Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

androidauthority.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 430 posts

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#171

Post by atoav »

What astounds most ist that we have now ~16 years of Android and there is still no all around decent keyboard for power users. It seems like everybody has accepted to use Android just as a consumer OS.

When I started using Unexpected Keyboard the realization that I can just shift + arrow select text and ctrl + x cut it hit me like a bag of bricks. This is such a simple thing, but the existing story for marking and editing text is so bad on phones that I nearly forgot that just making existing shortcuts available would already be a sifnificant improvement.

Sadly unexpected keyboard has other flaws, like no prediction/correction, no swype and less typing accuracy since there are no statistics on where you hit buttons that could adjust the collision borders etc.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#172

Post by codedokode »

lisp2240 wrote: post #169

A smartphone is an appliance like a washing machine or a blender. It should just work. I will gladly pay extra for appliances that perform well. I will gladly pay extra for appliances that require no maintenance and can’t be broken. If I want something unreliable I can program or hack, I will go to a real PC.

A smartphone is first of all a data collection and ad distribution device.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#173

Post by ksp-atlas »

orf wrote: post #122
hilbert42 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Because the population of people that would actually use that functionality rounds to approximately 0." How can you say that, where are your figures/stats/evidence? For starters I'm 1 person, so the market is not O. And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone. Clearly you don't work in test and measurement. Moreover, this article alone has raised the matter of additional features. Anyway, it's only a matter of ti…

> For starters I'm 1 person, so the market is not O. And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone Of all the people you interacted with in any way, shape or form this year, what percentage of those would benefit from this? It rounds to 0, assuming you’re not a shut-in

Wouldn't any percentage below 50% round to zero?

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#174

Post by Nursie »

haltcatchfire wrote: post #164
Nursie wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Huawei P20 Pro that did much the same back in 2018. I never really used it for much, a bit of light browsing and really just as a gimmick, buit yeah, there was a desktop of sorts and you could use all the apps, and the touchpad/mouse thing worked. You could attach a bluetooth keyboard too, IIRC. Kindof a shame my iphone doesn't do this (I assume, I haven't tried), but I'm not sure if I'd use it.

iPhone has good support for peripherals, hubs and external displays, but lacks a desktop mode.

Oh interesting, I suppose I have had it wirelessly project to the tv before...

I might give it a go when I upgrade to a USB-C model.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#175

Post by geokon »

hilbert42 wrote: post #102

I find it highly annoying that these rather powerful handheld smartphone computers don't have decent port access for use with instrumentation, etc. A huge range of features comes to mind from Geiger counters, oscilloscopes, sound level measurement, light intensity, etc , etc. The potential to expand the smartphone capability is enormous yet no manufacturer has tackled it. Why not? Why aren't there multiple USB ports?…

just a guess, but I've noticed that most app development has concentrated around crossplatform frameworks/languages. If you're writing in JS or Dart or whatever you're not typically going to write a high performance app that has tight integration with an optional peripheral.

As far as I understand the weird ART vs JVM difference also means Java libs are only sometimes going to work (would love to be corrected here though)

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#176

Post by codedokode »

close04 wrote: post #167
llm_nerd wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is precisely why I would expect it to be the start of such a discussion. The "use your smartphone as your PC" thing has been attempted again and again for, as you said, 13 years. Generally it's a commercial failure because it turns out that isn't something most people want. That seems hugely important to such a conversation.

> Generally it's a commercial failure because it turns out that isn't something most people want. What the people definitely didn't want was the performance of 2011 smartphone for desktop. The use case didn't fail, that device failed because the limits at the time made the phone desktop impractical. And I remember it not being a stellar smartphone either. But every smartphone also failed until they didn't fail anymor…

> Phones today have astounding levels of performance so they can easily serve as desktops.

Can you play Cyberpunk with desktop quality on it?

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#177

Post by namaria »

ghaff wrote: post #138
cassepipe wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. One was lost watching a video in the bathtub. A wasp came very closed to my head and I dived into the water with phone in hand sadly. Another one fell off my bike phone holder while riding on old style pavement (lots of vibrations) and the car behind me rolled over it (still functional except for the screen though, I was impressed). Another was lost because I left it in a stupid place that I did not have access…

And I broke 1 phone in 15 years. Yeah, losing one every 2 years is somewhat extreme.

Seconded. Losing a phone every 2 years and the stories GP tells sound like a string of bad decisions.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#178

Post by maccard »

lisp2240 wrote: post #169

A smartphone is an appliance like a washing machine or a blender. It should just work. I will gladly pay extra for appliances that perform well. I will gladly pay extra for appliances that require no maintenance and can’t be broken. If I want something unreliable I can program or hack, I will go to a real PC.

Couldn’t agree more. The locked down nature of my iPhone is something I actively desire - the curation on the App Store isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the Wild West that is the play store. I _want_ an ecosystem where developers are forced to upgrade their apps to use the latest APIs to take advantage of the new device features.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#179

Post by pmontra »

jeroenhd wrote: post #56
jmkni wrote: post #5

With USB-C, surely we are at the point where we can plug our phones into a hub with a couple of monitors attached and get a proper desktop environment?

Samsung Dex does this pretty well, and has been for ages now. It's an undersold feature in my opinion. Samsung used to experiment with using Ubuntu for their desktop environment but they shut that down a while back (I forgot why, I guess it was too much of a pain to maintain). Microsoft tried to do it with Windows Phone years ago, but phones were way too slow and Windows on ARM was an even worse prospect at the time,…

I own a Galaxy Tab (an s 8.4?) from 2018 with Dex on Linux (or was it Linux or Dex?) It's a docker container running an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop on the Android kernel. They developed it with Canonical to be able to use the hardware of the tablet to do graphics and probably more. Then Android moved on, Ubuntu moved on and probably they would have had to pay Canonical again to keep it up to date, plus dedicating their own engineers to the project. It was axed and removed from the next update from Samsung.

It worked well but of course Android would kill any Ubuntu process at random if RAM usage reached a certain threshold, so I wouldn't use it for anything heavy. I remember I was able to run a Ruby on Rails project of mine plus emacs. Slower than my laptop but still decent. The real problem was the limited amount of RAM of the tablet and the insecurity deriving from random process terminations.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#180

Post by codedokode »

atoav wrote: post #171

What astounds most ist that we have now ~16 years of Android and there is still no all around decent keyboard for power users. It seems like everybody has accepted to use Android just as a consumer OS. When I started using Unexpected Keyboard the realization that I can just shift + arrow select text and ctrl + x cut it hit me like a bag of bricks. This is such a simple thing, but the existing story for marking and ed…

I think the reason is that after you got used to full-sized keyboards, typing on a tiny screen portion with any software keyboard is just a pain. I cannot type more than several words on a smartphone without getting annoyed.
Post reply on HN