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LG G5 modular phone: Hi-Fi DAC, battery slide out, connection interface

engadget.com

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Re: LG G5 modular phone: Hi-Fi DAC, battery slide out, connection interface

#171

Post by mikeash »

vbezhenar wrote: post #155
mikeash wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the obsession with thinness drives me batty. My iPhone barely makes it through the day sometimes. I usually have no problem, but occasionally I find myself around 9PM and my battery is down to 5% and I have to plug it in somewhere. This leads me to plug it in more than I strictly need to, just to ward off these moments. This would all become a non-issue if the battery were twice the size. Then my phone might…

There's official case for iPhone with additional battery.

Sure, but that adds substantial bulk, hurts efficiency, integrates poorly, and is stupid ugly. Not really the same as building a bigger battery into the phone itself.

Re: LG G5 modular phone: Hi-Fi DAC, battery slide out, connection interface

#172

Post by SwellJoe »

moreati wrote: post #153
SwellJoe wrote: post #94

I want a better ADC, even more than I want a better DAC (though both would be best). I'd like a high quality recording device for the field...a phone or tablet would be perfect, but there's no good way, that I know of, to get the signal into the device at high quality.

My first thought is: through the micro USB port, exploiting the OTG feature. A few variations on googling 'android external microphone' lead to http://www.androidaudiorecording.com/record-from-a-usb-micro... . Sorry if you've been down this road already.

Yeah, I've seen that one, and it's a clumsy solution, at best; it has a custom USB driver and only works with that one piece of software (or did, last time I looked at it). It's certainly better than nothing, and it's cool that something exists, but the lack of general purpose USB audio interface support in Android is frustrating as hell, especially since iOS has had it for so long.

Re: LG G5 modular phone: Hi-Fi DAC, battery slide out, connection interface

#173

Post by nix0n »

shams93 wrote: post #118

I wonder if we'll finally get sub 2ms audio latency from an android device via this dac, or whether its just going to be very nice quality audio with 100ms latency.

Switching the DAC will only help with quality, not with latency, because the latency is a software issue. Samsung has implemented software workarounds to skip some parts of the audio processing path and reduce latency, but I'm not sure how low it gets. See http://superpowered.com/androidaudiopathlatency and https://github.com/felixpalmer/android-visualizer/issues/5 for more info on all this.

Re: LG G5 modular phone: Hi-Fi DAC, battery slide out, connection interface

#174

Post by omonra »

namocat wrote: post #126
omonra wrote: post #116

I've been a loyal Samsung owner since S3. Didn't upgrade to S6 because they dropped removable battery. Was waiting to see if it's brought back with S7 - it's not. Will be getting this phone as an upgrade. For me removable battery and SD Card in a flagship phone are a must. Then comes camera quality, then price.

I was in the same boat as you (loyal Samsung owner, still using my trusty S3) until a few months ago when I decided to go for last year's LG flagship, the G4, and I gotta say I've been extremely displeased with LG. Particularly, the way LG Mobile has handled the many problems that have plagued the G4. Apparently, catastrophic bootloop failures of the G4 were such a widespread problem, that a petition has so far gaine…

Thank you.

Funny enough I experienced a similar issue with my S4 a few years ago. One day it just died - no messages, no nothing. Completely out of the blue, no falls or anything.

I took it to Samsung repair, they sent it off and returned it to me in a few weeks. I looked on the forums and apparently it was a fairly common (ie thousands of people affected) issue. Same reason - a random hardware chip malfunction that manifests itself after 6-9 months of use.

I think this was the issue: http://forums.androidcentral.com/telus-samsung-galaxy-s4/380...

So basically I think any manufacturer can fall prey to this - a faulty component that takes months to manifest itself.

Re: LG G5 modular phone: Hi-Fi DAC, battery slide out, connection interface

#175

Post by nv-vn »

dandrews wrote: post #76
tdicola wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is a problem because?

Because (at least on my Moto X 2012, Android v5.1 Lollipop) rebooting can take upwards of ten minutes. Some OTA updates apparently trigger an 80-some-odd module "optimizing" run, which I presume is ART doing its AOT thing. If you're in a hurry to use your phone this can be maddening.

My Note 3 takes about 25 seconds to boot up completely. Newer devices tend to be faster booting up, so I don't think it will be a problem for the G5.

Re: LG G5 modular phone: Hi-Fi DAC, battery slide out, connection interface

#177

Post by ryukafalz »

Grazester wrote: post #170
ryukafalz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how long you plan to keep your phone. Lithium-ion cells have finite lifespans, and if you plan to keep your phone for years at a time, or if (like me) you tend to purchase slightly older phones, removable batteries are a godsend. FWIW, though I'm not happy about the non-removable battery, I currently use a Nexus 4. It's gotten worse over time, but I used to be able to comfortably get about 2 days of runtime o…

You are able to get two days of run time on a Nexus 4? I couldn't achieve this even when new. Replacing the battery on a Nexus 4 is a trivial affair(I am not saying this to take away from your non removal battery point but letting you know its pretty easy).

Two days of battery life was while using Sailfish rather than Android. I'd imagine part of that is due to the fact that Sailfish doesn't have drivers for the GPS chip in the Nexus 4, and therefore would never power it up.

Aside from that, I still get decent battery life out of it even in Android by carefully policing what runs on it. I have very few applications on my phone that run in the background, and I don't have the Google apps installed - I use microG instead, which is a FOSS implementation of (a subset of) Play Services.

I'm aware that the vast majority of users probably wouldn't like using their phone the way I do. That said, this should make it clear that battery life is very much affected by the software you run.

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