501–510 of 885 posts
It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones. So much of this product page is focused on new software functions that may have some vague relationship with the slightly upgraded hardware, but that could mostly be released to existing phones. Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very li…
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With cloud backup... this isn't as defensible as it used to be. Today, Apple/Google could design a phone with (a) a user-replacable battery & (b) no flash, only RAM + removable SD storage + long-life EEPROM. Boot loader, SD validator, and minimal image retrieval goes in EEPROM. Storage contents continually backed up, encrypted, to cloud with delta updates. Customer prompted to replace SD card and device reimagined wh…
That's honestly not a good user experience. Having to buy a new sd card routinely, and better hope you system can detect impending as card failures accurately. Compared to 5 years of good on board storage performance, with no little bits to accidentally lose. And a gradually degradation of performance after that. They could possibly design a phone the way you outlined, but people won't buy it.
There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large and create inefficiencies in the phone shell (even M.2 2230, when you take into account the mounting mechanism), and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.
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> People on average change their phones every 3 years People in my circles seem to use their phones for 6-7 years atleast.
This figure sourcing gallup has nearly half of Americans replacing their phone "as soon as their carrier allows it": https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/15/how-often-...
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If we're looking at older phones with removable storage, it usually limited what could be put on the SD card. And in the end the OS and system libraries were still on the on-board storage which would wear out over the years. And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliabili…
should just use m.2 2230 nvme. should be user replacable, its okay if it needs to be disassembled and its a 30 minute job, but that would solve a whole lot.
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Waiting when button phones will become the trend again
Since buying a larger-screen e-ink device, I have been wanting to go back to a dumb phone. But just a few features preclude this. 1. Dialing in the dumb phone. No dumb phones support CardDav syncing. 2. Very few dumb phones can function as wifi hotspots for the e-ink device. 3. Few dumb phones can record calls. 4. I forget what eight was for... seriously I had one or two other issues but I don't remember what they we…
6.7 inch screen. My Pixel 5 is already big. This one is an inch bigger in my hand and in my pockets. Price increase. 875€ in Europe. The Pixel 5 was 630€. Do you really get 40% more phone?
Been holding on to my Pixel 5 with GrapheneOS for a while hoping a smaller Pixel is available. I might consider the non-Pro since it now has a 120Hz screen and is smaller.
From a friend who used to use GrapheneOS and flashed back.
You want that guy pushing code to your phone?
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Older phones don't get significantly cheaper when bought new, used ones are a gamble, and the savings don't go that far anyway when you consider the amount of updates you'll be receiving diminishes.
Pixels are supported for 7 years, starting with the 8. P6+ for 5 years Also I'm talking like a couple months later, not a whole year.
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Cars still release on a yearly schedule decades later and they change almost nothing each year.
Well no. Car models have generations and mid-generation updates (aka facelift). It's very rare that there are any updates at all within the same generation. Year in model designation is just "ha, look at his looser driving last year BMW" and to show when car left assembly line. There are some examples where the same generation had a significant upgrade without a facelift, but those are rare. One example I could think…
Everyone can tell the age of every car [1] simply by the license plate (used to be in 1 year increments, since the early 2000s it's been in 6 month increments).
[1]: Yes, yes, before some is pedantic, imported cars don't come under this scheme, and self-assembled cars also have a unique form that mean you can't tell their age.
This is a meta comment, but I think it's extraordinary that we're only 15ish years from the first smartphone release and we've already reached the "boring" incremental improvement phase for these tiny pocket supercomputers. Consider how long it took PCs to reach the same stage (with a fraction of the adoption). It was like 20 years from Kenbak-1 to the 90s PC era.
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My experience with my own pixel 7 pro and a pixel 5 has been that these devices are an order of magnitude lower in build quality than Samsung or iPhones. I really, really wanted to be happy with them but they've been a never ending source of frustration. My pixel 5 just stopped turning on one day about 2 years in, and my pixel 7 pro had the volume and power buttons fall out about 3 weeks in (not due to a drop, after…
My wife and I have apparently been lucky enough to buy the 6 variant then- we've had nothing but good luck with ours, and we haven't been babying them either. I miss some of the nice touches LG added on top of stock Android, but the hardware has met all expectations so far.