Press F2 to pay respects. New Xiaomi Poco Pro has 5G, top-drawer Snapdragon chippery, 64MP camera Xiaomi has lifted the lid on the much-anticipated successor to 2018's Pocophone F1 flagship killer: the Poco F2 Pro. The handset, which starts at €500, packs Qualcomm's top-tier Snapdragon 865 platform and a 64MP quad-camera setup. For the most part, the Poco F2 Pro is almost identical to Xiaomi's Redmi K30 Pro handset, which …
Is it really "all that"? The vast majority of the time you'd presumably want it off (to save battery life), does it really make that much difference in games? I don't use a 120Hz monitor for gaming on my PC, and I don't see many TVs with this as a selling point (I know there *are* some, and they're often said to be the "best for gaming").
Is it just a thing to differentiate offerings, or actually useful.
As Anthony said, it's reported to make animations and interactions feel more fluid. Most midrange+ televisions sold today can operate at 120hz or above - either for gaming, interpolating frames on 60hz sports broadcasts or alternating frames for 3D content.
I believe some chips and bits of Android provide the building blocks for varying the frame rate between 60 and 120Hz as required to save battery life, but I haven't heard if it actually being implemented in a phone yet
I like my Pocophone F1, but a big part of that was the "bang for bucks" equation.It offered good specs at a great price, especially since I don't care that much about the camera. The price/performance balance seems to have shifted markedly with the F2, making any upgrade decision less straightforward.
I also bought a F1 and it was great while it was working. However battery failed in less than a year ( i'm not a heavy user) in comparison with my s7 which is still going after 4 years. The fingerprint sensor stopped working and getting spare parts has been a nightmare, xiaomi support just tell you to buy one from amazon.
I bought a Pocophone F1 shortly after launch , I use it as my primary phone when I am in Asia and as a secondary phone when I am in the UK. It still works perfectly, battery at 95% according to Accubattery App. I downloaded GCam and the pictures are much better.
The problem with all Android phones other than Samsung , if you have problems outside the warranty period and when it is time to replace the battery where do you take them to ? Do you just throw them away ? My Pixel developed a fault after three months , Carphonewarehouse sent it back to Google and they sent me a ' Refurbished' Pixel. My daughter took her iPhone 7 to iSmash for battery replacement and the experience was not good at all , she should have taken it to an Apple Store.
My main driver was the original 5 inch Pixel of 2016 , it needs battery replacement , Google does not provide battery replacement service in the UK, I can take it to iSmash but after my daughter's experience I am not sure. Also no more updates now it is over 3 years old ( last update was October 2019.
So considering those problems I decided to move on to an iPhone after so many years with Android phones. iPhones have at least 5 years of updates and if I want to sell it after three years it still has some value unlike Android phones. The Pocophone F1 and I think F2 also lack most of the necessary LTE / 4G /3G bands to work in the US whereas iPhones have the necessary bands to work in the US, Europe and most of Asia. This only concerns those of us who travel to different countries.
2020-02-01, 2020-03-01, 2020-04-01 and 2020-05-01 have all been released with critical security patches since the January patch level.
My Samsung S20+ got the 2020-05-01 patches on 2020-05-04. Given that the last Samsung I owned, an S3, only received 2 patches in 18 months, I find that it is currently doing a very good job. I just hope they keep it up for the 3 years they provide the guarantee for...
LTE: 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/20/28/38/40/41
NR: n77/n78
Having the minimum bands for global operation means it's going to be the first phone to lose bandwidth when a lot of people are nearby. Channel aggregation will barely work, if at all. It looks like a good gaming phone but I wouldn't upgrade thinking that "5G" means faster data.
... so there is no feature yet available that is tempting me to upgrade my Galaxy S8.
I'm still waiting for accurate 3D scanning and measuring, be this done via a laser Time of Flight sensor or by using two cameras, a la Project Tango. I want to wave my phone around and grab real measurements I can take back to the workshop. Qualcomm and Sony, amongst others, have been pushing this for a few years now.
The biggest Galaxy S phone, the S20 Ultra Super Duper (or whatever it is called) has a VGA-resolution ToF sensor, as does the current 12" iPad Pro - leading to fair speculation that the next iPhone will too. The very pricey and unwieldy iPad is a strange place to put a sensor that requires the device to be waived around, but as a test bed for the tech before rolling it out on the iPhone it makes sense.
I suspect the Apple system will work better than the Samsung system, given the work Apple has done on making their GPUs suitable for this sort of task.
In the meantime I'll continue searching for a tape measure. Damned things hide for a hobby. I think they're shy.
However, I'll probably wait for the tech to become more mainstream in Android before going for it, when it will likely be cheaper, better supported and more capable than Samsung's first foray into it.
Hmm, I might just super glue one of those Bluetooth tracking Tile dongles to my tape measure - seems like a practical solution! Having the wretched thing in high-vis fluorescent orange has proved to be only a partial mitigation against its tendancy to hide.
The Tony Starck-style workshop, where the room itself can scan and measure in real-time, will have to wait til next year!
>... so there is no feature yet available that is tempting me to upgrade my Galaxy S8.
I'm still on my oneplus one bought at pre-order and extended with lineageos and there's nothing to tempt me away yet.
The slowly degrading battery life (not bad for a 6 year old phone) was about to make my decision for me, but then I saw replacement batteries on ebay for a fiver so now my ethics are guilt-tripping me again about ever ditching it
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