21–30 of 111 posts
The ui developments are obnoxious. And there are weird delays. And it gets hot in unexpected new ways. Seriously considering Mobian. But my banking app.
I'm still "clinging" to my Pixel 6 Pro. I have an unboxed pixel 8 pro from 2 years ago. My corporate contract subsidizes a new phone every two years from the time of contract renewal. I really think the phone update cycle needs to be lengthened, and that updates are so slightly incremental. I would like to dip my toes into the fold phone pond, but that seems excessive. In November, Vodafone will call me and ask me wh…
Why would you not sell the unused phone instead of it sitting in a box depreciating?
Why in the world I would buy a phone (any not just Google) that costs north of $800 is beyond me unless I want to signal my purchasing power. If utility is my metric and not outward signalling and flex, I find this worst deployment of my funds. So called "budget" phones these days have OLED screens some even come with 120Hz displays (beyond me why someone would want that) and plenty of compute and memory. You want ca…
They run promos around the clock. iPhones OTOH are never discounted.
Why in the world I would buy a phone (any not just Google) that costs north of $800 is beyond me unless I want to signal my purchasing power. If utility is my metric and not outward signalling and flex, I find this worst deployment of my funds. So called "budget" phones these days have OLED screens some even come with 120Hz displays (beyond me why someone would want that) and plenty of compute and memory. You want ca…
Why in the world I would buy a phone (any not just Google) that costs north of $800 is beyond me unless I want to signal my purchasing power. If utility is my metric and not outward signalling and flex, I find this worst deployment of my funds. So called "budget" phones these days have OLED screens some even come with 120Hz displays (beyond me why someone would want that) and plenty of compute and memory. You want ca…
"Buy a camera" doesn't work because (a) I don't want to pocket two devices, (b) most point-and-shoot dedicated cameras that are actually better are more bulky, too, (c) even entry-level good digital cameras are >$500 (e.g. a ZV-1F or something), so even the combo with a midrange phone often comes out more expensive and (d) a seperate camera makes it really annoying to send photos anywhere on the go.
That said: I came away fairly unhappy with the Pixel 8 Pro camera, which my book has a too editorialized post-processing look that I simply don't like. In retrospect, I think I should have gone for the Xperia in that generation, which appears to have been the last phone with high-end smartphone camera gear that took neutral-looking shots. My S21, despite having a worse sensor and optics, took subjectively nicer photos.
I've now updated my definition of "maximum phone camera" to be more choosy ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are calling 'installing an app on your own phone without involvement of the vendor' 'sideloading' then you are complicit.
I like this point very much. That the term "sideloading" has normalized treating this as a special case is a problem. It's unlikely the terminology can be rolled back at this point, but occasionally reflecting on this is useful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The AI tax is crazy, Pixels now reserve 3.5GB of RAM to keep Googles local models permanently loaded regardless of how much you use them, or whether you use them at all. The base Pixel 10 has 12GB of RAM so that's nearly a third set aside for something you may never use! Last year they had the relative sense to only enable that "feature" on the higher end SKUs with 16GB of RAM, while the lower end SKUs with 12GB woul…
That is wild. And so disrespectful of apps that may need that extra memory. I wonder if GrapheneOS will also suffer this memory overhead, once they do support this newest Android. Or possibly allow disabling it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this point very much. That the term "sideloading" has normalized treating this as a special case is a problem. It's unlikely the terminology can be rolled back at this point, but occasionally reflecting on this is useful.
It sure can. I’m installing most of my stuff from F-Droid nowadays and I’m sure as hell confused why would anybody call this “sideloading”.
Why in the world I would buy a phone (any not just Google) that costs north of $800 is beyond me unless I want to signal my purchasing power. If utility is my metric and not outward signalling and flex, I find this worst deployment of my funds. So called "budget" phones these days have OLED screens some even come with 120Hz displays (beyond me why someone would want that) and plenty of compute and memory. You want ca…