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Google Nexus 5x and 6P

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Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#511

Post by DanBC »

pjc50 wrote: post #510
DanBC wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia screens were glass and it was unusual to crack those. Extending the bezel to the edge of the phone means there's no "crumple zone" to absorb energy of impacts - that shock goes to the screen. Personally I think a mobile phone that looks lovely but has little chance of surviving metre drop is a design fail. Modern phones are stupidly flimsy.

The 3210 glory era of 'indestructible' Nokias had the glass under plastic (polycarbonate?), and weren't touchscreens. That was also the big era of replaceable phone cases. I think people who are worried about the frailty of the phone buy secondary-market protective cases these days.

But protective cases makes my point about poor design. If the only way I can stop my phone being damaged during normal use is to wrap it in 3rd party protective case then the design failed.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#512

Post by burriko »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #496
threeseed wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In short, no major improvements or evolutions in the smartphone. Try the 3D touch on the iPhone. Adding what is the equivalent of contextual menus to the UI is a major improvement to the overall experience and I know I will be upgrading to the 6s purely because of this.

It's called long-press, a touch-screen UI pattern that has been around since at least Pocket PC, carried through on Android, and is only now appearing on iOS. Just like with right click, Apple is late to the contextual menu party.

Long-press is a different thing, and something iOS has had from the day 1 (obvious example is rearranging home screen).

3D Touch is about how much force you use, not how long you touch for.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#513

Post by jfoster »

shmerl wrote: post #481
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…

And the new one is slightly bigger. Nexus 5 was already on the edge of comfortable for me. Why did they make it bigger?

Isn't it taller, but less wide, and thinner? There total surface area is probably bigger (height increased about 1cm whereas width decreased about 3mm), but I think it will feel smaller in your hand. When holding a phone, it's generally the width & thickness that makes it feel big. Both of those dimensions decreased.

If you're talking about thumb-stretching to reach the top of the screen, though, that might get a bit more difficult.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#514

Post by wisty »

chrsstrm wrote: post #336
zuppy wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's going to bother to recreate your fingerprint, when it's much easier to beat you with a wrench ( https://xkcd.com/538/ ) until they get access to your phone. It's a huge convenience for you though, to unlock it without doing anything extra, as you're pressing that button anyway to turn the screen on. Much easier than typing passwords.

My worry is that this is a gateway drug to "Fingerprint protect all the things!" My bank emailed me the other day with an announcement that I could access my account through their app via my fingerprint. WTF? My text messages are one thing by now my money is protected by just my fingerprint? I took my bank to task because they allowed my username to be twice as long as the allowed characters in my password. Someone a…

Yeah, no-one will steal your fingerprint, just like no-one will crack a reasonably strong password. But if every site has a copy ...

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#515

Post by lmedinas »

drewrv wrote: post #149
tcdent wrote: post #130

Pretty insightful to compare this to Apple's recent release where they've introduced a brand-new input method, in addition to the usual spec-bump. Meanwhile, Google is still building phones that are trying to keep up with what are essentially PC hardware specs (memory, clock speed, etc). I'm amazed they think that protrusion for the camera is cool, too. There are obviously two very different mentalities inside these…

I switched to an iPhone recently and can't wait to switch back. Already preordered the new nexus. PC hardware specs are important, my biggest complaint about the iPhone is how little RAM it has. My nexus 5 could support doing simple things like running an email app, web browser, and maps app simultaneously. My iPhone is constantly reloading stuff when I attempt this.

With the new iPhone 6s you shouldn't have this problem as they have 2GB RAM. At least i have much more issues in my Nexus 5 than with my iPad Air 2 (with 2GB RAM)

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#516

Post by inversionOf »

DannyBee wrote: post #471
inversionOf wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of CPU time you should be spending on these tasks is really low. Which is exactly the point. They are not CPU intensive, but the CPU is constantly doing a multitude of little things, whether simply moving memory around from the GPU to storage, sending the render buffers for the 60fps display, etc. Another comment mentioned, rightly, that cores are put to sleep in they don't have anything to do in a quantum…

"You have zero expertise to be saying this." This is 100% false. I do bringup on these platforms. I know a lot about them. "I'm going to favor the industry's interpretation of this a bit more than your anecdotal, occasional compiler-writer knowledge. " Dude, i literally do the toolchain bringup on these platforms you claim i have no knowledge of. This is not "anecdotal occasional compiler-writer knowledge". This is "…

This thread should embarrass you. Christ, I'm embarrassed for you.

I linked multiple real world demonstrations (both the technical data, and actual observations of these cores in practice) of how big little is used for power consumption, including specific details of the core power profiles. You still allude to your great, clearly laughable, expertise and actually continue arguing this. Remarkable.

You are a Hacker News "Expert" and a bore. You are far, far out of your depth, and you should stop responding to topics where your knowledge is hilariously wrong.

you literally have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to CPU sleeping

He said that cores slept as much as "every 50ms". 50ms is an enormous period of time, and is a colossally granular mechanism of power reduction. They didn't discount what I said at all (in fact, talking about the millisecond scale when discussing a costly CPU activity is pretty bizarre to begin with), though it is unsurprising that you try to hang on that.

Not to mention that their comment is simply dated and wrong now regardless.

anything other than self-serving industry press releases to back up your claims.

Comical. And yet you'll wave your hand at "battery life" based upon utterly nothing. Hey guys - ARM, Samsung, Qualcomm --- disregard them, and disregard actual observations of how these SoCs operate in the field on varying demand workloads -- because this guy knows how compilers are written and he does little winky faces.

Save the world from your ignorance. The mere fact that you continually reference your great compiler writer knowledge in relation to core design is, honestly, embarrassing.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#517

Post by inversionOf »

swetland wrote: post #342
inversionOf wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

CPUs enter and exit sleep on Android devices constantly . Back in 2007 on the MSM7201A we'd go to power-down sleep for any idle times of >50mS (nothing to schedule for the next 50mS). Run fast and go to sleep has always been the primary power policy. That said there's plenty of lightweight threads and processes that are mostly IO or event bound, do very little compute, and will run in roughly the same time on a small…

Run fast and go to sleep has always been the primary power policy.

A sleeping core is obviously the most efficient core, however you have said nothing to discount what I said. Putting a core to sleep is a very costly activity, which is exactly why it happens at the millisecond scale.

Before that happens, the core will likely have been frequency scaled to more appropriately fit the window's loading. I mean, we know this is the case right now, and that "run fast and go to sleep" is not the primary policy. It's "run as fast as appropriate for the workload to fill a quantum, and sleep when there is no workload". There are many if not most workloads that are externally bound, or event triggered enough that sleep is completely out of the question and running faster does nothing.

Your words have been used (out of context and inappropriately) to bolster DannyBee when they represent, literally, all that is wrong with Hacker News.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#518

Post by desas »

cheepin wrote: post #273
choward wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's pretty niche though. Not really. Do you ever travel? Have you ever been on a road trip? Have you ever been on a plane? Have you ever gone camping?

Yes, but I don't fill up my phone's storage during those activities. The issue comes up if you use your phone solely as a camera without an accompanying connection for long enough to fill up internal storage without some way to offload it. It's a situation that won't come up ever for most users of the phone, and as Wifi and Data coverage increases will become even more obscure.

It's typical in Europe to go abroad on holiday so the only coverage is via expensive roaming - I usually take lots of photos on holiday and like to use my phone to play music in my room or by the pool. Hotel WiFi is often expensive.

It's especially a problem while cruising - onboard WiFi is slow and expensive, buying a sim per country wastes time.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#519

Post by saiya-jin »

onion2k wrote: post #469
untog wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had absolutely nothing else on my phone - no apps, no photos, no videos, sure.

That's why I said half the memory.. The other half would be for apps and stuff. It'd be very interesting to see how much music people store on their phone when they use services like Spotify. I use it on a Nexus 4 and I've never had a problem with running out of space, but I don't have lots of games or anything on there. I honestly doubt it's much more than 2 or 3GB.

just because you personally don't have a need to store more things in the phone, doesn't mean other people won't have usage for these.

I don't like fragile cloud solutions, so my music is offline. I find it amazingly stupid to tell other people to "just delete some of it, because you probably won't listen to it twice". My offline car navigation takes more than 10 GB, and no thank you, I won't use google maps which are not that accurate in places I go, and require constant connectivity (which makes them useless in foreign countries, or in mountains). My DCIM folder is cca 5 GB after 1 year of usage, and I shoot almost no videos which would make it explode.

FFS, it's almost end of 2015, having 32 GB model as your highest offering is... pathetic.

Re: Google Nexus 5x and 6P

#520

Post by saiya-jin »

cheepin wrote: post #273
choward wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's pretty niche though. Not really. Do you ever travel? Have you ever been on a road trip? Have you ever been on a plane? Have you ever gone camping?

Yes, but I don't fill up my phone's storage during those activities. The issue comes up if you use your phone solely as a camera without an accompanying connection for long enough to fill up internal storage without some way to offload it. It's a situation that won't come up ever for most users of the phone, and as Wifi and Data coverage increases will become even more obscure.

simply no. one example - in europe, there are still roaming charges. in mountains, there are still places with no internet at all (and it might surprise people like you, but no wifi either).
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