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Google Nexus 5x and 6P

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Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#261

Post by rsync »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #205
rsync wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The higher end market has shown it doesn't care about SD cards and, honestly, I think for good reason: their user experience has always been terrible." But that's just an easy software fix away. There is nothing inherent to SD cards (or removable storage in general) that makes it a tough UI case. It's pretty simple, actually,

> There is nothing inherent to SD cards (or removable storage in general) that makes it a tough UI case. It's pretty simple, actually, See, you're thinking in terms of UI but I'm talking about user experience (which isn't just UI). It sounds like they essentially fixed the UI type of issues in Android M but SD cards are still slower, once you install it you really don't want to ever remove it or if you do god knows w…

Well, if android phones still had the ability to masquerade as a USB drive (in order to move files/photos/whatever) on and off, then I could see leaving the SD card in place forever.

But android phones don't currently have the ability to behave as a simple USB drive when you plug them into the computer.

So if you're even a little bit discerning, and you refuse to install silly helper apps and photo-importers and android-buddy programs on your computers, you need some other (sane) way to move files on and off the phone - and that is the SD card.

They're just files. You don't need a little helper app or to open up iPhoto and "import" or any of this silliness. You just need a dumb block device that you can move back and forth.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#262

Post by mjrpes »

mkozlows wrote: post #200
shadeless wrote: post #84

As an owner of Nexus 5 I must say I'm a bit disappointed with this announcement. I was looking forwards to upgrading my almost two year old phone to Nexus 5x, but there doesn't seem to be a good reason unless Nexus 5 stops getting new Android updates. They have the same resolution, same amount of memory, same amount of storage. I don't shoot video, and I probably won't use fingerprint reader - but I do use wireless c…

So the thing is, the Nexus 5 was a near-perfect phone (especially considering it was released two years ago), and it's totally reasonable to think it's still doing the job very well -- it is. But that's a fact about the N5, not the N5X/6P. I mean, what would you want from a new phone that would show up on a spec sheet? Faster? Check, both of these are. The 808/810 aren't gigantic generational leaps over the 800, but…

Occasionally, my Nexus 5 is dead in the morning because the phone was not perfectly placed on the wireless charger. Until Google expands the charging area on the phone to eliminate this problem, I don't mind going back to wired charging.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#263

Post by DannyBee »

inversionOf wrote: post #219
dozy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the improved 808 SoC at 20nm manufacturing process should offer better battery life over the 800 in the N5, even if they had the same battery capacity (which they don't, so it's a double-whammy there).

The 808 is also a big little architecture, with two A57 cores and four A53 cores. The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings. As a Nexus 5 user I'm pleased with most of the changes and non-changes. 2GB is fine for a smartphone, and an image sensor with more than double the light capture area per pixel is brilliant, and if it delivers the better photographs wil…

"The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings."

non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers.

There reason why is pretty simple.

In an ideal world, you don't want anything running at all. You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". What you want is to wake up, do whatever work is needed as fast as possible, and go back to sleep. Period. Sleeping chips are lower power, by far, than idling chips.

If it's faster to do that work with an A57, it'll generally give you better battery life to do that. Again, this is right now, based on perf per watt/blah blah blah. Maybe someday, in the future, a53's will be so low power vs a57 that doing something else makes sense. But it's not true now, AFAIK.

Instead, they make big-little because they can't really increase the speed of the higher end cores more without increasing power usage too much.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#264

Post by mkozlows »

mattmaroon wrote: post #251
mkozlows wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the thing is, the Nexus 5 was a near-perfect phone (especially considering it was released two years ago), and it's totally reasonable to think it's still doing the job very well -- it is. But that's a fact about the N5, not the N5X/6P. I mean, what would you want from a new phone that would show up on a spec sheet? Faster? Check, both of these are. The 808/810 aren't gigantic generational leaps over the 800, but…

I love wireless charging, but my Nexus 6 has such horrible battery life, and charges so much faster wired, that I end up using a cable a few times a day. Especially in my car. I can pretty much only get away with using a Qi charger at bedtime. So to me the USB C is a big win.

Yeah, I suspect that was a big part of their thought here -- USB-C charging is very fast, and whatever marginal convenience win you get from wireless charging would almost certainly be overshadowed by the speed of wired charging.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#266

Post by moultano »

dpark wrote: post #245
mayoff wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android and iOS HDR systems take multiple pictures very rapidly at different exposures and knit them together. You can't manually take the same “input” pictures as rapidly as an HDR system.

Do you have a source for that? I've also been under the impression that HDR in most phones is just a gimmick that operates on a single exposure.

Here's the google research blog post about it. http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and...

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#267

Post by moultano »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #227
moultano wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HDR isn't a gimmick, it dramatically improves the picture quality. You get the effect of a super-long exposure on noise level and dynamic range, but with image stabilization, and a compromise on the moving objects in the scene.

HDR is a gimmick in the sense that it just takes information from the sensor to bring out highlights. This is the sort of thing that can be done in post-processing on any RAW image. Its not a feature of the camera itself.

That's not how it works. Here's the google research blog post about it. http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and...

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#268

Post by noja »

mjrpes wrote: post #262
mkozlows wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the thing is, the Nexus 5 was a near-perfect phone (especially considering it was released two years ago), and it's totally reasonable to think it's still doing the job very well -- it is. But that's a fact about the N5, not the N5X/6P. I mean, what would you want from a new phone that would show up on a spec sheet? Faster? Check, both of these are. The 808/810 aren't gigantic generational leaps over the 800, but…

Occasionally, my Nexus 5 is dead in the morning because the phone was not perfectly placed on the wireless charger. Until Google expands the charging area on the phone to eliminate this problem, I don't mind going back to wired charging.

Get a better wireless charger with multiple coils.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#269

Post by bad_user »

zanny wrote: post #125
com2kid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to couple of GBs Android phones came with just 3 or so years ago, 32GB is a lot. For anything except Video content (or the need for several months of offline music) 32GB is plenty.

Meanwhile, I got a base model Iphone 3gs back in 2009 that had 16GB minimum storage. And 32GB is plenty except for X Y and Z (where Y is large app collections of games [Hearthstone alone is like 1.5GB on mobile] and Z is music collections where you don't want to spend $50 a month in data fees for things you have on your home hard drive) which precludes anyone using those from buying these devices. All the cell compan…

The iPhone 6 still starts from 16 GB, which I found very odd, as these days the minimum should be 32 GB. Like the Nexus 6 had, so now we are talking about a regression in the Nexus line.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#270

Post by inversionOf »

DannyBee wrote: post #263
inversionOf wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 808 is also a big little architecture, with two A57 cores and four A53 cores. The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings. As a Nexus 5 user I'm pleased with most of the changes and non-changes. 2GB is fine for a smartphone, and an image sensor with more than double the light capture area per pixel is brilliant, and if it delivers the better photographs wil…

"The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings." non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers. There reason why is pret…

You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload".

Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question.

An A53 has a much lower ceiling, but a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57. Yes, if you want to run a benchmark the A53 is not a good bet (and is generally worse in a workload power usage), but it is a very good bet for most real world usage.

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