341–350 of 695 posts
> Your phone is your personal property. Oh, come on! It runs android. My phone and data belongs to google.
My phone is most certainly my personal property.
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I just can't type on screens. I have tried so many times. My current phone is a Blackberry Passport, previous one was an HTC Desire Z, and my next one (fingers crossed) will be this: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gemini-pda-android-linux-... I'd like to ssh sometimes, but mostly I want to send text and emails like everyone else. Shame that few companies have the guts to break the monoculture. It is vaguely ridic…
> Shame that few companies have the guts to break the monoculture. It is vaguely ridiculous that most phones look identical. You are describing cars. There is no market for cars which are driven with more complex mechanisms than steering wheels. The world has percolated around the optimal solution, and it is a touch screen.
Touchscreens suck for typing. A smooth glass surface without haptic feedback can never be an optimal solution for that. It is only better for pure media consumption, if having only a touchscreen means having a bigger display.
Give me software updates for 7+ years, then we'll talk about buying your $700 phone. Lasting hardware means nothing without lasting software. In the meanwhile, I'll keep buying $120 phones (Moto G4 with Amazon Ads FTW) and keeping them for ~2 years until they break or software updates stop. Even though as a Catholic (Laudato Si, Rerum Novarum) it kills me to waste all those materials every couple of years and be part…
I'm on Android 4 as I'm typing this and the only reason I'm even considering a new phone is that apps have gotten a bit more demanding of the CPU, i.e. my hardware is too slow for a handful of apps now. What do you find so critical about OS/OEM software updates that you find a need to buy a new phone every 1-2 years?
But you've got a point about newer apps becoming more demanding of the CPU. Ideally, this trend continues to slow down (Moore's law is essentially over) and software engineers start to find ways to do more with less. There's plenty of room to optimize most software out there, but historically very little incentive to do so. That's changing, or it should.
In the meanwhile, an expensive long-lasting phone should make it possible to upgrade the CPU and/or GPU in a phone for a fraction of the price of the whole phone, so that the phone can be used at its full potential for its complete lifetime. A similar provision applies to batteries, which usually die after a couple of years and would need to be replaced once or twice during the lifetime.
Frankly, I haven't been able to keep a phone long enough for the software to become obsolete because the hardware breaks after 1-2 years. So I want Essential to succeed. A long-lasting phone made with durable materials and with many years of guaranteed software updates is the product we need, if someone dares to make it.
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And you pay at least thrice as much, get far worse app support outside of the US (for example, in Germany > 85% of users are on Android, so that’s where the apps are), and you basically can’t develop at all for iOS (who’s gonna pay 3000$ to get a Mac and stuff AND 99$ a year just to build apps in their free time? Yeah, me neither).
> who’s gonna pay 3000$ to get a Mac and stuff AND 99$ a year just to build apps in their free time? Yeah, me neither The Mac complaint is fair, but you can build and run your own apps outside of the store with a free developer account as of a couple years ago. Edit: Also, a capable Mac development machine is closer to $1500 than $3k.
More like $700ish. The Mac Mini is perfectly capable of doing iOS app development.
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I'm not trying to be snarky, I swear, but iOS checks all your boxes except "be android" along with dual sim and removable battery. And iOS hardware is still top of the pack when it comes to raw power in the majority of real use cases.
Yes, but that box is oh so hard to check. ;)
Phones with the Apple logo on the back do this job best. Their security posture is just so much better and you don't have carrier-enforced forced obsolescence from the software side. You literally can always run the latest iOS until the hardware _just can't_.
I'm an open source guy only as much as it makes sense.
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And Apple moved to using aluminum from titanium in its PowerBooks (the design would later be the basis of the original MacBook Pro), in part, because the softness of of the metal, led to warps and bends in those first-gen TiBook models. I don't know how Essential is using titanium, but history certainly has examples of gadgets that suffered from using that metal over others.
...and if you believe that, I've got a bridge for sale. Titanium is many things but soft it is not. It can also be alloyed with many other metals for specific purposes. One thing it definitely is though is expensive which is most likely the reason for Apple to look for alternatives. That is actually is possible to use titanium to create form-stable notebooks can be seen by e.g. the many Thinkpads which sport titanium…
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Security update for one. Idk about 1-2 years, but if it doesn't get security updates I'm not getting email/sms/etc on it
But your email app will still get updates right? (I guess I'm using Gmail and assuming you are using something like it that gets updates too, but maybe I'm wrong.) Same with SMS - lots of apps that get updates. What's the exact issue?
(Also Android got some additional security/privacy features after Android 4)
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Security update for one. Idk about 1-2 years, but if it doesn't get security updates I'm not getting email/sms/etc on it
But your email app will still get updates right? (I guess I'm using Gmail and assuming you are using something like it that gets updates too, but maybe I'm wrong.) Same with SMS - lots of apps that get updates. What's the exact issue?
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Bluetooth keyboards work great with Android devices. No cables required.
Heavily disagree. Especially when using ssh. I always have alt/ctrl issues, and I've tried a handful of them.