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Essential Phone, available now
241–250 of 695 posts
Re: Essential Phone, available now
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
When mac books needed some pep in marketing, as sales floundered, Jobs also diverged into Titanium in lieu of faster uPs. After that wore off he went to the unwieldy 17" Mac Books. Often times Titanium is just a marketing ploy. Like titanium cards. Titanium bracelets. Etc.
And Apple moved to using aluminum from titanium in its PowerBooks (the design would later be the basis of the original MacBook Pro), in part, because the softness of of the metal, led to warps and bends in those first-gen TiBook models. I don't know how Essential is using titanium, but history certainly has examples of gadgets that suffered from using that metal over others.
...and if you believe that, I've got a bridge for sale. Titanium is many things but soft it is not. It can also be alloyed with many other metals for specific purposes. One thing it definitely is though is expensive which is most likely the reason for Apple to look for alternatives. That is actually is possible to use titanium to create form-stable notebooks can be seen by e.g. the many Thinkpads which sport titanium lids and frames. I have yet to see one of these warped or bent. This is partly due to the boxy - and with that, strong - form factor but the material plays a big role as well.
Re: Essential Phone, available now
#243Why would I spend $700+ on a phone with a dubious fate when I can spend $230 on a Moto G5 Plus and have Lineage OS running on it in no time, for a long time?
I think the entire blog post is meant to address that question. It is trying to differentiate from the cheap Android phones. For me this is the most interesting point: > Devices shouldn’t become outdated every year. They should evolve with you. Also the design looks much nicer than average cheap Android phones.
> Devices shouldn’t become outdated every year.
They only promised 3 years of security updates.
Re: Essential Phone, available now
#244I admire the gumption of making a new phone. But controlled obsolescence kills me. The real feature that improves in phones the past few years for me is the software and apps, not the hardware . My wishlist: - Give me a lighter, snappier OS. Not something clunkier and slower and uses more ram, gpu/cpu (aka battery life). - Actually support updates to the things for longer than 2-3 years. - (Not related to this phone)…
On top of that, I would add "make it 4.7 inches". When it comes to Android that is. The only current line of phones with specs I like is Xperia Z5/X Compact. First one is great, but overheats and is no longer available, the second one has a weirder design.
Re: Essential Phone, available now
#245Will it work in Europe?
Re: Essential Phone, available now
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really shouldn't be difficult, it's not as if Intel is worrying about how to support some computer sold in 2009. The reason it's difficult is because the companies have chosen to set up a short term process which means reapplying and testing hacky patches to every upgrade. If they stopped forking the linux kernel and invested in putting their systems on the mainline they could have excellent support, and dust thei…
I've often wondered why it's so difficult to make a standardized OS distribution for ARM processors. You would think it should be as simple as Google provides core OS -> manufacturers add drivers -> done (Of course this skips the "manufacturers add shitware" step). But I've been told ARM just doesn't work that way and for whatever reason that I don't completely understand, hardware can't be abstracted this way on ARM…
My understanding is that unlike the PC world where hardware can report itself or be found easily the way things tend to be connected on ARM boards make it so that's not feasible or even possible. Someone just has to tell the kernel up front what is where.
Re: Essential Phone, available now
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is the people who make software for the rest of the users, so they'll buy this phone and write software for it, making it desirable for others.
As someone who has numerous Palm/HP devices running webOS and BB10 based Blackberry Passport and is a complete sucker for hardware keyboards, let me say that this assumption is false. People don't care about physical keyboards, it is not worthy the factory/design/maintenance costs. I still love them but I understand why vendors are not investing them anymore. If "people who make software" could really influence the m…
Not to mention, why take the reliability gains we've made with these devices, likely because of the massive reduction in moving parts, and erase all that with a keyboard. An accessory seems like the right way to do this for those that really need it, and those accessories exist.
Re: Essential Phone, available now
#248I admire the gumption of making a new phone. But controlled obsolescence kills me. The real feature that improves in phones the past few years for me is the software and apps, not the hardware . My wishlist: - Give me a lighter, snappier OS. Not something clunkier and slower and uses more ram, gpu/cpu (aka battery life). - Actually support updates to the things for longer than 2-3 years. - (Not related to this phone)…
> - And physical keyboards. Something for SSH'ing with. There is no market for this product. Nobody wants it except a tiny fraction of the market who work in IT.
Not really. Manufacturers just stopped making phones with PKB because since Apple wasn't making them, they weren't worth it. It hard to estimate the demand for PKB phones when no one is making them. I'd buy one in heartbeat if one launched with low-mid end specs and less than $400.
We've constantly chosen form over functionality. Larger sized phones, fragile build materials(glass over plastic), lesser battery just so the phone can be thinner. The keyboard was given up to make room for a bigger screen and thinner body, and now writing anything more a few sentences on a phone is a pain in the ass.
Atleast in the era of dumb phones, for all the weird shit (Nokia's taco phone) that came out that time, at least the phones were distinct, you could tell them apart just by looking at them. Now they are all the same generic rectangular glass slabs that cater's to single demographic who want large screens for media consumption. What if you are not in that demographic? Well, tough luck.
I know am in the minority and it's not really Apple's fault that everyone decided to ape them, but a part of me wishes we hadn't given up the variety just to pander to the largest common denominator, even a little variation among phones would be a welcome change.
Re: Essential Phone, available now
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - And physical keyboards. Something for SSH'ing with. There is no market for this product. Nobody wants it except a tiny fraction of the market who work in IT.
Blackberry make a couple of Android handsets with physical keyboards.
KeyOne seems to be selling well, I hope they release some cheap PKB phones in the future. Even if it has low-end specs, if it is less than $300, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
Re: Essential Phone, available now
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's moot. Apple offers ~3 years of software updates included in the price of the phone. Right now, Android companies COMPLETELY FAIL to match Apple's update value. The idea that Android companies should switch to a paid update subscription model, while iDevices retain free updates for most of device life, would be a hilariously incompetent decision. "They're better than us, we know it, so why not subscribe to us and…
What confuses is me is what kind of work needs to go in to updating android on different phones? If Android is compatible with the architecture of the phone shouldn't the software update from Google work?
AFAIK, they don't use Google's software updates, because they have their own "distribution" that's mostly the same but slightly different from the vanilla Android version, so they need to merge those changes and test them before they can push the updates to the phones they made.