361–370 of 568 posts
The US prices are reasonable, but the UK prices are just horrendous. £500 for the 6P brings it out of the range of "I'm due an upgrade anyway" into luxury territory. I think I'll stick with my Nexus 5.
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Nobody's going to bother to recreate your fingerprint, when it's much easier to beat you with a wrench ( https://xkcd.com/538/ ) until they get access to your phone. It's a huge convenience for you though, to unlock it without doing anything extra, as you're pressing that button anyway to turn the screen on. Much easier than typing passwords.
"Nobody's going to bother to recreate your fingerprint, when it's much easier to beat you with a wrench ( https://xkcd.com/538/ ) until they get access to your phone." I think this misses the point. Accessing a device using a "cloned finger" (not tremendously difficult) can be done without the target ever knowing it has happened. The wrench technique, less so.
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1. The Nexus line is supposed to be something like Google's Android reference device, and implements the minimum common set of features -- up-to-date computing hardware and screen, reasonable-resolution cameras, standard set of sensors (GPS, acceleration, etc.). An SD card slot doesn't really add any technical possibilities. 2. Google probably wants to push the idea that any storage beyond local apps should be to the…
Google's advert claims "The ultimate Android experience", not the "The minimum common set of features Android experience".
FWIW - I'm pro-removable memory myself, for cost & convenience of data transfer
In terms of the software, the Nexus phones are some of the best I've ever had, because they don't mess around with Android to try and 'improve' it, and because they get regular, timely upgrades. My Nexus 4 is still going strong several years after I got it. I'm tempted by the 5x, though I wish it were a bit smaller.
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Huh... bought a bunch of Nexus4's 3 years ago for family members (a mix of younger and older people). Some of them are still in use, some of them upgraded. Not a single complaint about random hardware failures (except for worsening battery life of course). Also haven't heard this particular complaint about Nexus devices on the forums etc. Are you sure this is not something specific to your use patterns?
> (except for worsening battery life of course) Compliments of 5.0 Lollipop. It's sad they're going to leave the N4 with that abomination.
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> (like when unlocking the phone or authorizing a payment on the app store) Aren't these the things where you'd want security?
Unlocking your phone is done so frequently that many people opt not to secure it. The best security is one that you use. It's arguably more secure than a 4 number passcode, which someone can easily watch you enter over your shoulder. Buying things on the App Store requires you to type in a password for the first purchase every so often. Then you use your finger print.
My friends often have to share their passcodes with me; at which point it's like, what's this adding?
Namely, your defense against legally compelled decryption is significantly weakened via use of a fingerprint sensor, since the phone's unlock mechanism is the same authentication system that the phone's encryption mechanism uses (it would be really nice to have some sort of separation there).
The last drawback, I'll simply quote verbatim from the article:
>What would happen if some government “asked” phone manufacturers to create a back door to store or send it fingerprint information, and to lie to the public with denials of the existence of such a program. Considering the news of the past few years such a scenario seems far from impossible.
On that note, I wonder how compatible smartphone fingerprint data is with data you'd find in a fingerprint database. If not immediately compatible, would it still be possible to convert it to a standardized format?
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/josephsteinberg/2015/03/05/wh-yo...
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You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question. An…
CPUs enter and exit sleep on Android devices constantly . Back in 2007 on the MSM7201A we'd go to power-down sleep for any idle times of >50mS (nothing to schedule for the next 50mS). Run fast and go to sleep has always been the primary power policy. That said there's plenty of lightweight threads and processes that are mostly IO or event bound, do very little compute, and will run in roughly the same time on a small…
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Nobody's going to bother to recreate your fingerprint, when it's much easier to beat you with a wrench ( https://xkcd.com/538/ ) until they get access to your phone. It's a huge convenience for you though, to unlock it without doing anything extra, as you're pressing that button anyway to turn the screen on. Much easier than typing passwords.
Many countries now take fingerprint scans when you cross the border. Even if they themselves never use it, its easily conceivable that they could be hacked or leaked. Then what? You can't revoke your fingerprint.
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My wife dropped her N5 a few weeks ago and cracked the screen (why are phones still so delicate?). We bought the new Moto G that night from Best Buy. Its pretty much a Nexus 5 but with a 720p screen instead of a 1080p screen. She loves having twice the battery life and the $179 pricepoint was mindblowing. The low and mid range in Android is very competitive. I'm not sure what this new N5 is bringing to the table othe…
Why are screens still so delicate? It's not even been 10 years since the original iPhone.