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Essential Phone, available now

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Re: Essential Phone, available now

#651

Post by jiggunjer »

kllrnohj wrote: post #391
git-pull wrote: post #85

I admire the gumption of making a new phone. But controlled obsolescence kills me. The real feature that improves in phones the past few years for me is the software and apps, not the hardware . My wishlist: - Give me a lighter, snappier OS. Not something clunkier and slower and uses more ram, gpu/cpu (aka battery life). - Actually support updates to the things for longer than 2-3 years. - (Not related to this phone)…

> Give me a lighter, snappier OS. Not something clunkier and slower and uses more ram, gpu/cpu (aka battery life). The apps you[1] install are what use up all your RAM & battery. The OS itself is light, fast, and efficient. [1] Well, that either you installed yourself or that your carrier/oem "helpfully" bundled for you.

There are apps in aosp that are needlessly bloated too. Not that you can see much of source nowadays.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#652

Post by abawany »

remir wrote: post #470
abawany wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I am currently using my 2011/12 vintage Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (albeit as a play phone) with Lineage OS (Android 7.x) and it works pretty good. Batteries are getting harder to find but still available. It works great.

The simple fact that we have to rely on volunteers to have a recent OS on our phone shows how problematic updates are on Android. Hopefully Project Treble will make the lives of Lineage devs easier.

You have a good point. I am very grateful to Cyanogenmod and Lineage OS and contribute what I can - it really puts the vendor junkware with its non-removable bloatware to shame. I once wrote a giant rant on XDA Developers after spending a long night debugging a Nook HD+ tablet and its highly-obnoxious habit of reinstalling uninstalled bloatware on a reboot.

(Off-topic) I still prefer Android with its volunteer ecosystem due to the freedom it offers me with respect to my devices. I have tried to switch to iOS a couple of times due to my perception of their stronger privacy policies but my use cases, which I have been familiar with since the days of Palm, are incompatible with non-rooted iOS use models.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#654

Post by Grazester »

First review: They liked it.

Things I learnt: It uses an LCD(screams, I like AMOLED) and has no waterproofing. An update for the camera was pushed right before the review was release which improved it greatly. Seems like a good $500 phone not a $700 one to me.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/18/16165040/essential-phone-...

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#655

Post by erikpukinskis »

roryisok wrote: post #602
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…

> Even though as a Catholic (Laudato Si, Rerum Novarum) it kills me to waste all those materials every couple of years and be part of the environmental degradation of our planet It's not your Catholicism that makes you feel bad for polluting, it's your humanity. If Pope Francis turned around and said there's no climate change and we should all have tyre bonfires for christmas, would you be on-board with that?

Well Pope Francis is not a denier, and in some sense the Church scientists are the least biased in the world, since they are beholden to no one but God. They don't need to be published or get tenure. They can go with or against both academic and political orthodoxy as they choose.

So if Francis came out and said climate change is not a concern I would actually pay pretty serious attention to that. And I'm not even Catholic.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#656

Post by roryisok »

organsnyder wrote: post #648
roryisok wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even though as a Catholic (Laudato Si, Rerum Novarum) it kills me to waste all those materials every couple of years and be part of the environmental degradation of our planet It's not your Catholicism that makes you feel bad for polluting, it's your humanity. If Pope Francis turned around and said there's no climate change and we should all have tyre bonfires for christmas, would you be on-board with that?

Though you wouldn't know it from observing many Christians, environmental stewardship is a Biblical mandate. Of course, it is possible to have the same conclusion through non-faith means, but that doesn't preclude the ability of a person to derive their view—at least in part—from their religious faith. Also, despite the Catholic church's hierarchical structure, a large portion of the church does not blindly follow th…

I was raised Catholic, in a Catholic country and I don't every recall being taught environment stewardship as being a biblical mandate. All that came from my parents, from common sense, from a love of nature and from 80s kids TV.

I don't want to get caught up in a religious argument, but I think its far more likely that people attribute a particular view to their religious beliefs as a way of validating them than they believe the environment is precious solely because the bible told them.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#657

Post by roryisok »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #655
roryisok wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even though as a Catholic (Laudato Si, Rerum Novarum) it kills me to waste all those materials every couple of years and be part of the environmental degradation of our planet It's not your Catholicism that makes you feel bad for polluting, it's your humanity. If Pope Francis turned around and said there's no climate change and we should all have tyre bonfires for christmas, would you be on-board with that?

Well Pope Francis is not a denier, and in some sense the Church scientists are the least biased in the world, since they are beholden to no one but God. They don't need to be published or get tenure. They can go with or against both academic and political orthodoxy as they choose. So if Francis came out and said climate change is not a concern I would actually pay pretty serious attention to that. And I'm not even Ca…

how weird is it that we came here to read about a new phone and ended up discussing climate change and religion.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#658

Post by pjc50 »

exikyut wrote: post #643
pjc50 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://sharps.org/wp-content/uploads/BECKER-CHES.pdf is probably the state of the art here. It's basically undetectable. "Instead of adding additional cir- cuitry to the target design, we insert our hardware Trojans by changing the dopant polarity of existing transistors. Since the modified circuit ap- pears legitimate on all wiring layers (including all metal and polysilicon), our family of Trojans is resistant to m…

* Sound of groaning * Thanks. But ugh. That is both absolutely amazing and... well, what did I expect. Of course there are going to be process attacks :) Hmmm. I guess the only defenses against this are - trying to design the layout to get good "route coverage" via test routines (sounds hard) - aiming for super-simple designs that make it difficult to constructively alter the design (pathological simplicity is one pa…

It's much easier to just trust the fab. TSMC do not care about backdooring your hobby project.

If you really want to carry on down this route, I would say the most effective approach would be to regard fab interference as a strange form of "single event upset", and borrow high-availability techniques such as lock-step mode across duplicated processors or subsystems.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#659

Post by zanny »

pantalaimon wrote: post #646
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. To play the devil's advocate here, you could also blame Linux for not providing a stable driver ABI and instead tries to force all vendors to adapt their coding practices if they want to play along. Many companies don't want to take the burden to rewrite their code if the Kernel maintainers have a differe…

You don't really have to mainline your drivers. You just have to open source them. I guarantee if the chipset drivers and GPU drivers for most Samsung S phones were open sourced the phones would see community merged drivers or a popular third party repo supporting their continued maintenance.

Of course, it would be preferable that companies support their hardware in (open) software themselves (like Intel and AMD do for their GPUs / wifi / ethernet / ASM extensions), but we don't have anything close to that right now in mobile.

Re: Essential Phone, available now

#660

Post by justinjlynn »

SippinLean wrote: post #650
ericabiz wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know about this phone (we'll have to wait for the teardown), but iPhone batteries are pretty easily replaceable, and you don't need to go to an Apple Store to have them replaced. I run a chain of independent repair shops and we replace iPhone batteries all day long. A press push for environmental reasons has made sure most smartphone batteries aren't glued in. Now MacBooks and Surface Books, on the other hand,…

Extracting them with a torx driver, heat gun, and an hour's labor is not the same as a swappable battery.

You forgot the step of desperately trying to not crack anything while doing so for said hour.
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