Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Essential Phone, available now

essential.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 695 posts

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#531

Post by trapperkeeper74 »

zanny wrote: post #483

Since no one else has, I'll take the piss out of this "hollier than thou" bullshit. > Devices are your personal property. We won’t force you to have anything you don’t want. Devices are your personal property. The SoC is still a proprietary trade secret, the baseband is still spying on you for the NSA, the GPU is still a closed blob piece of shit. No mainline driver support, bootloader is closed source, firmware is c…

Open ASIC IP cores and firmwares are a must-have. Without independently-verifiable silicon, there's no telling was is or isn't there.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#532

Post by teknologist »

zanny wrote: post #529
ekianjo wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Flash burnout. Shitty flash chips don't last forever. I've binned almost every older phone than this crop because the flash memory dies. I have never experienced this before, what are the signs that the flash chip is going sour? Slow to load? Losing information? Is there anything you can do about it ?

Sadly mobile flash doesn't support smart monitoring. There are three indicators, but your flash can randomly fail without any of them being observable: * Sector reallocations. As flash stops writing or reading the package will reallocate data. This process is intensive and usually lags out the phone. If when moving large amounts of data into / off the flash the whole phone is freezing, it can be due to this. * Stunte…

A year or so ago my iPhone 6 was constantly freezing up and was practically unusable. I tried changing literally every setting available in an attempt to resolve it. Wiping it clean and restoring from a backup solved it.

I was almost convinced it was a problem with the flash chip as symptoms were exactly what you describe here.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#533

Post by mscdex »

steeve wrote: post #486
zanny wrote: post #483

Since no one else has, I'll take the piss out of this "hollier than thou" bullshit. > Devices are your personal property. We won’t force you to have anything you don’t want. Devices are your personal property. The SoC is still a proprietary trade secret, the baseband is still spying on you for the NSA, the GPU is still a closed blob piece of shit. No mainline driver support, bootloader is closed source, firmware is c…

> Devices become outdated because shitty vendors refuse to open source and mainline drivers for their components. YES. This one of the major reasons of the Android versions fragmentation. However, most of them don't even have mainline-able drivers. See Amlogic which got rejected because of "shitty code".

Amlogic is being supported in the mainline kernel, see the work going on for the Odroid C2 for example, which uses an Amlogic S905. See this[1] site for more information and the incoming patches page[2] for a more up-to-date view on what's being worked on.

[1]: http://linux-meson.com/doku.php [2]: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-amlogic/list/

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#534

Post by benclauss »

hedora wrote: post #518
benclauss wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it fast? I have a 6. In addition to the bulkier size, apps are often slow and the battery life is atrocious. I'm considering updating when the new iPhone releases in the fall.

I have none of these problems with a 6 plus. Maybe backup, factory wipe + restore, or go to an apple store and ask for help? Also, what do you mean by "atrocious"? I get 1-2 days with heavy use. Finally, the 5 phones I've seen this week seem snappy enough, and so does my 6 plus. It really sounds like your phone is screwed up.

I usually do a backup, wipe, and restore every couple of months which temporarily resolves the issues. I'll definitely go to an Apple store soon. Checking Instagram and Snapchat (No Facebook) every few hours, playing music, and using 30-60 minutes of Google maps each day will kill the battery in about 4-8 hours. It has gotten to a point where when I go to an event, I'll make sure to turn off my phone to save enough battery life so I can use maps later.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#535

Post by BoorishBears »

patrickthebold wrote: post #514
froo wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Devices shouldn’t become outdated every year. They should evolve with you. I really don't understand this sentiment. I've still got my iPhone 6 Plus. I haven't seen the need to upgrade yet. It does absolutely everything I want. At this rate, the only reason I'm going to upgrade is if I destroy my phone somehow (I've yet to even put a major scratch on any of my smartphones over the years) or if a vendor comes out w…

>>I've still got my iPhone 6 Plus. Not the parent, but that's pretty new. I used a 4s earlier this year and there were several apps that couldn't be upgraded and/or stopped working.

I got my pair of Nexus 6 dev phones a month after my iPhone 6 Plus.

The Nexus 6 reached it final OS update with N but the 6+ is about to get iOS 11.

The iPhone 5s is about to get iOS 11. If it weren't for the 64-bit transition I wouldn't be surprised if it had gotten on the iPhone 5 as well.

Apple gives about 5 years of iOS updates, which makes keeping the same phone a lot more feasible. Meanwhile my Google sourced Nexus barely makes it two without landing on security patches-only.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#536

Post by bitmapbrother »

rl3 wrote: post #479
ariofrio wrote: post #286

Give me software updates for 7+ years, then we'll talk about buying your $700 phone. Lasting hardware means nothing without lasting software. In the meanwhile, I'll keep buying $120 phones (Moto G4 with Amazon Ads FTW) and keeping them for ~2 years until they break or software updates stop. Even though as a Catholic (Laudato Si, Rerum Novarum) it kills me to waste all those materials every couple of years and be part…

> Lasting hardware means nothing without lasting software. The Nexus 6P is a perfect example of this: https://m.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/01/google_eol_for_nexus_... I've had mine a year and a half, and it doesn't even feel close to struggling with things. Performance is great. Yet, it's going to be artificially deprived of the latest Android releases starting one month from now, and won't even receive security updat…

Well at least the 6P will get Android 8 and another year of security updates. Which is more than I can say for the rest of the Android phones not made by Google.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#538

Post by CaptSpify »

hohghitlblkh wrote: post #372
baddox wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the draw of a tiny physical keyboard? I can type much faster on an iPhone than with any similarly-sized physical keyboard. The only advantage I can think of is the ability to touch type without paying attention to the screen as closely, but for a phone that doesn't seem like a very big deal.

I could type faster (and without looking) on the old Nokia style keypads than I can on a touchscreen.

also: much more screen-space as the keyboard doesn't have to take over.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#539

Post by CaptSpify »

exabrial wrote: post #411
natch wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any of these should work: https://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywo...

Much like JNCOs, dongles were a bad idea from the 90s, why are we reliving this

Because dongles are a guaranteed money-maker.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#540

Post by colordrops »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #496
colordrops wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's another annoying thing. OnePlus uses a specific type of charger, the Dash(tm) charger, so you can't just buy any random USB charging unit, or else it will take all day to charge. And the chargers are expensive. The other problem is that the screen is not flat, so you need to buy a curved screen protector. For the OnePlus 3, they've been sold out for months, and have no plans to restock them. Furthermore, there…

> The other problem is that the screen is not flat, so you need to buy a curved screen protector. Huh? The phone ships with the screen protector already applied.

It's a low quality plastic on that loses its adhesiveness and starts peeling off in less than a month.

I was referring to tempered glass protectors. I didn't realize that people still use plastic ones.

Post reply on HN