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

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

#231

Post by lm28469 »

stavros wrote: post #226

But I do want performance :( Every phone I've owned becomes a dog after a few months, with apps taking tens of seconds to launch cold. I don't know if iOS does better in that regard, but it has other issues that make it painful to use as a daily driver.

> But I do want performance :( Every phone I've owned becomes a dog after a few months, with apps taking tens of seconds to launch cold.

That's a chicken and egg issue. The more performance you have the less the apps are optimized. We used to do incredible things on very limited hardware, now everything is a bloated piece of shit that uses 10-100x too much ressources

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

#232

Post by DoingIsLearning »

boomskats wrote: post #208

FWIW two things have been a game changer for me in terms of mobile UX recently: - ZMK powered super portable wireless Bluetooth split keyboards - portable headset-based displays like the Viture XR pro I am now comfortable leaving my laptop at home with zero anxiety, because I know I can fairly comfortably dive back into anything I need to from anywhere with my split 36 keys, termux, obsidian and earbuds. Yes most of…

> Portable headset-based displays like the Viture XR pro

I'm really not familiar with the physics of this. But when using your glass, the image is put in a parallax between left and right eye to 'appear' at a distance.

But does this mean that your eyes are focusing on a very nearby plane irrespective of where the image is perceived to be by your brain? As in would this strain your eyesight more?

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

#233

Post by wazoox »

Notice that generally, environmental impact of an electronic device (depending upon the country you live in) is up to 95% in its manufacturing. Therefore any electronic device should last until it's literally falling to pieces and cannot be repaired anymore.

Second, I'm currently using the OnePlus 5T I bought back in 2017 as my phone. It's perfectly fine, and never feels particularly sluggish either (except at times with LinkedIn, which is probably the trashiest app ever anyway). The only repair it ever received was a battery replacement last year.

My wife still uses the OnePlus One I bought in 2013. It's equally fine for her modest use, and it still runs (LineageOS) with its original battery for two full days without any trouble.

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

#234

Post by buro9 »

stavros wrote: post #226

But I do want performance :( Every phone I've owned becomes a dog after a few months, with apps taking tens of seconds to launch cold. I don't know if iOS does better in that regard, but it has other issues that make it painful to use as a daily driver.

I agree on not using iOS, because Firefox + Adblock + NoScript is incredible on Android.

but... Android sucks because the default permissions and business model on Android all veer towards advertising, and this is heavy on network and bandwidth as well as background processing across lots of apps... and that drains battery and performance.

I switched to GrapheneOS and just disable network on many things like Camera, etc... the Cloud AI features are not worth it... I also run web apps instead of installed apps for the vast majority of things, if an app doesn't require some hardware capability that only an app can provide then it's staying as a web app, m.uber.com works, most news websites work best as web apps with the JS disabled... I routinely get multi-day battery and stellar performance by just not running apps that are always trying to continuously exfiltrate data about me.

I've found only 2 things that don't work the same on GrapheneOS: Revolution banking just does not work at all - so I closed my account with them, and AMEX forces 2FA on every sign-in - which I can tolerate. Nothing else was impacted, everything else is an improvement in performance and battery.

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

#235

Post by polyomino »

zaptrem wrote: post #220
Tepix wrote: post #210

Until recently, the availability of software updates was a limiting factor, especially for midrange phones. (Before that, phones were so slow and had so little RAM that software updates made them unusable eventually). The mid-range Samsung A52 5G now comes with 7 years of security updates and you can get it with 8GB of RAM for less than 300€. That's a pretty good deal! You just need to replace the battery every three…

Have there been compelling use cases for on device LLMs where the value isn’t based on privacy benefits yet?

Lower latency, which can be useful for live translation or keyboard autocomplete

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

#236

Post by hilbert42 »

f6v wrote: post #160
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…

> And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone. Children who play Fortnite on the go are a much bigger market and will always be. Smartphones are content consumption devices.

"Smartphones are content consumption devices."

The point I put forward is what I and a small select section of the market wants as features—NOT what's on offer from manufacturers now.

The argument people are putting here is that manufacturers would not serve that market. These are two separate issues. Isn't that clear?

When someone makes what I want then I'll buy it. BTW, I've not suggested anything that cannot be made now with existing technology.

Instead, manufacturers are removing important features such as not including FM radio and 3.5mm headphone sockets. These are the first two specs I look for on a phone before I buy it. If they're not included I'm not interested. Full stop!

In brief, the lowest common denominator is NOT what I want. The market has to be more diverse. That in part is what the article is about and why I commented.

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

#237

Post by carlmr »

lm28469 wrote: post #231
stavros wrote: post #226

But I do want performance :( Every phone I've owned becomes a dog after a few months, with apps taking tens of seconds to launch cold. I don't know if iOS does better in that regard, but it has other issues that make it painful to use as a daily driver.

> But I do want performance :( Every phone I've owned becomes a dog after a few months, with apps taking tens of seconds to launch cold. That's a chicken and egg issue. The more performance you have the less the apps are optimized. We used to do incredible things on very limited hardware, now everything is a bloated piece of shit that uses 10-100x too much ressources

It's just Parkinson's law for computers.

> Work expands so as to fill the time available for it's completion.

Programs expand so as to use the average hardware available to developers.

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

#238

Post by boomskats »

hilbert42 wrote: post #225
boomskats wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. My phone supports UVC video input so I can plug my $25 standards compliant borescope into it, I can plug my standards compliant rme sound card into it for field recordings, and I have a bunch of input peripherals that just 'surprise work' with android now too. You should have a look at the GATT spec for bluetooth LE and the UART service. It has never been easier to build scientific devices that rely on yo…

"There are a _ton_ of scopes and stuff that sit in the prosumer space that leverage your phone" Models off phones with these features integrated please? Where can I find them on, say, GSMArena.com?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking for. Phones that support Bluetooth LE?

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

#239

Post by close04 »

codedokode wrote: post #176
close04 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I can't play Cyberpunk with desktop quality on my desktop :(.

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

#240

Post by perryizgr8 »

The problem is that phone makers will keep more and more compute-hungry software. For example, when you take a picture on a modern phone, it takes several pictures across time and with different exposures etc. and measures gyro/acc data and I don't even know what else. And then this is all combined to make an approximation of reality. If you don't buy the latest and greatest every 3-4 years, your camera will keep getting more and more outdated because all this fancy stuff won't run without 32 cores and 256 tensors and 10 GPUs or whatever.
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