51–60 of 109 posts
Yikes. I'm not a fan of the design because I like my phone to be able to sit flat on surfaces.
At least this can sit flat on one axis and should stay put when you tap anywhere on the screen, unlike phones with camera bumps in the corner that rock back and forth diagonally
Unrelated to this article specifically, but the biggest thing I'm looking forward to with the Pixel 6 is the improved updates timeline, as Google has said they will provide updates for at least 5 years, which puts them more in-line with Apple. Previous Pixels worked great but then inexplicably lost OS updates after only a few years.
Amortized cost on the update cycle of Pixel was pretty similar to iPhone(at least in some parts of the world). But I am glad that they are doing longer updates. I just wish batteries become replaceable again, my phone is 3.5 years old and the only thing that is noticeably worse is battery life. If we are gunning for longer update cycles, batteries should ideally be replaceable. I sincerely hope some big country takes…
Weirdly my 3.5 year old phone actually has about the same battery life as it started with. As android 3.5 years ago was terrible at battery management, so software updates have compensated for battery degradation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Qualcomm will only ever ship one kernel version for a given SoC and never try to upstream support. Google uses LTS Linux kernels for Android, and once upstream stops supporting a version, the phone usually stops getting support shortly after.
Last I checked, the postmarketOS folks were working on submitting drivers for older devices to the mainline kernel, with some notable successes.
Qualcomm (and MediaTek, etc.) fork the latest LTS kernel or android common kernel, hack it up for that SoC, and dump that on vendors as the msmXXXX kernel.
They'll rebase on top of upstream or android common kernel patches (of that version) for the contracted lifespan, and then pretend that SoC didn't exist.
From the Verge article it seems the CPU in SoC would be some licensed spec based on Exynos, so I am guessing we aren't going to see CPU performance close to A series processors, but it does seem like a promising start. Google has an incentive to go all in on CPU design as that helps their data centers and GCP both, so we might see significant gains over time. I had to buy a new phone and I am really happy that Pixel…
> Google has an incentive to go all in on CPU design as that helps their data centers and GCP both, so we might see significant gains over time. It seems that CPU design for phones and for data centres are quite different problems, or do you see them as facets of the same problem?
I imagine I'm in the minority but I'd rather have a phone a fraction of a millimeter thicker that has a flush back. At this point it's getting out of hand.
Why? What's the useful advantage to a flush back? I don't really see any. As long as I can hold the phone, and it can lie on a table or stand without wobbling, it seems to do what it needs to. It's not like you're stacking phones on top of each other the way you do books or magazines. (And heck if you work in repair or provisioning and actually do stack phones, it's easy enough to turn every other one 180°.) Also I d…
Unrelated to this article specifically, but the biggest thing I'm looking forward to with the Pixel 6 is the improved updates timeline, as Google has said they will provide updates for at least 5 years, which puts them more in-line with Apple. Previous Pixels worked great but then inexplicably lost OS updates after only a few years.
Amortized cost on the update cycle of Pixel was pretty similar to iPhone(at least in some parts of the world). But I am glad that they are doing longer updates. I just wish batteries become replaceable again, my phone is 3.5 years old and the only thing that is noticeably worse is battery life. If we are gunning for longer update cycles, batteries should ideally be replaceable. I sincerely hope some big country takes…
"Tensor"? Google makes some great stuff but I really wish their product naming conventions weren't so confusing. First they have the Nexus 7, Nexus 4, Nexus 10, and then ... Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9, ... oh wait they aren't versions, they are number of inches ... -____- And then they have Google Hangouts, Google Hangouts Meet, google Meet, Google Chat, Google Hangouts Dialer, Google Duo, Google Uno, uh .... And then…
(Disc: Work for Google, not on Pixels)
I read the entire blog post and I don't understand the fanfare, it's a custom SoC, presumably to rival Apple's M1. I don't see anything innovative about this, besides heralding "begun, the neural net wars have". What is the benefit of having all of the ML bits on device? Can models leverage them post training?
Reduced latency. Which has an apparent performance boost versus sending data to Google for processing and waiting for a response. Potentially improved privacy (this is how Apple tries to sell it). Less data has to leave the phone to gain the utility of the ML models. Improved device performance. Reduced network use and better specialized chips leading to better performance. Either in terms of better battery life or b…
On a Google device I would say the potential is reduced to zero!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? What's the useful advantage to a flush back? I don't really see any. As long as I can hold the phone, and it can lie on a table or stand without wobbling, it seems to do what it needs to. It's not like you're stacking phones on top of each other the way you do books or magazines. (And heck if you work in repair or provisioning and actually do stack phones, it's easy enough to turn every other one 180°.) Also I d…
Less annoying in your pocket
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amortized cost on the update cycle of Pixel was pretty similar to iPhone(at least in some parts of the world). But I am glad that they are doing longer updates. I just wish batteries become replaceable again, my phone is 3.5 years old and the only thing that is noticeably worse is battery life. If we are gunning for longer update cycles, batteries should ideally be replaceable. I sincerely hope some big country takes…
It's not as convenient as a user replaceable battery, but most phones have batteries that are replaceable by repair shows cheaply. Weirdly my 3.5 year old phone actually has about the same battery life as it started with. As android 3.5 years ago was terrible at battery management, so software updates have compensated for battery degradation.
Also, are original spec batteries available easily? I don't want to put something which is not the same as it might cause some battery related accident.