451–460 of 568 posts
My biggest gripe with Nexus series has been the camera. None of the releases has made a quantum leap in terms of picture quality. I don't care about gimmickries like HDR, live photos, sphere etc., all I want is a $300 Point & Shoot quality. Something that won't make me feel guilty for using a camera phone for preserving spontaneous memories. Please Google :) Samsung has done a great job with the S6, the others like G…
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> There is nothing inherent to SD cards (or removable storage in general) that makes it a tough UI case. It's pretty simple, actually, See, you're thinking in terms of UI but I'm talking about user experience (which isn't just UI). It sounds like they essentially fixed the UI type of issues in Android M but SD cards are still slower, once you install it you really don't want to ever remove it or if you do god knows w…
Well, if android phones still had the ability to masquerade as a USB drive (in order to move files/photos/whatever) on and off, then I could see leaving the SD card in place forever. But android phones don't currently have the ability to behave as a simple USB drive when you plug them into the computer. So if you're even a little bit discerning, and you refuse to install silly helper apps and photo-importers and andr…
* The removal of SD cards from mainstream phones
* The use of ext4 as a main filesystem on a lot of phones.
The removal of SD cards meant that you could no longer "unmount" part of the phone filesystem to present it as a mass storage device. The use of ext4 meant that many OSes had no idea how to mount the storage, even if you presented it as a block device.
I'm not sure anyone will read this, but I think you could implement a FAT emulation layer over USB Gadget, at least enough to get car head-decks to play MP3s off the phone. If anyone wants to take a crack at this, please get in touch with me.
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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.
Wrench, meet plausible deniability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability#Use_in_c...
1. Attacker sees random data.
2. Attacker knows you might be smart enough to use a plausible deniability file system.
3. Attacker starts beating you with the wrench.
At this point, there are several possibilities that could happen:
1. You give up the secret and give the attacker what he wants. The beating continues after this point, because the attacker really has no idea if you've given up the right secret.
2. You give up a fake secret and give the attacker what he thinks he wants. The beatings continue. See possibility #1.
3. You don't give up the secret and he continues beating you with the wrench anyway to try to get you to reveal the secret.
4. You're not using a plausible deniability encryption at all, and it truly is random data, and he continues to beat you with the wrench to make sure.
As you can see, the wrench doesn't give two shits about your plausible deniability.
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Why are you disappointed? It sounds like a device you bought a few years ago has a longer useful lifespan than you thought. You get to have a state of the art phone for less money when you own it longer. I wonder if devices will start to be built better, with more replaceable components as the rate of spec improvements in mobile devices slows down.
Not the OP (although I feel exactly the same), but I'm disappointed because the battery life on my Nexus 5 is going nowhere but down... but I am not going to buy a new phone with exactly the same RAM and storage (and no SD card slot). The features they have added I don't care about (fingerprint scanner, better camera). I may well buy a new phone, but there is zero chance it will be a 5x.
Turn off Google Fit, turn off always on OK Google hotword detection, clear the Google Play Services cache.
I've long felt that a major disadvantage for the Android ecosystem is that the OEMs simply don't have the resources to compete with Apple when it comes to designing new hardware, and it leads to situations where the iPhone is years ahead for certain features. One solution for that is for Google to invest in these technologies and make them available to all the OEMs, a bit like Android but for hardware too. I wonder if that's what is happening here? Looking forward to a teardown.
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My worry is that this is a gateway drug to "Fingerprint protect all the things!" My bank emailed me the other day with an announcement that I could access my account through their app via my fingerprint. WTF? My text messages are one thing by now my money is protected by just my fingerprint? I took my bank to task because they allowed my username to be twice as long as the allowed characters in my password. Someone a…
The bottomline is that if someone can hack a server to steal your fingerprint, they can just as easily use the same method to steal your method so I don't really see the differen imho.
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> I think Google and Samsung have decided to ditch sd cards to prevent the user having a shitty experience. This line of reasoning makes absolutely no sense. How could having the option to use an SD card with your device make for a shittier UX. The use of an SD expansion slot is completely optional, if you don't have the desire to use an SD card it has absolutely no bearing on the UX, and if you do , no matter how sh…
Because there is an opportunity cost to having an SD slot. Remember it takes up physical space inside the device, which could be used for more internal memory, battery space etc. they would have opted for something everyone wants over a smaller subset of users
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What can the bank app do? Mine can only deposit and view accounts, not withdraw or transfer. Open access to it would be weird, but not much worse than someone fishing my ATM receipts out of the trash to see my balance.
It's Bank of America, so it's about as feature-filled as a banking app gets. You can do all the normal stuff like check balances and deposit checks, but you can also open new accounts (including credit cards) and transfer money (between other accounts you own or to other people outside the bank). And yes, the app has the ability to add new transfer recipients, which only needs their email address or phone number. The…
And unsurprisingly, it's half a foot tall (159mm, or 6.2 inches). My hands continue to cry. Is it what the future holds, that we should eventually hold mainframes up to our heads?
It's smaller than the device it's replacing.
Nexus 5X: 147.0 x 72.6 x 7.9 mm ( Front face 10,672.2 sq mm)
The front face will be larger. The only way it is smaller is the reduction in thickness.
[EDIT] My mistake, thought you were talking about the Nexus 5
I am finally in the market for a new mobile phone - my trusty MOTO FONE (F3)[1] finally died after three years. One of my absolute no-compromise feature needs is removable media ... an SD card slot that can accept the new 128 GB cards. This is because my current music collection is 68 GB in size and carrying the entire collection is one of my use-cases. But ... I also want a non-crapware, pure android phone, and the…
Get a clip zip (~$30) and a 128gb sd card (~$50), put rockbox on it ($0), enjoy your entire collection in whatever codec you want, in a form factor that works better for exercising, with a week battery life to boot.