Be Excellent To Each Other

So who here’s getting one

To be fair, it isn't yet. These are review copies.

They should be pretty close, though.


JC's got the money.

I remember when we used to call those previews

Samsung Fold Pro(totype)

My friend who works for EE has had the prices through for this folding phone. £98 a month with £500 up front.

Wow.

On a 24 month contract, presumably?

Yep... Providing the phone lasts that long.

It's caused us a minor issue at work as our current limit for mobile phone insurance is £1500, because when it was setup last year, surely that was enough...right?

Hang on, let me run those numbers........

Oh. No. No it's not. Not even close.

Considering the highest-end iPhone is £1500 that doesn’t seem very future proof.

It's a complex issue, we don't really want to insure mobiles that cost more than that, as the loss ratio will be too poor. But compare that to not being able to serve customer needs and it all gets a bit tricky.

Galaxy Fold just been delayed by at least a month.

Haven't done much gaming on Android lately besides Words With Friends 2, but yesterday I had an urge to play something like Dungeon Raid. As that's not been available for a while, I had a look around for something similar and saw Good Knight Story recommended. It's pretty good too - match-three type stuff with a few RPG elements on top. It doesn't get challenging until about 40 levels in though.

Mid-budget Pixel 3a and 3a XL launched at I/O:
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2 ... es-io-2019

Ah, they've remembered that the mid-range exists! Excellent.

I guess they're not doing this for altruistic reasons, maybe the top-flight megabucks phones aren't selling that well. After all, mid price phones offering solid specs were a lot of the appeal of Android for many folks, particularly the Nexus line.

Also

https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/05/0 ... el-phones/

Splendid

Ooh, colour me interested. I'm in the market for a new phone.

No wireless charging! Useless, nobody will buy them without that.

If I can’t charge wirelessly and use an app to check my tyre pressures what’s the point of being alive

Remember I don't care about wireless charging anymore because the P20 Pro has a battery that it's impossible to kill in a day.

https://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/ ... g#p1013277

Why are Google's affordable phones far more expensive than other company's similarly specced phones?

They come with added 'don't be evil', and that stuff isn't cheap.

Android One is already kind of like a successor to the Nexus range.

With an equivalent camera?

Pretty sure most of what makes photos on Pixel is image processing etc. Google just keep that image processing Pixel exclusive. If you hack a phone with a similar lens to use the pixel camera app, it creates similar quality photos.

So it's just a case of Google keeping some of their software stuff exclusive to the Pixel range.

So no, then.

Even if you are correct [1], is your theory then that software isn’t worth paying for?

[1] which you aren’t: the 3d pixel feature on the camera gives it the ability to measure depth information which is an input into the image processing setup. On Pixel 3, that image processing also happens in a bespoke piece of hardware, the Visual Core.

How does it measure depth?

edit: https://www.techspot.com/news/77666-goo ... xel-3.html

So it sort of guesses rather than measures, but it's clever stuff.

It gazes into the eyes of the subject and weighs its soul.

12oz, with a couple of sausages thrown in.

Ounces? How old are you, Troops?

Souls aren't metric!

I see that some retailers are offering a free Chromebook with the 3a too. I'm rather tempted.

It says that for the XL there is no WiFi calling. Does that mean that I wouldn't be able to make/accept calls using Whats App?

Where have you seen that? It sounds unlikely to me.

Huh. That’s weird.

Anyway, no, it doesn’t mean that. WiFi calling is a specific feature where, when your phone has a good WiFi signal but poor cellular signal, normal phone calls and SMS messages are magically routed over the WiFi network and so keep working when normally you’d have no signal. It needs to be supported by your network and your phone and the combination of your phone on your network so it’s possible you’ve never seen it. I know it works on Three on my iPhone, as it’s the only way I get calls in work (our office is a massive cellular radio black hole.)

This isn’t anything to do with anything that happens in an app.

I get WiFi calling on my iPhone XR on Vodafone. HTH

I did a comparison through the link that DM posted. It's on the 3A but not the XL.

Thank Rich, that helps.

Not at all, but thanks for trying.

Oh god, don't trust Carphone Warehouse to get details like that right.

Yeah, that did occur to me.

I'll have a proper look tomorrow. Thank you for explaining what it was to me though.

I am trying thank you

Not quite right. It's the phone and the carrier network and the WiFi and the phone on that carrier network using that WiFi.

Well that’s all clear then

You forgot the phase of the moon, also only if Jupiter is rising in Capricon I think.

So the new OnePlus 7 Pro phone is quite the thing then. More expensive than what's come previously at £650 for the base model, but dat spec tho. Snapdragon 855; 6.67 inch screen with a 90Hz refresh rate; some kind of storage tech that make for much faster data transfer than other stuff on the market; up to 12GB of RAM. The only reservation I'd have if I was in the market for a new phone--assuming we don't talk about the fucking headphone jack--is the apparently curved screen. As long as it wasn't as annoying as Samsung's implementation I'd maybe put up with it, though it's a concept that needs to get fucked in general.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/14/one ... ro-review/

My phone seems plenty snappy enough, I don't know what CPU it is or anything. It's a Mi A1 and it was only £160 over a year ago so it's got to be pretty lowly compared to these. So what are people doing with phones that they need massive specs when it comes to CPUs etc? I'm not having a go or trying to say that it's pointless I'm just genuinely curious.

No one needs this stuff of course, but like pretty much anything else having higher specs will (should!) contribute to an overall faster, smoother and (arguably) more satisfying experience. Like you could browse the internet on a ten year old netbook, but you'd have a shitter experience than you would on a new spec PC. And if you'd only ever used the netbook you'd probably be relatively pleased with the experience, but you'd certainly notice the difference after spending some time on the newer machine.