I really wish they would reintroduce the Nexus series. The money felt worth it for the phone. Not sure if I can say the same for the Pixel series.
What’s in a name?
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
181–190 of 615 posts
Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt it, that would be a good chunk of data for what I see as a fairly small feature. More likely (this is a guess, nobody outside google really knows at this point), they will use federated machine learning to figure out that something is "a song", then perhaps clean up and isolate the actual "song" part of it and send that over to a google server for processing. But again it was just announced, so nobody really…
They announced, in the talk, that this is all done locally on the phone. The phone will have a database of, iirc, 10,000 songs locally. [edit] typos
Ah! Then I'm sure they have some way of making the data needed much smaller than I thought it could be!
Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I own a Pixel but this DxO stuff is really dodgy. In the portrait pic of the girl, the difference between the Pixel 2 [1] and the iPhone 8 [2] is night and day, with the Pixel 2 looking like shit. She so pale, and the fake bokeh looks like a 5 year old smearing all over, it's simply not pleasant to look at. And the whole push on adding the fake bokeh """scores""" to justify changing the scores so every fucking newly…
It's post-processing, not the quality of the sensor, photo from iPhone have warmer color balance. If you compare the right eyebrow, you will see that [1] have more details, than [2]
That might be true, but I'd say if they say their expertise is to have artificial intelligence, then by that I'd like to have the picture that is the most pleasant to look at. By that benchmark, and I can confidently say that 1 is definitely not more pleasant to look at than 2.
Remember, the picture is always a depiction of what our eyes see, and that our eyes see is only a part of the reality. My eyes don't see bokehs. My eyes don't focus the same way the camera does. My eyes don't see in 3500K or 6500K or whatever the hell that is. My eyes don't care how many strands of hair there are in her eyebrows and how detailed they are. My eyes don't see in black and white, either. Yet those are what you see in pictures. Focusing on the little detail "accuracy" and forget what it really matters at the end is dangerous.
Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
#184Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think (good implementations of) wireless headphones are the way of the future. What did they gain by removing floppy disk drives from laptops? Well, nothing per se, but it allowed them to make smaller laptops. Removing the jack will allow them to make phones thinner - if not now, in future iterations. And the thing with keeping features around is that it's not just a question of that one feature. It's cumulative ov…
The floppy disk stopped being good at moving files between computers and making backups because single files of popular types regularly exceeded its capacity at the time it stopped being a standard feature. Modems and CD drives had fallen into disuse in favor of alternatives by the time they started getting left out. The analog headphone jack still does as good a job of connecting headphones, speakers and such in a p…
> The floppy disk stopped being good at moving files between computers and making backups because single files of popular types regularly exceeded its capacity at the time it stopped being a standard feature. Modems and CD drives had fallen into disuse in favor of alternatives by the time they started getting left out.
There were still people who had stuff on floppies who wanted floppy drives.
There was a big fuss when Apple first removed CD drives from their laptops.
> The analog headphone jack still does as good a job of connecting headphones, speakers and such in a practical sense as it always did.
Many people -- I'm not claiming it's the majority -- disagree. Many people find headphone cables a big pain in the ass.
> While bluetooth headphones exist and enjoy some popularity, most people I know own, and regularly use wired headphones.
At least part of that is that wireless headphones tend to be expensive and many of them aren't the best at pairing and staying connected. Those things aren't inherent to wireless technology and will change over time.
> Yes, they also usually have bluetooth, but getting a car and a phone to pair, and getting the right phone to be paired at the right time isn't always a good UX.
Again, that's nothing inherent to wireless. Apparently the Apple wireless pairing works pretty perfectly.
Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
#186Edit up top: The identification is done on-device. The Verge article didn't mention this. > And this year’s Pixel will take advantage of the phone’s always-on microphones to listen for music (not just the phrase “OK Google”) and display what you’re listening to on the screen, even if it’s something on the radio. This sounds creepy. So now when excessive microphone data is seen to be going out to the cloud, they can j…
Except it doesn't send any data to the cloud. They mentioned that explicitly. There's an on-phone database of songs that it is matching against.
I wonder how much space this takes on the device. How many signatures does it keep and how often is this updated
Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not against removing the Aux port on principal or anything, but I just don't understand why we're going toward removing seemingly core hardware. Even on desktops/laptops 3.5mm audio is still used. Why do we need dongles to use core features? Especially since we're removing an "out" port, now we're reliant on a single port to manage all in and out. I don't want to carry dongles to be able to use my phone normally.
Desktops and laptops have different constraints than phones. Bluetooth uses less power (from the device), makes waterproofing easier, and frees up space for battery. I personally would prefer having a headphone jack on the phone (even though I've never used mine), but I understand why they did what they did.
Bluetooth uses less power... than what? Than a headphone jack?
Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
#188The € price is ridiculously higher than the $ price. The smaller pixel costs 799€ which includes 19% of taxes (in Germany), the 649$ does not contain taxes. Still that's a difference of 150€ on top of my hat. There's also a fee which manufactures have to pay (GEMA which collects money for artists and so on). Guess they also include that Google Home Mini in this price which is kinda dumb. Not going to buy with such a…
If that includes 19% taxes, than its a €30 or 4% difference on the pretax pricing. Not very big really. Especially, if there's other fees they pay to sell the product in your territory.
Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
#189Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still do that. You just need an adapter. The rest of us will be happy to sacrifice quality we can hardly recognize for better mobility. Also, this already happened with the Ethernet port.
Ethernet makes less sense on a mobile device, because you don’t carry routers on your body, and the standard was no where near as old. Again, removing because there was a better alternative. Adaptors are not a better alternative. Bluetooth is not a better alternative.
WiFi is in no way better than Ethernet except one: That you don't have a cable. Bluetooth headphones are no different.