Earlier quoted context omitted.
Purism are working on a Debian phone! https://puri.sm/ (I wish them luck...) I bought the BQ Ubuntu tablet. I hate to say it, but it's terrible. You have to set up a cloud account with Canonical to download or update apps (no reason given). Most of the apps are pretty bad. It's constantly pinging YouTube and news websites to show me stuff I don't care about, and can't turn off. No easy way to set up a VPN. No CalDAV,…
> No easy way to set up a VPN. That's not true, it's right there in the network settings. I use it. Maybe it just doesn't support the type of VPN you want to use?
Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
711–720 of 874 posts
Re: Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
Purism are working on a Debian phone! https://puri.sm/ (I wish them luck...) I bought the BQ Ubuntu tablet. I hate to say it, but it's terrible. You have to set up a cloud account with Canonical to download or update apps (no reason given). Most of the apps are pretty bad. It's constantly pinging YouTube and news websites to show me stuff I don't care about, and can't turn off. No easy way to set up a VPN. No CalDAV,…
Is it a real linux system under the hood though? I don't care much about apps or anything, I care about being able to customize it to work how I want. terminal, cron, scripts, etc.
Re: Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
#713Re: Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
my nexus 5 camera is absolute garbage.
I have a Nexus 5X and the camera on it is terrible as well. If my next phone is an iPhone, it will likely be because of the camera.
Re: Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
#715Haha, what? Google already thoroughly beat the iPhone: they made Android. This is just a ridiculously overwrought way to say "Google is making a new phone".
Re: Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
#716Earlier quoted context omitted.
Age is not a sign that's something is broken. Apples main lead is they need much less hardware to get good preformance which means smaller and longer lasting battery's and better profit margins. Giving that up for a useless status screen is a terrace idea that would cost them 10's if not 100's of billions of dollars.
Nothing wrong with the age of an UI per se, but I think the notion of App's as silos which need to be individually opened get its information is rather old fashioned, and not ideal from an UX POV. Being able to quickly glance information from weather, email, social media does do quite a lot to lessen unnecessary UI excise. I don't think it has anything to do with hardware, they can be engineered in such a way they do…
Re: Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
#717(comment copy-pasted from https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles/Pixel-smartphone-camera-revi...)
Re: Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
#718I think it is just me but I find this 'book me a concert and fancy dinner' schtick rather boring. May be well off people are so busy and book these things so often that these virtual assistant really save time if price is of no concern to them.
Even when price is no concern to me, I am pretty picky about the exact arrangements. Which seats at the concert? Which restaurant, what reservation time? Which airline and seat on the plane (for the also common travel example)? Etc. Yeah, I'm busy, and I book this kind of stuff all the time. But I don't trust an automated system to arrange things the way I like them. With a human assistant, they quickly learn my pref…
Let's say I wish to book an Uber. Usually, I open pop open the app and hit the request button. Doesn't take long at all. I get visual confirmation through the map and the little lollipop Uber driver photo. It's fast and I have the feedback to know that what I set out to do has been done. What if I had used the assistant? Well, now I have to waste a lot of time chatting to it. Sometimes it reads my address wrong or it doesn't understand Australian. So after a few mishaps, I finally get told that it's on the way. Okay. Then the twitching starts. The need to check that it was actually entered properly kicks in. So I open up the app to check the lollipop heating-seeking Uber driver is on target. I end up at the same place I attempted to avoid. Yet this avoidance was less efficient. I didn't receive enough feedback so I was unable to trust.
The second example is ordering a movie ticket to go see Batman 27 with my wife. I ask the assistant awkwardly to book for me and give it a time. It tells me that it's all good and dandy. The trust issues then kick in. So I go head off to my e-mail to triple check my confirmation. I wasn't active during the booking process, so the feedback is all I have to work with. It's date night too, so I can't waste it or I'll be sleeping on the couch. I've just wasted time.
Then it occurs to you that by bypassing their system, you may have possibly missed some little announcement or some benefit that is only visible to you during the booking process. For example, doing it manually may show me that there's a time slot that has more ticket availability than the one we were originally headed to. This means an emptier cinema so that I don't get weird looks when she starts telling me about her day mid-movie. The assistant wouldn't have told me that. The assistant also can't toggle around the tick boxes and drop boxes that would have told me I would have been able to do a 2-for-1 deal if we had gone an hour later.
Being there during the actual process isn't always a bad thing. Abstracting away these manual processes would be fine if all processes were identical. They're not though. You're losing too much control and being provided with too little feedback. Now, I can very much see the benefit of the assistant while driving. It makes sense there. You're usually unable to hold the device and that form of interaction is a best fit.
I don't think it's ready yet. I can do everything faster manually. It doesn't add anything at the moment, it just subtracts. It's the same reason I have no use for Cortana on Windows 10 or Siri. Why would I talk to the computer when it's considerably more efficient to just start typing.
Re: Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
#719I don't like Google because they're gonna use my data against me. I don't like Apple because it's a walled garden and millions other reasons. I don't like Samsung because they bloat Android. I don't like Huawei because I don't trust the Chinese government to not do stuff to it. I don't like LG and HTC because the smartphone market is slipping away from them. Am I just getting old?
Sony provides official AOSP builds for a number of their Xperia phones, I'm very close to getting one because of that. http://developer.sonymobile.com/open-devices/ https://github.com/sonyxperiadev/
Unfortunately, most people in the US have no idea Sony even makes phones because the company has utterly neglected to market them here.
Re: Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
#720Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm in the market for a premium phone (and I am) then I either go with Apple which is known to deliver quality (I can buy a products without prior research because they are rarely bad) or I go with something innovative that is high quality. The Samsung Note 7 comes to mind with its phenomenal build (except for the explosions), display and some unusual features like a stylus and microSD slot. But what does the Pixe…
Pixel isn't a huge annoying brick to carry around for one.
These options exist because many people do prefer larger smartphones. In fact this is the first year where there's higher demand for the iPhone 7 Plus than there is for the iPhone 7.