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Rotary Cellphone

justine-haupt.com

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Re: Rotary Cellphone

#161

Post by dwild »

jfim wrote: post #158
dwild wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my first Android smartphone, an LG Optimus One P500, I had no trouble to reach 4-5 days and the battery was far from humungous, only 1500 mAh. Most things were not running but I was using it to text quite often during the day. I don't believe there was any wizardry on there. We see the battery on a picture, if it comes from Adafruit, that seems like the 2500mAh one they sell. There's no reasons that thing can't la…

> I don't believe there was any wizardry on there. A lot of that wizardry is not really user-visible. Ensuring that chips spend more time in sleep mode, coalescing events so that wakeups happen together, ensuring that there are no components passively draining power, etc.

For me, wizardry would be to go beyond what any other manufacturer would do. No one is considering Android phones to be optimizing specifically toward battery life and that phone was the cheapest of the cheapest, I paid 50$ for it, without any contract in 2012.

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#162

Post by nicbar »

24hrs battery?!?! For a low tech solution with no draining high res touchscreen and all the other battery hungry features of a modern smartphone this is shockingly poor. I thought it was going to be 2 weeks!

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#163

Post by taneq »

dwild wrote: post #161
jfim wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe there was any wizardry on there. A lot of that wizardry is not really user-visible. Ensuring that chips spend more time in sleep mode, coalescing events so that wakeups happen together, ensuring that there are no components passively draining power, etc.

For me, wizardry would be to go beyond what any other manufacturer would do. No one is considering Android phones to be optimizing specifically toward battery life and that phone was the cheapest of the cheapest, I paid 50$ for it, without any contract in 2012.

World's pretty big. A one-in-a-million engineer is pretty damn special compared to the rest of us, and there's 7000 of them out there. Cheap-per-unit hardware can have paradoxically high development budgets since volume is expected to be so high. We probably all have slightly unrealistic how hard it is to design even a "crap" piece of equipment.

It's like how non-software people can't fathom that it costs $50k to build a relatively simple phone app when MS Office only costs a couple of hundred bucks.

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#164

Post by therealidiot »

defnotarobot wrote: post #157
dublin wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old GTE payphones up in Georgetown, Tx (suburb of Austin, now) when I was a kid would let you dial with the switchhook - no coins required. Agreed, zeroes were a pain, but this was partially compensated for by the fact that 5-digit dialing worked for any local number, e.g. 3-1234 got you 863-1234. Interestingly, most VoIP adapters support the pulse dialing of an old phone, but very few have the cojones to actuall…

I've seen some grandstreams that'll run a ringer.

Second this, I've had no trouble ringing an old GPO 746 telephone (and very loudly) with a Grandstream HT802

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#165

Post by TrickyRick »

rsync wrote: post #91
TrickyRick wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone not familiar with morse or pulse dialing, how does one do that?

You click the handset down, like you are hanging up the phone, but just very briefly. So think of the cradle switches - what "hangs up" the phone - as a button, and you just click that button (quickly) for '1' and then you pause and hit it twice in very rapid succession for '2' ... You need to be on a POTS line to do this, of course, but it will work even today. Even if you have no dialing mechanism, you can dial the…

Ah, thanks! I grew up using a rotary dial phone but of course was too young to think that much about how it actually works. Learned something new today!

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#168

Post by cptskippy »

nerfhammer wrote: post #118
cptskippy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When cellphones first came out, they eschewed classic ringers to sound modern and fresh. As soon as they started offering custom ringtones, I loaded up sounds from a classic TV and Movie sound effects library onto my Nokia. It included a Rotary Phone sound that became my standard ringer up until I started leaving my phone permanently on silent. I can't find the sound fx library online anymore but it had all sorts of…

I always wondered if Apple deliberately tried to kill wacky ringtones by having every default ringtone suck except for the standard simulated landline phone ring so that everyone would just choose that one. But these days everyone just keeps their phone on silent anyway...

I feel like that wasn't an option initially and that I was relieved when but also offended when everyone started using the fake phone sound.

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#169

Post by jfim »

dwild wrote: post #161
jfim wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe there was any wizardry on there. A lot of that wizardry is not really user-visible. Ensuring that chips spend more time in sleep mode, coalescing events so that wakeups happen together, ensuring that there are no components passively draining power, etc.

For me, wizardry would be to go beyond what any other manufacturer would do. No one is considering Android phones to be optimizing specifically toward battery life and that phone was the cheapest of the cheapest, I paid 50$ for it, without any contract in 2012.

The problem is that this wizardry is not usually user visible, and doesn't have much of a correlation with the device price or operating system.

If anything, it's even possible that the cheapest phone has the most engineering done on it to optimize the battery life, due to the fact that reducing the battery size (and resulting cheaper BOM) on a cheap device that has millions of units sold is worth the additional engineering time to reduce power consumption.

Re: Rotary Cellphone

#170

Post by moisto »

That is awesome. I remember dialing our beige rotary phone for my friend when he came over after school... Haha he was afraid to dial it for about a year.

(Scared of looking dumb, I guess) But aside from choking on our tears and those shameless bellyaches, we didn't give him any grief. This would have been probably 1994 - 2000... when my folks upgraded to touch tone and answering machine :)

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