Technology Android

dilla · Aug 9, 2020

Well, the OnePlus 8 5G is $700 on TMo. There may not be an equivalent model to the S20/Note 20 in terms of screen size but it's still a good bit cheaper than the Note 20 Ultra at $1300. But yeah, OnePlus has also deviated from the path of being the "flagship killer" its OnePlus 2 had set out to be.

I know you were always a fan of Chinese OEMs and I was too. I may have decided to side with the anti-Chinese propaganda the tech world has had (long before Trump piled his on) and it seems like it's only going to get worse as more Chinese wrongdoings are being uncovered from TikTok to whatever Huawei's supposed scandal was. As far as new OEMs trying to compete with the Samsungs and LGs of the world, they better start basing them out of India or Vietnam, because those might be the places a lot of the hardware manufacturing is going to take place.

Since I'm not that familiar with Chinese OEM models (just the OEMs themselves, barely), I just know Huawei has had a phone with a stupid big battery for a few years now. Was it 5000 mAh? 6, maybe? I do remember seeing battery life tests on AnandTech where Huawei would randomly be at the top with a bar much longer than the others indicating longer battery life. The downside was the recent banning from Google Services and that almost instantly makes these OEMs a no-go. As much as we shit on Google's practices, Google Services are still the brain and backbone of the Android experience and without that it just feels raw/unrefined. I'm sure even Apple uses some aspects of Google Apps, right?

I've just stopped caring about the notch. I'd even prefer that center speaker-notch that Apple has over the teardrop notch or whatever it is the S10 has, which is off to the corner. When I watch videos, I either get the video wrapped around the notch and miss whatever is on the screen in that spot, or I just get video that is cropped to fit under the camera slot and can't utilize the whole screen for video. I rarely notice it when looking at something on my sister's XS Max screen.

dilla · Aug 10, 2020

I....forgot Toshiba made laptops.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53721016

Pittsey · Aug 12, 2020

Nice to see that you two are still sending really, really long posts to each other

dilla · Aug 12, 2020

Thoughts on the Surface Duo?

I thought the foldable devices were a gimmick and still don't see a use for them yet, but the Galaxy Fold and now this Surface Duo tablet have gotten a lot of hype.

I'm mainly concerned about the hinge and it's durability but it's still an exciting design and might be more useful than the smaller screens of the folding phones.

And, for some reason, I trust Microsoft as a hardware manufacturer than I do most other OEMs, though I don't know why. I just imagine this Duo to at least feel durable, whether it is or not, and feel a bit more premium than most other Android phones and tablets.

masta247 · Aug 14, 2020

dilla said:

Yeah Huawei puts huge batteries and their phones' battery lives are excellent. However, I came here to post about the Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra. Holy shit, man! Firstly, it scored a full 130 points at DXMark, making it the best camera phone on the market, severely beating the S20 Ultra:

Secondly, it does 120W charging that takes 5 minutes to charge to 41%, and 23 minutes to charge to 100%. On a 4500mAh battery doing 18 hours screen on time on Youtube. It also comes with Xiaomi's Wireless charger that takes 40 minutes to charge to 100%. I'm personally not into super fast charging, but this is quite an achievement.

Thirdly, it's $650 and it just looks like a much better daily driver than anything else we have today, as everything else about it is also great. Even though it comes with the same Snapdragon 865 as the S20, it manages to overcome its biggest weaknesses by providing a larger battery and better power efficiency (and much faster charging if that's your thing).

I feel we are definitely missing out, as the current flagship phones from Xiaomi and Huawei are much better than what we're getting from Samsung or Apple, and that's the only place where significant innovation is taking place on the high end.

dilla said:

It's bulky, comes with last year's chipset, less RAM than even last year's devices, and costs a lot. The camera hardware it uses is on par with flagships from 2012. The battery is 3500mah powering the equivalent of an 8 inch display. It comes with two screens that can't create the effect of having a single large screen (like the Mate X or Galaxy Fold do) due to the big ass gap between them. That sounds like a disaster.

There aren't any redeeming features other than the fact you have two large-ish displays in something that isn't too gigantic, and literally everything else was cut down to bare minimums, or lower, just to make this happen. It's a one-trick pony. Personally I'm not sure who this one trick would even appeal to, as I don't think there are many people who want two screens side by side on a phone and sacrifice everything else to get it. Something like the Fold or Mate X makes sense, because they expand to one larger screen, and these are devices that have otherwise flagship components too. Having two separate screens in a device that's barely usable as a phone doesn't sound good.

masta247 · Aug 14, 2020

I just wanted to emphasize that I'm really not bullshitting when I'm saying that the Chinese phones are so much better than flagships you can currently buy in North America. If they were still allowed to compete on equal terms, Samsung and Apple flagships would look like sub-par options, offering an outrageously horrible value.

Just look at DXOMark's current best phones in terms of camera quality:

The Galaxy S20 Ultra is behind 7 devices by Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo. It's even behind Honor, which is Huawei's budget brand. The best iPhone 11 is behind 11 Chinese phones and 2 Samsungs.
Best phones from LG, Sony, Motorola, didn't even make the list anymore. This advantage currently translates to other areas such as battery life, design (you can buy bezel-less, notch-less devices) and overall user experience.

You have these $500-$700 flagships that far overtook the Galaxy S series and iPhones in almost all regards. I don't want to bring politics into this, but I can see why the US is afraid of China and trying to protect the economy by cutting Chinese makers from essential tech suppliers, or even Google. It's just impossible to compete with the pace at which they are outperforming current market leaders in the western countries, and doing it with labor that's so much cheaper that the better devices cost half the price.

I'd buy the P40 Pro in a heartbeat if it had access to Google Play Services, and I'd buy the Mi10 Ultra in a heartbeat if it was sold in North America. The Samsung Galaxy series have nothing over those. The iPhone's last bastion is the faster chipset and software, but at this point Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo are better at everything else, and by a sizeable margin.

dilla · Aug 14, 2020

masta247 said:

What's the tradeoff, though? There's always a "but" in these situations where something is not even head and shoulders above the competition. There has to be something going on, aside from the software aspect where Google doesn't allow Huawei to use Play Services. That's something that is sort of an artificial barrier put in place in the name of national security or tariff wars. Is the tech the Chinese use all their own, original work? I know that's one suspicion by the rest of the world of the Chinese, that it's all stolen IP. That camera looks great and I'm not sure what sacrifices would come from using good camera hardware, other than the cost. But these OEMs are undercutting the rest of the industry, so that's not it. Is their post-processing software even better than Google's?

On the one hand, sure, other OEMs like Apple and Samsung are scared because these Chinese brands are putting out products that blow them out of the water. But there also has to be something these OEMs know about the Chinese that they're not waging an all-out war on them. Something like this success being short-lived and that the Chinese are doomed to fall flat at some point on the hardware front. They're already handcuffed by not being true Android devices since they can run Google services on them. So maybe the Chinese OEMs figured they'd dump that money into jaw-dropping hardware and performance at the cost of running a crippled OS. Maybe for Chinese users, these phones are fine and dandy but for the rest of the world that wants the Google experience of Android, these phones are more like million dollar supercars; look and perform great but are still limited in what they can do and what they have access to (Google Services).

While this trade war is going on against China, another war just started with Google Play and Apple's App Store about their profit-sharing with the developers of apps on their respective stores. Epic offered a way to bypass these app store's getting a cut by offering users a cheaper price for in-game purchases. So Fortnite just got pulled off the stores and that's going to be an interesting fight. I know a few streaming services, like Spotify and Netflix no longer offer subscriptions to their services via the iTunes store since Apple was taking a 30% cut. Their apps are just fine but I'm not sure what has changed for these streaming services now that they don't pay Apple that 30% cut for people that subscribe through it.

The 10-25 age group must be ready to riot in the streets now. First TikTok and now Fortnite being under attack due to politics.

masta247 · Aug 14, 2020

dilla said:

No trade-offs anymore, just better phones. Which is why Huawei was banned from using Google Play services and ARM chips (which don't even use American tech). Then TSMC was blackmailed to stop dealing with Huawei, even though TSMC is a Taiwanese (technically Chinese) company, lol. The US government is going as far as to using their influence to meddle in foreign affairs to stop Huawei's rapid expansion. Huawei was never caught stealing or spying on anyone, as opposed to Samsung or Apple, which have "five eyes" backdoors baked in.

The thing is that Huawei can throw thousands of best educated engineers on a new R&D project for the cost of a few dozen in the US. Their government is also rich from all the money that the world is throwing at them to manufacture stuff there, so the government can further subsidize their tech companies to become the world leader faster. It's been brewing for a long time.

None of the Android phones use much original work. They design them themselves, use whatever parts they make themselves, and then use parts obtained from other companies, and open source software from Google (with proprietary software on top, everyone makes their own). There isn't anything more original about Samsung phones than Huawei phones. Huawei makes better chips, better cameras and better batteries, while the rest, they obtain from other OEMs, except they order better parts.
The rest are R&D costs, and Huawei's Chinese R&D is much cheaper. The rest are profit margins, and Huawei can go lower, especially since they ship many more units globally. They outcompeted others fair and square, supported by a cheaper economy that everyone is throwing money at.

Google's software processing has a good rep only because of how horrible their hardware is, and still managing to produce pictures that look good. Pixels are light years behind Huawei in camera quality at this point though. Huawei uses incomparably superior camera hardware, and lenses + processing is made by Leica - these days Huawei is their biggest partner because their people are more expensive, and they aren't getting as much support from their governments pumping foreign money at them.

That's the whole thing. Samsung went all out and started offering much better value phones due to this competition (that's how the "A" series began, offering 80% of the S series for 40% of their price). Now they are throwing down their gauntlets in markets that Huawei and Xiaomi dominated and sticking to markets in which their situation is protected, milking them while they can, because they aren't threatened yet. I don't think they could compete against Huawei or Xiaomi on equal market terms today - they can't lower their price as low while using components of as high quality because their people cost more, and because no government is pumping as much foreign money to make sure they become the best.

THEV1LL4N · Aug 15, 2020

Pittsey said:

Use text to speech.

dilla · Aug 15, 2020

masta247 said:

It looks like the cost of R&D is where China has the advantage, which doesn't seem as unfair at first. But when you say that Chinese engineers can be hired by the hundreds and thousands for the price of maybe a dozen engineers elsewhere, are those Chinese engineers being paid a fair amount, or are they being undercut? Because that would be one of those tradeoffs I mentioned earlier, although not one that would affect the consumer directly. Instead, some other guy is getting screwed behind the scenes. And while I do believe all these big companies need someone to get the short end of the stick (anyone but the company themselves), it's either the consumer or the people working for said company that get a shitty deal.

I get that most devices source parts from major suppliers but what I meant by these OEMs doing their own work was in reference to the accusations by the rest of the world, and not just tech, that the Chinese send citizens to other countries and their companies to get educated and trained and come back with the IP of these companies and share it with Chinese companies. So yeah, TSMC, ARM, etc. can all supply the hardware but when it comes to software and hardware design and aesthetics, don't these Chinese brands copy the design of OSs and hardware from the likes of Apple because they blatantly steal the design plans? For example, the Huawei Matebook? The name and design looks identical to the MacBooks. It feels like these Chinese brands just steal the hardware design of the device, throw a couple of bucks at designing a UI and call it a day. So "tradeoff" may not have been the right word but instead a "caveat." An asterisk or blemish. They put out a superior product with superior hardware and then sell it for much less than the competition. There has to be a compromise somewhere along the line or something shady that they're doing that allows them to do it. Sure, Apple and other OEMs mark their prices way up on top of their cost to produce, but if they can't sell their stuff at the same price as Huawei and they're getting their asses kicked by them, then there has to be some "cheating" going on by the brand that is able to do it.

masta247 · Aug 15, 2020

dilla said:

Below is the most comprehensive post I ever made on the China issue, by far, lol.

China is a different world. You can live there very comfortably on much less, and Huawei engineers are still paid well for the Chinese standards. Since their output is much cheaper, you will have more total output per $ than Samsung or Apple can achieve and there's no going around it. Japan dominated the world after WW2 by initially being the cheaper skilled labor too. Similar thing happened in Korea. Eventually so much money goes to their "cheaper and better" makers that they weed out most competitors, make even better products with all that money, then economy and wages grow and eventually so do prices. That's how all top economies became top economies. Don't forget that Japan and Korea started precisely by improving on existing design as well. Until their designs became entirely their own and better than anyone else's. A similar thing happened in China, while you are taking advantage of the fact they already started making their own good tech, but are still cheap.
Except it's being accelerated by Chinese govt programs aiming for China to reach technological superiority in the upcoming years - the government is pumping a lot of money subsidizing tech, allowing for better products to be sold for less, while the companies making them can still turn a big profit and grow fast. And as I mentioned, China has a boatload of foreign money, as everyone has been throwing it their way.

As for copying, a couple of words as a preamble to the rest of my post: this concept stems from the fact that China has no copyright laws, or no understanding of western concept of IP. To them taking the best product and improving on it to make it even better means they came up with the superior product. It's considered a good thing there, as Chinese companies tend to build upon each other's successes without ever thinking that it's a bad thing. They think it's the way forward - you will collectively succeed faster rather than have every company spend most of their product budget working on the exact same thing at the same time to ensure the wheel has been reinvented and it's different enough from what someone else made. In China they would say the latter approach is just dumb. It's one of the sources of their strength, at least as long as it's happening within China and they don't have to worry about 'weird' foreign laws forcing them to re-do someone else's work slightly differently before they can really innovate. When you look at it objectively, IP laws are a tremendous waste of time and resources, forcing you to re-do the same thing again just to avoid having to pay big money to someone else who was merely first to do something a certain way. That's how the Chinese think, and when you think about it, it makes sense if you don't view it through the lens of western laws.

Aligning naming with that of other companies is also considered a good thing in China as it reduced the amount of confusion. If you know what to expect from a Macbook Pro, you will more easily know what to expect from a Matebook Pro better than if they created a brand new naming scheme. This is again logical in China, and is not a cringy example of their lack of creativity as it might seem to us.

With that out of the way, the important thing to note is that when Chinese companies started entering foreign markets, they quickly learned that it's not what people want outside of China, and that their products have to comply with IP and copyright laws. When you take smartphones from Huawei or Xiaomi, today they all have original, proprietary designs and naming schemes. Some are imho much neater than flagship Samsung or Apple. The Huawei and Xiaomi design teams are largely led by top ex-HTC employees that moved there when HTC went down, together with huge internal teams. The people who designed HTC One devices work for Xiaomi and Huawei today, just continuing their work, except they have larger design teams to work with. In particular, Xiaomi makes some of the best designed products in the world.
The common criticism revolves around the fact that they used to copy other products, or that some of their designs are inspired by other products and look similar. This doesn't affect their smartphones made today though, or products made for global markets, apart from perhaps some low-end models sold only in China where they don't have to comply with IP laws (and that's perfectly ok there).

The accusation about China using western tech is often ironic. Something like 80% of the international students at my University are from China. Almost every large company opened their offices in China to hire Chinese engineers. Of course the Chinese people studying or working there will educate themselves there and apply the skills they learned there to develop their own tech. It's not unlike what originally made big American companies great, when IBM or Fairchild engineers started Intel or AMD, or when Berkley graduates used what they were taught to open up start-ups. Nvidia was started by AMD engineers based on their AMD experience. You can't take Chinese money to provide them with know-how and then complain when they use it. And the Chinese are investing in education at a rate that far exceed that of the US. What would not be ok is if they outright built global products on top of someone else's existing IP - while this is definitely not ok, it's rare on the grand scale and is not amongst the top reasons why they are growing so fast. It's more of a neat excuse to try to stop them from getting ahead with all the talent and money they have, that has been largely handed to them fair-and-square on a silver platter over the years.

When you take Huawei's network equipment that everyone is trying to ban, it is cutting edge, around a decade ahead of the nearest competitor. Tens of thousands of people worked to make the best, proprietary equipment in the world, and they succeeded. Contracts poured in left and right. The only reason it is being banned is because it's Chinese, and spying is something their government would be expected to do, not because anyone ever discovered any red flags in Huawei products themselves, or because they stole any tech to make them. This is the same with Huawei smartphones. Huawei is actually one of the few companies that openly refused to cooperate with governments to include backdoors into their products, as opposed to Samsung who gladly cooperates with different governments' secret services and "tweaks" their software to their will. They also pay more license fees than Samsung or Apple do, as they cooperate with companies like Leica or ARM to develop their own tech as opposed to just buying ready-made parts.

While the Chinese CPP has its rep we all know about, and they might or might not have influence over Huawei products, Huawei's network equipment was banned only after it outcompeted everyone. Huawei's Kirin chips began outperforming Qualcomm's, and suddenly Huawei is banned from legally buying licenses from ARM forcing them to stop making them altogether. Huawei smartphones are better than anyone else's in the world, and suddenly they can't use Google services anymore, making them a paper weight in North America. It's purely protectionism under a plausible but baseless pretense.

dilla · Aug 16, 2020

So it all boils down to a "cultural difference" and how the West thinks progress should be made versus what China does?

Also, I thought Huawei received a large sum of money from the CCP and that's what raised concerns about their ties to the government and possible backdoors. It's hard to imagine the CCP giving a large sum or money to a company and not expecting something in return. I'm sure there are plenty of other Chinese companies that would guarantee the CCP to have full access to the tech and do as they please, so long as they get their money. And they'd probably do it for less than what one of the largest brands in Huawei would ask for.

Sure, the Chinese philosophy around IP laws, or lack thereof, does make sense in a bubble, but that's exactly where it's taking place. In a bubble the size of China. And I'm not sure that philosophy isn't rooted in the Communist ideals of the CCP.

But I can also believe that this thinking is the reason advancements are made at such a high rate among the Chinese tech companies. And that their tech could be superior to those of the Koreans and Japanese and even the US tech companies. But does China believe their same belief of no IP laws extends to the rest of the world, too? Why isn't Apple or Samsung heading over to China to pluck the R&D that makes Huawei and Xiaomi so great and using it on their devices?

Also a bit of a tangent, but I read that Nvidia is planning on purchasing ARM?

masta247 · Aug 16, 2020

dilla said:

I suspect Huawei has been getting big money because they were China's big, own money maker. They wanted them to become the world leader and bring even more money in. Back when Apple and Samsung phones were THE thing in China, billions of dollars left the country as people spent their money to buy the newest iPhone. They wanted Chinese people to buy Chinese devices, to make sure this money stays within their economy, and they wanted people abroad to buy Chinese devices, which means big billions pouring in. "Subsiding" Huawei felt like an investment. They got what they wanted - Huawei is the biggest smartphone maker in the world today.

The other aspect is self-reliance. You can't do whatever the heck you want as CCP if others who don't agree with your actions can force you to comply with their wants by cutting shipments of items that are critical to your growth. And there are so many issues that the international community has with the CCP that are near the breaking point. Chinese govt wants to ensure nobody can fuck with them in any other ways than outright starting a war or sinking their own economy, which nobody would want to do. So they can take control over Hong Kong, perhaps Taiwan in the future, and who knows what else comes after, and nobody can do jack shit. Case in point, China is funding semiconductor companies now that they have been cut off from foreign fabs and licensees to ensure they can make their own. This is really expensive.

That said, as a counterargument to what I said earlier, while Huawei's tech is great and I'd buy it in a heartbeat for technical reasons, I think the world has all the right reasons to be suspicious of the CCP. If they wanted to, they could surely force Huawei to follow their marching orders. The CCP can do anything in China. To be honest it isn't that much different from the "known evil" of western makers cooperating with the NSA and the five eyes, except less familiar and more totalitarian. And the unpredictability of the CCP, which seemingly doesn't obey any rules and is hungry for world domination, feels threatening. It's definitely not a friendly government, and I get why the idea of them gaining too much power abroad sounds bad. I get why some people want to ensure that this does not happen, even if the risk is small and currently largely speculative.

This doesn't change the fact that Huawei flagship phones are great, there's nothing wrong with them, and I'd get the P40 Pro in a heartbeat. It is much better than the Galaxy S20 series, or the iPhone 11. At the same time I would respect anyone's decision not to buy them, but that wouldn't be based on the product or the company making it - they are still superior phones made through superior engineering, fair and square. I just wish people were honest and said "the CCP is a problem, they're scary, and we don't want them ever having any power over us" as opposed to slander and economic protectionism. Nobody does that, and nobody faces the problem head on - everyone is walking on egg shells around the CCP, attacking everything around them but never having the balls to address their problem directly.

As for Nvidia potentially buying ARM, that's not good, it would be silly for Softbank to sell them, and silly for the UK to approve the sale. It's a huge money-maker, and their patents are an almost infinite source of income. It isn't any better for the tech world that almost everyone using ARM's tech is an Nvidia competitor. At the moment ARM has no skin in the game and treats everyone who wants to use their tech equally.

dilla · Aug 16, 2020

masta247 said:

I think the cynicism of China is what is the big concern of people in the West. I can understand Huawei making superior hardware, despite running gimped software/OS. By the way, weren't Android devices sold in China but China prevented the Play Store and its apps from being on Chinese devices? This was years ago, before the recent trade ban imposed by Trump. Maybe it was Google or maybe it was Apple, but China had not been friendly to either of those companies trying to sell their products there.

I still remember that Bloomberg article a year or two ago that had Apple accusing someone of installing backdoors in their machines? I forget who they accused but not much came of that story a few weeks after that.

I think the rest of the tech world wants to get in to China's market because of its sheer size but they have to balance losing their IP if they send their stuff to them and risk having spyware installed if they source from them. I don't know what the solution is because it's the whole world that is skeptical of China, not just the US. I think people are worried about more companies entering China because of what we've seen happen in the last few months with the NBA and Disney bending their backs to appease the CCP after the Hong Kong and the Uighur situation.

masta247 · Aug 16, 2020

dilla said:

Google services are banned from China. Google made a search engine that would comply with CCP's propaganda but then dropped the project, and in its absence the CCP banned Google from China. So their phones in China run Android without Google Services, but it's ok for Chinese makers to make phones with them on as long as they are sold outside of China. This is purely to maintain the propaganda machine and limit access to non-filtered information within China.

I don't think they've been any cases of Chinese tech having spyware installed in the products they sold abroad. They want full control over their own citizens within their own country, but they don't want to shoot their own global expansion plans in the foot. All the research so far proved that Huawei products sold abroad are completely clean.

As for the political situation, what's happening in Hong Kong is horrible. At the same time I feel like the Taiwan situation is flying crazy under the radar. The Chinese just completed their military drills and violated Taiwan's borders. They flew nuclear bombers over the island. The international community is still indifferent to their struggles. The WHO hung up on Taiwan trying to cooperate with COVID and they managed to operate and defeat it entirely on their own. Only a few countries even recognize Taiwan's government, despite the fact it's almost a model democracy. None of the western countries recognize them. And that's just because China tells them "if you don't officially announce that Taiwan belongs to us, we're not going to deal with you", and everyone pussied out and complied.

At this point Taiwan has almost nothing to do with modern China - they are essentially this bastion of true Chinese culture and morality of what China was before the CCP took over, and grew into a pretty great thing. They are now living under this constant fear of invasion and not receiving much in terms of support from anyone in the world. Taiwanese TSMC agreed to respect America's pledge to not deal with China and build their factories in America, while at the same time America officially says that Taiwan belongs to China. It's fucked up, really.

dilla · Aug 17, 2020

masta247 said:

If it isn't Taiwan, it's HK, and if it's not them, it's Tibet. If it's none of those, it's their own population within China, like the Muslim detention camps. It's always something with China and it's sad how every country has money tied up in China and can't do or say shit. Well, they can, but it complicates things. But a decision/stance still can be made.

As for the hardware concerns, maybe I'm mistaken. I thought Bloomberg had come out with an article slandering Apple or its suppliers for a critical security flaw that was trying to be pinned on China. If it's not the hardware vulnerabilities, are there concerns for software? Sure, Facebook is America's own bastard as is Twitter for being mediums to spread disinformation and illegal practices of farming data. Google, too. But China has been the source of many apps on the app store that were removed for being malware. TikTok is in a conundrum now, but that might be between them Trump and nothing about security at all. Although Apple's new permissions monitoring in iOS 14 did catch IG and TikTok, both, doing somethings that raised some eyebrows. I think some concern is there for the Chinese game developer/pubisher Tencent. They own Reddit too and many on Reddit are wary of Chinese influence on the site via censorship. I use Tencent games and Reddit, so I can't say I've abandoned those companies and platforms in the name of security. I also don't use TikTok but if they're all eventually found to be in violation of privacy guidelines, then I think we're back to square one. Instead of looking to hardware flaws and backdoors, it may have been software all along and I'd expect more outrage over that.

But then again, Facebook is in the news almost daily as more shitty practices are being uncovered. Algorithms that promote Holocaust denial, troll farms for political figures in Facebook groups. The whole Cambridge Analytica debacle a few years back. People still continue to use Facebook and the services that fall under its umbrella of ownership.

dilla · Aug 19, 2020

Why is Android rolling backwards, even if it's an inch at a time instead of by leaps and bounds?

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/18/android-11-camera-apps-chooser/

WTF is this? I use the stock cam for the most part because it's usually set to the default for most apps, including system apps. Like if I have to take a picture and text someone, I do it within the Messages app and it just selects the stock camera app and it's simple enough. But sometimes I have to take a night shot or with poor lighting, and I choose the GCam app. Now it's going to require me to manually select the GCam app every time or take the picture beforehand in GCam and then import using the Messages or Hangout app.

This is the same stuff Apple got shat on for doing for so many years, especially when picking your default browser in iOS. You couldn't. Now they've loosened up and Google is heading back in Apple's direction.

masta247 · Aug 19, 2020

dilla said:

Yeah, I guess they were still for a few years and things were still going too well. Time to start fucking it up.

In related news of shooting yourself in the foot (or in this case straight in the head) Oculus announced today that you won't be able to use their VR headsets without logging in to your Facebook account first. I have the Rift S, but not for much longer. It's not like they're struggling to popularize those devices in the first place, am I right?

dilla · Aug 19, 2020

masta247 said:

I'm not familiar with VR especially in gaming. Never used it, unless my phone counts. I got a GearVR for free with my S7 and used it for the first month before never touching it again. I think it was an Oculus branded device, but I'm not sure.

Do you use it for gaming? I haven't gamed much either but I think it was just PC users that used it and looked for GPUs that were VR-capable. Maybe PS4 users?

But that sucks because you know they want you to use their parent company's app for data collection. Bold move for tech that doesn't appear to be mainstream as yet. I only occasionally hear about VR and it's usually in the context of gaming. Or maybe in sports for training or rehabilitation.

I don't even know if the next-gen consoles are going to be flaunting VR games. I recently started paying attention to the Series X and PS5 since a lot of the YouTubers I follow had their reaction videos to the unveilings and the hardware comparisons between the two. Still not big mention of VR.

What the hell is the state of VR, now that you mention it?

masta247 · Aug 19, 2020

dilla said:

VR is awesome, but there isn't all that much content yet so people aren't willing to buy expensive headsets for it, and devs aren't making much new software because there aren't that many devices in the wild.

Based on the Steam hardware surveys, 1.7% of all PC owners also own a VR headsets. Definitely not mainstream, but enough for some high profile games to come out (such as Half Life Alyx). Just not enough - most are fun but very small and simple, like Beat Saber. They are also expensive to recoup dev costs considering the small market. VR "Movies" and videos (and ahem porn) are amazing in VR at this point.

The adoption is the problem, as there is a barrier of entry that might not be obviously worth it when the ecosystem is still relatively small, and the ecosystem isn't growing all that fast due to this relatively small market. PlayStation does support VR as an optional accessory and there are a couple of games that work well with it. Also not enough imho, but the experience is great in those that do support it.

Although I do have some doubts as I hear news such as the one about Oculus requiring FB account, VR isn't going to die the way 3D did simply because the tech is really cool, and has tremendous potential once hardware improves and entry level tech is cheaper while offering a solid experience. Gear VR was something of a tech demo imho - I had it too, but the amount of content available there was just that, a demo.

Technology Android

Trumpfan17 aka Coonie aka Dilla aka Tennis Dog

Trumpfan17 aka Coonie aka Dilla aka Tennis Dog

Knock, Knock...

Trumpfan17 aka Coonie aka Dilla aka Tennis Dog

Well-Known Member

Attachments

Well-Known Member

Trumpfan17 aka Coonie aka Dilla aka Tennis Dog

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Trumpfan17 aka Coonie aka Dilla aka Tennis Dog

Well-Known Member

Trumpfan17 aka Coonie aka Dilla aka Tennis Dog

Well-Known Member

Trumpfan17 aka Coonie aka Dilla aka Tennis Dog

Well-Known Member

Trumpfan17 aka Coonie aka Dilla aka Tennis Dog

Trumpfan17 aka Coonie aka Dilla aka Tennis Dog

Well-Known Member

Trumpfan17 aka Coonie aka Dilla aka Tennis Dog

Well-Known Member

Donate