Posts by Dave 126

Re: I suppose they just need more and iPhones fall short of their needs.

The Chinese state retains the right to monitor its citizens, so the chief advantage of an iPhone in the West - that it doesn't run on a data slurping advertising business model like Android does - is lost on China.

Re: Why I get disposable phones

I should note that despite my phone case - a Spigen Tough Armour that is a hard shell around a shock absorbing layer - my Galaxy S8 has taken a lot of drops, including bouncing down a cliff. The phone is unscathed so it would appear then that Samsung's use of glue is doing a good job of keeping the internal components together.

Re: Screen burn

That's the thing: the phone ups the brightness of its own accord - into the red area of the brightness slider - in sunlight. Whilst I was aware theoretically of the risk of OLED burn-in, the phone displays no warnings so I'd assumed that its firmware was designed to mitigate the risk - akin to the firmware in OLED TVs that mitigate the risk of burning in images of broadcaster logos etc. In other circumstances the phone does a very good job of combining the history of my past manual brightness adjustments with the ambient light.

Once Samsung replace the screen I will indeed be more cautious, and that'll be easy because it was only the one app, a game, that has left burn-in artifacts. I guess it comes from taking the occasional break from work to smoke a rollie and play a strategy game for ten minutes feeling the sun.

Re: Why I get disposable phones

I owned a brand new Huawei once, bought half price at an EE shop for £35. It was surprisingly fine at calls, WhatsApp, maps, browsing etc, and if I dropped it I didn't worry.

Now I have a pricey phone that lives in a tough case with a tempered glass screen protector. It's survived many drops into concrete, but a bit of worry is still there.

Re: Screen burn

You can but ask. I'm due to take my S8 in to have the screen replaced after going through the online chat process. They ask you to go to hardware test mode and describe the burn artifacts when the screen is displaying different solid colours, and they ask if your screen is physically damaged - but not if you rooted your phone.

My burn resulted from a single game, presumably from me playing it in sunlight occasionally when the phone itself ramps up the display brightness. Had Samsung been more conservative with the adaptive screen brightness *and* you had disabled such a safeguard by rooting, then they might have grounds for refusing to fix your screen, but they weren't and you didn't.

Re: I'm no fan of Samsung...

Yep, it's hard to fathom how the user will break the sensor without breaking the screen first. If the sensor malfunctions of its own accord then it can be replaced at Samsung's expense under warranty. This can be done within a day at a Samsung service centre, so if you live anywhere near a big city you don't even need to send the phone away.

Re: the inefficiency of wireless charging

And charging my phone over USB kills my FM radio reception, as does some LED light bulbs.

I could wrap the light bulb in tin foil I suppose, but it'd rather defeat the object.

Re: Deal...

But some Moto phones do have swappable (and hot-swappable at that!) batteries via their Moto Mod system.

I can't help but think that if every poster here who cries out for swappable batteries actually bought said handsets, Moto would be selling a lot more phones.

As it is, one gets the impression that posters here just want a cheap way to keep using old phones. That is sensible and indeed laudable. However, it should be fairly clear to them why phone vendors aren't designing phones with their wishes in mind.

Re: Deal...

I found myself using my phone's front facing camera to locate a screw hole underneath a cabinet the other day. It was handy to have, since I didn't have a mirror in my pocket.

Re: Niche use case

I wasn't thinking of heat as the sterilisation method, but rather UV or chemical - there would be no nooks or crannies for microbes and viruses to hide in.

However heat could (though maybe not should) still be used without damaging the battery, since to sterilise it is only necessary to heat the exterior to a high temperature. If the temperature is high enough the duration of heating can be so low as to not raise the temperature of the phone's interior appreciably. That said, I can't see any advantages of using heat over say a quick dunk in peroacetic acid.

My phone looks like it has a cracked screen, but it's merely the replaceable glass screen protector. Assuming the protector has similar mechanical properties as the screen proper, it's saved me the cost of several new screens - i.e the original cost of the phone. Not to mention the drops in puddles, the bath and a stream which would have killed phones of old.

Re: Deal...

You can retrofit a bezel to any phone: it's called a 'case'. You choose a case to suit you, slender, chunky, one with a pop out hand grip, one with a little stand for watching TV...

Just to say: there are 3rd party charging mats/docks that can wirelessly fast charge Samsung phones other than the overpriced Samsung ones. But research first.

Google got flak because their Pixel phones would only fast charge wirelessly if the mat gave the right DRM handshake.

Wirelessly charging a phone which is already in a potentially hot place (a car dashboard) isn't a great idea.

Consider making an old phone or cheap 7" tablet a dedicated car GPS, even without a data subscription it can get live traffic dsta from your primary phone. This way you don't have the faff of plugging in your phone, you don't care about high temperatures reducing your battery life, and in the case of the tablet you have a bigger display.

The Qi standard alone might not supply enough power for that use case. Individual vendors such as Samsung and Google have wireless charging solutions that can supply more power than the Qi baseline but you need to research which charging mat first. Example: to fast charge a Samsung phone wirelessly you need a compatible charging mat fed by a compatible power source.

Yep. The idea of a single cable from the Cube to monitor that carries power, video, audio and usb for mouse and keyboard has taken a long time to come around again. It the solution to a clear problem, one vocalised by my father thus: "Won't someone rid me of this fucking snakes' nest behind my desk?!"

Convection cooling too is a good concept.

All the tributes from other musicians, such as Suede or the Chemical Brothers, emphasize that he was a chatty, friendly, gentle character.

Re: The Prodigy never again scraped the same level of chart-topping success

Topping the charts in 2018 ain't the same as topping the charts back in 1998 or whenever.

That's not knocking The Prodigy's recent efforts (of which I've heard good things), just an observation about the music industry and wider pop culture.

Re: Use Case?

Audio hardware works better on a stream based protocol than a packet based protocol.

But yeah, external GPUs, external displays, single cable docking... it opens up lots of possibilities.

Super ~Street Fighter 2~ *USB* Hyper Turbo Edition

Re: Make them an offer?

A staging post might be handy for resupplying consumables such as fuel, water and food... not sure how the ISS would help there.

The problem depends upon the end application. If it's to allow a soldier to see enemies in low light then I wouldn't have thought it matters whether they're seeing infrared converted to avisible wavelength or if they're seeing that visible wavelength in the raw.

Re: FAD ALERT - A modern day flip-top

Of course for displaying text then having two screens next to each other, akin to two facing pages in a book, is nearly as good as a single screen. It's the display of video or images that is spoilt by a bezel between the two screens.

The MS Courier featured two screens separated by a hinge. The use-case its team were pushing was using two apps at the same time - the example they gave was a browser on one screen and a scrapbook on the other, for easy copy-paste (or rather, drag n drop) from one screen to the other.

There was also a two screened clamshell Android by Weird Sony that actually made it into shops.

LG are bringing the concept back with a second snap-on screen for their latest phone.

> The candy bar was never a good design for a phone, the flip phone was always superior.

Can you expand upon that? Just curious.

Re: cynic

My Phone looks like it has a broken screen but the visible cracks are just in the glass screen protector. I'll replace it if the cracks get worse or more dust gets behind it, but til then I won't bother. The pricey screen beneath is pristine.

It might be that the phones with cracked screens you see amongst your friends are merely phones with cracked screen protectors.

Re: FM Radio?

I think they missed your irony Steve.

Personally I don't miss having FM radio on my phone, since I either have the phone signal to stream Radio 4 live or I am in a vehicle with an FM tuner. Most Radio 4 content I listen to after broadcast in the Radio iPlayer app so I can pause it when needed. The only music station worth listening to most of the time, Radio 6, is not on FM.

Occasionally when camping - away from data signal and battery charger - I'd like to sit back and listen to FM... but not so much that I've dug out a discrete FM radio receiver. Somewhere I've got a SanDisk Sansa Clip with FM radio but the dang thing is so small I can't find it.

The US version of my phone has Qualcomm innards and its hardware FM receiver can be activated with an app. My European version uses Samsung's homegrown silicon which can't pick up FM.

Yeah, I can travel places easily without a smartphone, but to do so requires a bigger gadget called a car. Public transport is just so much easier to use if you have a smartphone to see timetables, or call a cab when it transpires the bus service is evidently unaware of its own timetables.

I do take your point though about people's attention. I use a social network called a pub.

Re: cynic

There's evidence that phones are more durable today.

Re: Can we please

The Moto Force Z2 has a shatter proof screen, takes snap-on removable batteries (without requiring a power cycle) and with an attached battery will be thick. So that ticks all your boxes save the FM radio.

Re: Start up money

Can't these aspiring dealers use crowdfunding?

http://www.27bslash6.com/guaranteed.html

Re: Where did they get the power?

That's a good point. I guess they're using a 12V DC to 240V AC inverter from their car's fag lighter socket. Sucking coins from a box wasn't part of the vacuum cleaner test matrix in Which? last I saw, so I don't know how well a cordless Dyson would work (and the batteries on those don't last long on a charge, and don't appear to have overcharge protection circuitry so leaving them in their wall mount means the battery is next to useless after 9 months.

In any case, if you're stealing coins having your vacuum cleaner be transparent is a bug not a feature.