the very rare occurrence of a burning phone can cause injury, it's very unlikely to cause death, which an unattended fire (kit bag or paper-filled briefcase left in office) might. And if a phone battery does start to thermally runaway, it's maybe not a bad thing that it's surrounded by glass and metal instead of paper.
Since I have a grasp of statistics, and am a regular road user, the risk of a phone fire is pretty far down the list of things that scare me.
There's nothing antisocial about using my phone's loudspeaker to listen to podcasts in my own kitchen. Dunno that stereo would do much for me though - anything I care about enough to want stereo I likely care about enough to want headphones.
It's that I can listen in the kitchen whilst making a cuppa, then stroll to the garden or study that precludes me from plugging in bigger speakers, or faffing around with Bluetooth or Chromecast audio.
The Galaxy Sx Mini phones never had the full internal spec of their bigger cousins. The Xperia Compact range largely did, and, with respect to IanCa's outdoor lifestyle, had the added bonus of being waterproof. They also had several very good battery Stamina modes before stock Android adopted such features. Oh, and an FM radio.
These glass slabs aren't slippery if you put them in a case. A case will also solve your protruding camera lens issue. As a side benefit they identify your phone as yours, just in case your mates have the same model.
Some phones have sapphire over the camera lens; if it's scratched then it's likely due to jewelry or diamond cutting discs (or the dust after using them) that's likely to be the culprit. Blow or brush the camera lens before wiping it on your shirt.
It's healthy to suggest that certain design choices are questionable as long as one is genuinely ready to hear possible answers. I understand that a protruding camera lens prevents a naked phone from being laid flat on a table, but I also understand it provides a tactile aid to help obscuring the lens with one's finger, and that anyway most people use cases. Some people would say that nudging people to place their phones face down is also socially desirable. There has been a choice, all options have been questioned, and the pros and cons weighed up.
@Piro
I suggested that consumers have enjoyed choice in the size of phone screen size, and you disagree before talking about batteries and headphone jack. I don't follow you.
There have always been smaller Android phones available in the low and mid range. Where smaller Android phones were conspicuous by their absence was in the top range - those phones boasting the fastest processors - until the Xperia Compact range. I've seen a few in the wild.
I've also seen people who've deliberately chosen bigger models.
So I'll state it again: most people having used smartphones over the last decade are aware of the pros (more screen for content) and cons (harder to hold etc) of a large screen and have made their own informed choice.
I'd use try a different browser if I were you Dropbear. Yeah, some websites don't flow text properly, but many a browser has 'Simplified' mode to remove the chaff and comfortably display the pertinent text.
Of course two differently shaped screens of equal area will show the same amount of text if pages were properly displayed. However, I didn't take screen area as my starting point but screen *width* (because it is screen width that most greatly affects hand comfort and pocket comfort). So, for two screens of equal width, the taller one will display more text.
If we didn't have to carry, hold or pocket our phones they might all be the size our desktop monitors!
Be consistent. You lambast the average consumer for being potentially confused by geometry (area, width, height), but you yourself express the size of phone you want by only giving a diagonal dimension without specifying the aspect ratio. For example, I could cover about 90 percent of the screen of an Z3 Compact (4.6" 16:9, 64.5 mm wide) with my thumb tip without out adjusting my grip. The XZ2 Compact is only half a mm wider at 65mm but has a 5" screen. The XZ2 has a larger screen in terms of area (64.5 cm 2, Vs 58.3 cm 2). The XZ has greater pixel density too, but that's moot to this point. Now, most of an Android user's thumb movements will be towards the bottom of the screen (keyboard and navigation), so most users will happily take the advantages of being able to read more text over the occasional, very slightly extra effort required to move their thumb to the top left corner of the screen.
I think that the average consumer has used enough phones in the past to choose the size they want.
Apparently the A8 has a great screen and water resistance, but better value is to be found elsewhere, so I've read:
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/samsung-galaxy-a8-review
Might be worth looking at the price of the S8 - it appears now to be £50 - £100 more but hard to tell without digging deeper through the detach results to ignore cowboy retailers.
A taller phone will display more text (less scrolling) than a shorter phone of same width.
If you're finding that height of phone is a limiting factor with regards to putting it in your pocket, try rotating the phone through 90 degrees and trying again. No, no, I meant 90 degrees through the Z axis, you're just making it even harder for yourself.
You might also consider the Xperia XZ2 Compact phone. Or there's a new iPhone SE rumoured to arrive soon if that's your flavour.
At the moment there are many similar specced phones with 16:9 and 18:9 displays, so a vendor should be able to work out what the consumer thinks they want based on what they buy.
Also note that consumers buy what they think they want, and that what they think they want and what they actually want aren't necessarily the same thing.
A phone designer can spend months living with a prototype and assessing it. A consumer might spend twenty minutes in a showroom with their mind melting under the strain of specification numbers and special offers.
A phone designer also has access to a lot of information, both quantative (what proportion of users spend what proportion of their time with their phone reading articles in portrait as opposed to watching videos in landscape) and qualitative (how a phone feels in a hand or a jeans pocket)
Answer: Comparison to older models that the consumer is used to. These 2:1 phones tend to be the same width as older 16:9 models, (human hands and pickets remaining the same size) so using 18:9 more clearly denotes that the phone is longer. For reading websites, and especially commenting in websites where the keyboard takes up space, a talker display is very nice.
On OLED screens the notch doesn't have to visible. It will only be visible if the background to the status bar is not black.
Apple made a point of making the notch visible and insisting that developers don't hide the notch.
The Vivo X21 phone has an optical under-the-display optical fingerprint sensor, sold in India a couple of weeks ago. It is possible that the article you refer to is about ultrasonic under-the-display finger print readers, I can't remember.
Vendors are a bit fond of fusing the screen and digitiser to the glass for that to work. My current solution is to attach a 3rd party tempered glass screen protector to my phone's expensive screen. When dissapating force applied to tiny spot, half a mm is far better than nearly zero. Screen protector is a bit cracked, phone is fine. Before buying new screen protector, I'll build up the sides of the case with glue or something ( cases sold for the curvey-screened Samsung phones don't protect the screen edges for some reason, so some user modification is required.)
Fitting glass protector did affect screen sensitivity on S8, but for some reason turning off "Hard Push on Home [ virtual] Button to Return to Home Screen" option made the screen more sensitive again.
The Gemini can run Linux, so potentially more broadly useful - however, if you're running it in Android mode you have to restart it into Linux. The Register said that Libre Office worked okay on the Gemini, but there was a bit of input lag - though they did note that they were using an early model and drivers.
I don't know if you can get the DeX optimised versions of MS Office for the Gemini's Android mode.
If I were to get a Gemini, it would be an accompaniment to my existing smartphone, not a replacement ( so it might likely stay in Linux mode all the time).
More or less. Unity was an attempt to have the UI component of applications / apps so written that they would adjust to the display size and Human Input methods present at the time - I believe it started out during the netbook era ( 7" - 10" screens, mouse, keyboard).
Samsung only need to have a few key apps ( Pareto analysis, we use 20% of apps 80% of the time) such as browser and Office to adjust to big display mouse keyboard tlfor this to be viable for some users.
A few years back Apple took a different route: rather than plug your phone into a display you could continue working on the same document across iOS and OSX, with the document (and where in the document you were currently working) being zapped between phone and Mac over WiFi. However, the popularity of iOS over MacOS means that Apple are now giving developers tools and guidelines so that an iOS app can potentially present a decent user interface when run on a Mac.
I stated a few years back that my personal opinion about Ubunto and DeX (and whatever Microsoft called their efforts) like solutions was that by the time you've found a spare monitor, mouse, keyboard and carried cables around, you might as well carry a little headless ARM PC with you. After all, they're not pricey, give you reduncy should you lose your phone, and don't tie up your phone in cables (so you can telephone a colleague whilst looking at a spreadsheet).
I mentioned DEX to a friend and he said it sounded great for his shed - for office tasks, web browsing and watching video. Many of us here have an older but still but serviceable monitor, mouse and keyboard kicking around the house. DEX works with 3rd party docks for around £20, I've heard - I'm sure someone here with post a comment confirming that in a bit.
Yeah, though now of course the 'terminals' can be used almost anywhere. It's not that new a return, either - laptops running a locked-down Linux for accessing an organisations network (the sensitive bits) have been around for years for much the same reasons; no data is stored on a laptop that might be lost or stolen.
The audiophile bit is that it has an ESS Sabre DAC in it for output through the 3.5mm socket, powered by a better amp than normal ( for use with a wider range of headphones). LG have been leading this for a while, starting with their G2.
The 3.5mm output has nothing to do with LG's efforts to make the phone's speaker louder - though as someone who might start listening to a podcast in one room and carry his phone into the kitchen to make a cuppa is no bad thing (though my S8 is just about loud enough for this use case).
> i don’t understand why they are dragging their feet so hard on this.
Because of this:
"All of the 4th generation MBPs have been limited to a maximum of 16GB of RAM; this is due to Intel CPU limitations where Intel doesn’t support the current generation of low power RAM (LPDDR4) that Apple favors, and the LPDDR3 that Intel does support only goes up to 16GB. However it is possible to pair more than 16GB of memory with these Intel processors – so long as you give up the use of low power RAM – and this is the route Apple is taking" - Anandtech
So as a result, Apple are using more power hungry RAM and making the battery bigger to compensate.
Casio still sell a range of inexpensive, reliable watches in a range of styles with a Telememo function. It's a bit fiddly to enter alphanumeric info into them though. A watch is harder to lose than a notebook. You can store a password and don't have to note which account it is for. If you lose your watch it can't necessarily be linked to you by a bad guy. Of course if you do lose your watch it'd be a good idea to have your passwords written down at home stored on waterproof paper in a half eaten jar of mayonnaise at the back of the fridge (or hiding place of your choice)
I tried my first underwater video today with my S8, but the canal was a bit murky. Still, the slow motion video of my lurcher shaking off the water off after a dip came out very well indeed. (A recent update seems to have cured an issue with the phone dropping frames when capturing slo mo video. Other users report better results if they first drop the screen resolution from [stupid high] to 2220x1080)
I chose an Xperia Z3 Compact due to its pocket friendly size and excellent battery life. When it died through accident I found a Nexus 5 to be light and slim enough not to be a pain in the trouser - though the battery was awful. Still, for a plastic it bounced and survived many drops into concrete - until the day it didn't.
A few years on I use my phone for more tasks than I did then, and I don't find the size of a Galaxy S8 (in a chunky case) that inconvenient. Like the Sony I appreciate the waterproofing. I was tempted by an iPhone 8 for its cameras, but it was just too big - and the S8 considerable cheaper since I bought it a few months before the release of the S9.
I get the impression that the Surface computers were MS's attempt to show up other Windows PC vendors poor efforts - low res 16:9 displays and shoddy trackpads were the norm - whilst threatening to step on Apple's lawn (specifically hardware suitable for professional graphics applications). It doesn't matter too much to MS if you run Windows on a Surface or on a Dell or Lenovo, as long as you arent running MacOS. It seems to have worked, since mobile PC hardware has markedly improved.
And I'm pleased to draw attention to a non 16:9 laptop (other than a 3:2 Surface or 16:10 MacBook): The Huawei Matebook X Pro - high Res 3:2 screen, discrete Nvidia graphics as an option. Finally!
I stopped to think of a legitimate use and thought of a TV promo spot featuring a football being kicked from the point of view of a boot - but nah, one would just use a GoPro or similar for that.
Reducing the number of upskirt photos is the reason many camera phones make a fake shutter noise that can't be disabled by the user.
And you've inspired me to find an electronic copy of the Usbourne Book of the Future (1979) which I read a lot as a child in 1985.
It's got mention of Buckminster Fuller, space elevators, linear mass accelerators for shooting ore off the moon, giant flat screen TVs, watch phones that take their time from satellites, video discs...
Great stuff.
https://archive.org/stream/Usborne_Book_of_the_Future_1979_pointlessmuseum#page/n0/mode/1up
Cheers Dan 55, I remember hours reading Write Your Own Fantasy Games For Your Microcomputer by Usbourne, and plotting dungeons and sprites on graph paper. I don't recall actually doing any programming though for reasons I forget (it might be that that I only had a Vic 20 with cartridges and no tape drive, it might be because I was climbing a tree or damning a stream)
When it comes to things I plug into to wall sockets, phone chargers use very little juice. Whilst it's not ideal that wireless charging is less efficient than using a cable, far more electricity could be saved by looking at other appliances and behaviours.
Where wireless-only charging would really inconvenience me as a user would be when using portable power banks, and if I wanted to charge in a hurry.
A happy compromise is phones with external nubs for receiving power, akin to MagSafe. A few generations of Sony Xperia featured such a system. The Nokia 6210 and earlier models could also be charged in docks using external contacts.
> Uber... ..put a car on the road that clearly, from the video footage, wasn't ready.
Hence the testing with a human driver. How else can a be made 'ready' for the road?
If one wants to find an organisational failing, it might be in the area of psychology - i.e not putting safeguards in place to ensure the human driver is fully engaged with the job in hand. Perhaps requiring then to give a running commentary on the road situation, as is done in training for advanced driving licences (police drivers etc). If this police report is verified, then the human driver wasn't expecting her employers to routinely review video of her eyes.
The vast majority of vehicles on the road today have human drivers and no Volvo-style automatic braking.
I haven't used it myself, but people used to swear by an app called Tasker. I'm not sure if it required root to run, or only needed root for some features.
I'm not sure that you can have your phone recognise a car charger over a wall charger, other than your Samsung-supplied adaptive wall charger will supply more power than a 2.1 amp 5v car charger.
You might consider an NFC tag to alert your phone to where it is. Again, I've not tried this but forums might give you an idea of how well it works.
An alternative is to use an older or second hand phone as a dedicated car unit. As a bonus it could be a model with a larger (not necessarily that high resolution display) and its storage used for music instead of camera photos. However, you'd still be turning on the WiFi hotspot on your primary phone unless you stretch to a second SIM
.. . That sometimes vendor's additions (either the concept or the actual code) to Android are incorporated into AOSP.
I'm thinking of:
-Power saving modes (Sony, concept)
-LDAC (Sony, code)
-24bit audio support (LG, Code)
If Samsung create something useful that isn't patented, it could well be incorporated into Android.
My S8 works fine, my first Samsung since a feature phone in 2008 . Feel free to trawl my old posts to see my previous Androids have been an Xperia P, Xperia Z3 Compact (both close to stock Android) some cheap but surprisingly cheerful Huawei (couldn't budge their weird launcher, other weird changes to Android), a Nexus 5 (stock, obviously). No complaints about Samsung's skinning of Android in the S8 after one switches the soft Navigation keys to Android standard and turns a couple of things off.
Still competition is good, so if you buy Sony, LG or Motorola, you'd being doing me a favour.
Similar techniques have been used on iPads and other devices for years. The software doesn't simply ignore touch input on a margin of pixels around the screen but rather uses algorithms to distinguish between what is probably a deliberate prod or swipe and what is probably an accidental brush or tap.
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