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Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

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Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one doesn't seem like purely on Android. I've never seen a device without Bluetooth bugs. The protocol is so complicated and implementation relies so much on chips that never get fixes that I'm surprised it works anywhere.

I wasn't criticizing Android , I was criticizing Android phones . I'm sure iPhone doesn't implement the protocol perfectly either, but we certainly observed fewer issues. Whether that's because our BT stack vendors did more testing with Apple devices or because Apple has fewer bugs or both, I'm not sure.

From my experience Apple’s Bluetooth stack is more stable than a typical Android stack and miles better than the Windows one. I have so many headphones that can pair with a Windows laptop exactly once, getting them to work again requires a full reset on both sides every time.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#302
post #196

I remember BREW but barely used more than the demos: we were in San Diego and Qualcomm was trying to get local developers interested. We had a few clients considering it but the terms we were getting were eye-watering: if memory serves, it was $50k or more per carrier just to be listed for sale, plus a big chunk of the purchase price, and that was just a floor — the carriers wanted to adjust up based on your perceive…

The BREW conference charged $5k each to attend. We would come up with speaking topics to get gratis badges...

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#303
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Bluetooth issues Aren't they rewriting this thing in Rust? > - Camera is hit and miss, even after the renewed API Give it time. CameraX is already vastly better than what we had before. > - Apps randomly killed on the background Up to OEMs. > - Intents that don't launch as expected ? > - NDK debugging that cannot attach to the server running on the device Welp. > - Keyboard handling Fixed. > - Perfectly working c…

- Devices never see updates, other than a select few flagship models - It does not matter if the blame is on Google or OEMs, it is still fragmented

Circular arguments are circular.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confirming #2: I live in Switzerland (low crime rate etc...) but I would not even dream of leaving my phone visible in the car. Btw. in the 90' I used to detach each-single-time that I parked the car the front panel of the car's radio to then carry it with me (leaving the storage box in front of the passenger seat open, to show that I didn't just put it in there) to discourage people from breaking into the car to ext…

The detachable faceplate for anti-theft reasons was (is?) a very common feature for aftermarket radios/head-units/whatever in the US. Built-in ones have just increasingly moved to not being a discrete, accessible, interchangeable component, another way around. I still remember when my dad had bought an aftermarket tape-deck-only radio, a Sony I believe, well into the era of the ubiquitous CD player (he just wanted a…

To this day I’d be afraid to park my car out in the open with that piece of hardware attached to it.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#305

I worked at a startup, Javaground [1], where we ported and developed games for J2ME phones. We had a room full of dressers full of all the different mobile phones of the day. Each phone had different implementation quirks, such as variable audio delay when playing a file, audio/image formats that were faster/slower, odd button events (some used press, some used ondown, some had no ondown, etc). A lot of our work was…

I worked with a few people from JG. I also worked on a bunch of J2me games. It was an interesting time to be in mobile.

I was just out of college, like the 5th employee at Irvine, a lowbie gamedev. I remember doing some collab with nearby studios (like WF), one where my future wife worked!

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#306

I worked at a startup, Javaground [1], where we ported and developed games for J2ME phones. We had a room full of dressers full of all the different mobile phones of the day. Each phone had different implementation quirks, such as variable audio delay when playing a file, audio/image formats that were faster/slower, odd button events (some used press, some used ondown, some had no ondown, etc). A lot of our work was…

I remember Javaground!! We actually worked with the BREW platform, so we only had 50 phones instead of the 300 java ones. Lol, too funny

Cool! The BREW automation guy at JG was a genius C coder. Those phones seemed more capable in general...but just as quirky.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#308

I worked on a J2ME app that needed to access location on phones without GPS, I was in touch with the operator and got a list of cell ids with lat, lon. With that I created a daemon in Symbian that would query the cell id and open up a socket server to give it to the J2ME app. With that we developed an app to request a taxi service, but none of the taxi companies wanted it. Some of the complaints were: 1. GPRS data pl…

To be fair, all 3 of those are valid complaints. #1 was true all the way till ~10 years ago when 3G became popular. #2 is still true is most 'urban' areas. People just take their phones with them when they get out of their cars. #3 is interesting - I think some regions had tried to ban mounting phones on the dashboard, but at this point, they must have given up

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Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#309
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true in my experience. I didn't stop directing cabbies to my destination until Uber and Lyft became commonplace and I never had to use a cab service again. In the major urban areas I've lived, every cab drive would start with "take this street to that street" or "head towards major landmark." Even in cities with decent grids you couldn't trust a cabbie to take the fastest route.

Being able to get to you and actually taking a good route are two different things though. How did Cabbies know where to show up when called? Or did they not? I only ever took Taxis from places I could flag them down pre-Uber.

Most taxi drivers required a license - and that required passing an exam. Big part of the exam was knowledge of town.

People also could tell the "main" roads, which would be known.

On a side note: my usual experience with taxis (not uber) is that they first ask the question to figure out if you know the town or not and then they know very well what is the longest route. Also even when asked for estimate of price it would always be the top.

Big reason why uber is so popular: you wont get a ling ride through whole town and you can rate the driver.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#310
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