41–50 of 67 posts
While I'd love to see different form factors being successful, steer clear of Unihertz.
I don't understand how the smartphone market is so enormous but the variety is so small. Why do I have to carry around a phone over twice as tall as it is wide when the space my thumb can reach is roughly circular? If I'm holding my phone balanced in my hand I can neither reach the navigation area at the bottom nor the notification area at the top. If I get a phone small enough to reach the whole screen it's so narro…
This phone is 16:9: 480*16/9 = 853.333.
Anybody ever switch from iPhone to android back and forth? I’m Apple products top to bottom but wouldn’t hate being able to switch to something like this for a few weeks at a time to change my habits…but it just seems gnarly and painful to make that kind of switch given how deep I am into Apple ecosystem (photos, iMessage, etc)
There's a handful of apps that aren't available on one or another. I really like f-droid, too, and I wish that apple had a free software directory somewhere.
I find Android Auto less finicky than CarPlay and Google Assistant more useful than Siri. But it feels like voice assistants are actually getting dumber as time goes on.
But eventually I get frustrated and switch to another phone, there's always something to complain about.
I'm still using my Palm Phone, as I find it better looking and I think the form factor is nicer than the Unihertz phones. I am able to type pretty easily with Microsoft's swipe text keyboard. But as it was not particularly fast in 2018, it's only a matter of time until software becomes too slow to use on the phone. Even opening the text messaging app has a visual lag nowadays. The battery life is also not great; I do…
- The internal databases (such as the messages database) growing larger than the devs intended
- Not enough free storage space to comfortably allow swap files
- 3rd party background processes taking over
Bad code can sometimes happen (usually “just” memory leaks requiring a reboot), but what we usually think of as a rule (“old devices are slower”) is manufacturers pushing more and more features on to the device until it can no longer keep up.
You know, I like it. But using an on-screen keyboard on that would be exhausting. Also many apps are built with at least 5” screen real estate in mind - so with the keyboard up, I wonder if it would be annoying to type a response/comment. I know I struggled with an OG iPhone SE, and that experience is the source of my concern here. I imagine the target audience probably won’t write lengthy emails on this thing. Eithe…
No one seems to question whether a qwerty keyboard is a good fit for this. Everyone somehow accepts that as the only way. But in reality, it doesn't pass even the slightest scrutiny. It's qwerty because that's the layout most people are familiar with from computer keyboards. It's not optimized to take advantage of the touchscreen hardware. Instead, it's a layout that works beautifully for full hands, crammed into a screen where you have use it with just two thumbs that often miss the tiny keys.
I tried to rethink touchscreen text input once[1] but this prototype ended up having such a steep learning curve that even I myself switched back to qwerty. I might try it again sometime in the future but I'm also open to ideas.
[1] https://twitter.com/grishka11/status/1517431598857302019
Does the phone screen PWM free?
Even my Pixel phone has visible PWM at anything less than 100% brightness, and my iPhone has visible PWM at anything below 50%. :(
I just want a dumb phone which does simple SMS and phone calls, but every brand I try has weird glitches that mess up texting. I just want an oldschool nokia
I believe this is the page you're looking for: https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/0920BDAE-2CCA-43D5-A91F-B...
Anybody ever switch from iPhone to android back and forth? I’m Apple products top to bottom but wouldn’t hate being able to switch to something like this for a few weeks at a time to change my habits…but it just seems gnarly and painful to make that kind of switch given how deep I am into Apple ecosystem (photos, iMessage, etc)
Link to my experience if you’re interested: https://rickytakkar.com/blog_smartphone_detox.html
Anybody ever switch from iPhone to android back and forth? I’m Apple products top to bottom but wouldn’t hate being able to switch to something like this for a few weeks at a time to change my habits…but it just seems gnarly and painful to make that kind of switch given how deep I am into Apple ecosystem (photos, iMessage, etc)
The main issue is that most apps require location services or other google stuff that also needlessly sends private data to google. (There are attempts to reimplement the location services api, but they were all flaky for me).
It’s not just that one service, and in practice apps will crash on startup for a week or so, then work, then regress again.
The second problem is that you have to pick third party apps with reasonable privacy practices, and those are buried in the app store search rankings (FDroid makes them easier to find.)
If you don’t care about privacy, then you might have a passable experience under android. The main advantages I noticed were that you can run emulators, and that it is easy to pirate abandonware. (I have a BB-8 sphero, and they didn’t renew the IP license with lucas arts, mostly bricking it. On android, it is possible to pirate the old bundled software. On iOS it is not.)