Technology Android

[masta247]

A lot of people do. I'm sure you will at some point too. To me it's one of the top priorities though, I enjoy taking pictures and I want them to be in the best possible quality, when I don't have my camera.

However here my main point was that they boast about their camera quality so much that it's annoying to find out that it sucks. Can you seriously not see that this picture is a mess? Extreme oversharpening, crappy colors, actually almost everything is wrong there.

Seriously, they could have said "we have the fastest phone on the market, it looks damn cool and it's the slimmest around too, especially it's 3mm slimmer than the Moto Razr and by the way the aluminium cover was once plasma and you can't break it with a tank cannon shell" but instead they said that their camera and audio are great, when in fact they are the worst company on the whole mobile phone market as far as those 2 things are concerned.

 

[S O F I]

I'll start caring once we get to a point where camera phones can be affordable and be just as good as professional cameras like the Nikon DSLRs and shit like that. Until that point, it's kinda like getting pissed off that your car can only go 80mph and not a 100mph, when what really matters is 200mph.

 

[masta247]

There's some truth in that. I think one point in caring about it is that with a new generation I'd expect new phones to have better cameras so I could clearly see this heading in that direction. I think Sony made a huge step forward with Arc/Iphone 4S' camera module, so did Samsung with SGS2. Those 8mpx cameras are as good as some less expensive point-and-shoot cameras, plus they offer pretty decent video, which is something not many cameras or even DSLRs can do.

I'm a bit disappointed with HTC because I was thinking about relacing my Arc with One S - I liked that phone from what I saw, I thought that it's an all-around improvement and I was looking forward to that "new, amazing camera with f2.0 and a separate camera processor" so I'm disappointed to find out that the camera quality is very poor compared to my Arc. It's poor compared to average past gen 8mpx smartphone cameras. That and the beats audio make me a bit confused, because they really spoil what otherwise appears to be a very good phone. I'm also disappointed about that pentile matrix. I didn't mind it on the Galaxy S/Nexus S/Wave but here the subpixel density will be lower.

So I'm a bit disappointed that come to think of it it's not really an upgrade, except of the processing power, which I have enough of on my own phone. And I was looking forward to upgrade to something all-around better.

 

[dilla]

Too bad Google doesn't have a desktop OS. I really like what Apple has done with its cloud syncing of calendar, contacts, reminders, etc. Really makes the iPhone an attractive option.

 

[dilla]

Can someone explain this ARM vs. Intel stuff to me? Or x86? I tried Googling it, but I'm not sure I'm comparing the right things.

I've read in a lot of mobile news articles about ARM replacing this or that. There's a big deal about something "running on ARM too."

 

[masta247]

ARM architecture - small, mobile processors that run in all smartphones.

There are 2 ideas to understand here:

Intel's Atom class processors (the laptop type) entering the smartphone market -> bigger and less energy efficient (in theory) architectures, but more powerful will be powering smartphones and tablets.

ARM (mobile) processors being able to run Windows 8 -> mobile phones and tablets will be able to natively run a OS that only desktop/laptop processors used to run.

So in short:

- ARM - super unefficient for each clock cycle but also super low power and small processors that power modern smartphones and tablets.

- X86 (32bit/64bit) processors that can be divided like this:

• laptop processors
  • Ultra low voltage
    • atom (slowest amongst laptop processors)
    • ulv, Core processors (faster, low clock speed making them slow compared to casual laptop processors)
  • Casual, full voltage laptop processors
• desktop processors (the strongest, fastest CPUs)
  • PC
  • server

Performance wise AND power use-wise it's like this:

ARM- .....................-> x86 Atom processors (modern)..->x86 ULVs->..............................................................-> x86 full voltage laptop processors........................-> x86 desktop processors.

Dots were used to emphasize differences. The difference in performance between ARM (fastest one, say dual core Cortex A15) and Atom is similar to the difference between full voltage laptop processors and their desktop counterparts. Although there are obviously exceptions from this rule based on models that are faster/slower. For example there are far faster desktop CPUs. There are also Atoms faster than some ULVs and ULVs that are closer to full voltage CPUs. However that's how it looks like these days (2011/2012 models) on average.

 

[Casey]

Too bad Google doesn't have a desktop OS. I really like what Apple has done with its cloud syncing of calendar, contacts, reminders, etc. Really makes the iPhone an attractive option.

The point is to make the desktop OS completely redundant, given that the vast majority of people spend 90%+ of their time in their browser anyway. Which for smart people, is Chrome, and that's whether they run Windows, OSX, Linux, Android, whatever. I don't even have an Office suite installed on my laptop because I use Google Docs. Why the hell would i bother installing contact software when it's all there at google.com/contacts? I get reminders through Chrome and they are synced to Calendar on Android.

I literally only ever close my browser to use audio, video and image editing software. And cloud-based image editing will catch up with Photoshop within 2 years or so for most use-cases.

Traditional desktop OS's are dying. For all the hype about Windows 8, most people will download it, install their browser and be doing exactly the same things as they were in Win 7.

 

[masta247]

Personally I use my browser about 30-50% of time. I can't picture myself switching to a web-browser-OS because I do most things outside of my browser and I'm a fan od dedicated solutions. I agree that for most people a browser would be enough because they don't care about other stuff. But, for some reason Google tools don't seem to work well enough for me. As a matter of fact I only use them when I have to share something with other people, when we have to work together.

 

[dilla]

Personally I use my browser about 30-50% of time. I can't picture myself switching to a web-browser-OS because I do most things outside of my browser and I'm a fan od dedicated solutions. I agree that for most people a browser would be enough because they don't care about other stuff. But, for some reason Google tools don't seem to work well enough for me. As a matter of fact I only use them when I have to share something with other people, when we have to work together.

There's a reason Chromebooks aren't selling.

Also, for sharing documents, it's so much easier for me to just upload them to my Box account and create a link and share it with whomever needs those files. With 50GB to work with, why would I use Google Docs?

 

[masta247]

Yeah I should've said collaborating. That's how we work on most documents together. It's a great tool for that.

For sharing files I use Dropbox.

 

[dilla]

Call me "old-fashioned," but we just...you know...physically meet up to do a project. If we want to do it right, that is.

 

[masta247]

Even when we meet together it's much more efficient to work using Google Docs. Any amount of people can write in the same document at the same time.

We usually use Google docs even when the whole group is physically in the same classroom, because even if there's a group consisting of 4 of us it's better if each of us can see things done in real time on his/her own screen and edit anything or write something else. To me it's the best way and it's really convenient.

Also, I have to collaborate with a lot of people I couldn't just meet up with - I can open up the document and edit something, leave a comment for the other person and that's it. Without unnecessirely having to save a file and share or being unsure what the other person has done on his/her own file.

 

[dilla]

Can anyone answer my question earlier about the whole ARM thing?

 

[masta247]

Yeah I think I gave an answer just below your post
Unless your question is more specific.

 

[dilla]

Yeah I think I gave an answer just below your post
Unless your question is more specific.

Oh, I saw you replied to the thread so I must have just thought your post about your web browser usage was the post. Must have missed it. Gonna go read it now.

 

[masta247]

This is how the dual core Snapdragon S2 (HTC One S/ AT&T One X) stacks up against the competition (including Tegra 3):

 

[Casey]

Chromebooks were never designed to be big sellers. Hence why Google never put much advertising resources behind them. Paradigm shifts take time, but the fundamental point of introducing them was to make people start thinking about Chrome as an OS rather than just a browser. And it worked. Remember when Eric Schmidt said in February that Chrome OS and Android will "likely converge over time"? Well, take a look at the glowing reviews of the Chrome BETA for Android ICS. Now think long and hard about them bringing more and more features from desktop Chrome into Android. Now imagine instant-on Android devices that boot into Chrome and straight to Google search, whilst loading the "traditional" OS features in the background.

Now you're getting a clearer picture of where we're headed with this.

Anyway, fuck all that, who else is playing Angry Birds Space? It rocks

 

[Flipmo]

I am playing it. I'm halfway through the Ice Planet.

 

[Pittsey]

I never play games. I was into draw this, or whatever it's called, for about a week.

 

[dilla]

I never play games. I was into draw this, or whatever it's called, for about a week.

Draw Something. I got creative with some of the things, but it appears few others enjoy my humor. Like for "belt" I drew a stick figure with a belt in its hand, and a smaller stick figure with a speech bubble saying "no daddy, no!" But I made sure to draw an arrow to the belt with question marks near it so the person knew what it was they were trying to identify. I just wanted to have some fun with it. Because I don't have a stylus for my tablet. So it's not like I can draw uber-accurate drawings either.

They ended the game with me after that drawing. Fuck them.