Yup. Kind of a gish gallop of buzzwords to keep investors happy…

Kinda the perfect place to start pushing app bundles more, but yeah, I’ll be really patient waiting for this one to roll out to my chromecast…

Ha! That was my favorite part of shooting the editorial. Thanks for sharing 😁

I REALLY wish these companies would drop the extra sensors. It’s just for the look, to make it LOOK more expensive. It’s better than when cheap brands would put fake lenses on the back of a phone, but not by much.

I try to tell people to “upgrade in place” and save money, unless they WANT to try new things on their phones. If you WANT to try playing more graphics intense games or edit video/podcasts from a phone (and you werent don’t that already on your current phone) it makes sense to shop a more powerful replacement. Otherwise, let’s say you have a three to four years old premium phone, and you want to keep doing the same things with it, then replacing it with a mid-ranger should still be a slight performance upgrade, move you down a price tier.

If you can skip premium phones from this year, you’ll get noticably better battery life. The Samsung fabbed Snapdragon 8Gen1 is kind of a dog. 8+Gen1 and 8Gen2 were fabbed by TSMC, and deliver a significantly better performance per watt.

We keep seeing these “record breaking” articles about Samsung selling more phones than some previous high watermark, but increasingly, Samsung can’t seem to sustain interest in their products past the first surge of pre-orders.

The S8 and S8+ went on to sell 41 million units according to analysts. That doesn’t include a Note.

I’ll lay the prediction out that Samsung will sell fewer Galaxy S phones with three models this year than they did with two models back in 2017.

We saw a glimpse of some great mobile awareness in Cortana. Contacts and location reminders were amazing on windows phones.

“Next time I talk to my wife, remind me to ask bout the dogs medication.” Phone call, text, or email, I’d get a reminder.

“Next time I’m at the store, remind me to buy bread.” “Which store?” “Any grocery store.”

Phone assistants have basically been going down hill since windows 10.

Google is using an order of magnitude more electricity to basically copy Siri. Neat.

I really want to try the withings. The new fossil hybrid is more like a Pebble. It’s a solid little notification machine.

Can’t blame them. Google cut mobvoi and fossil off at the knees, while courting Samsung. Why would they stay? I hope they try another hybrid watch.

Seems to me that Android as a platform was healthier when there was broader competition, and a wider range of designs and features. Samsung peaked with the S10, and sales have plummeted the more they copy Apple.

The only benefit to Netflix games is that these games have no ads or IAP.

4K120 is the most useful “extreme” video mode, and it’s a shame more companies haven’t supported it, just ZTE, OnePlus, and Sony. It’s crazy flexible. Can be easily dropped to 60 or 30 fps, and makes for absolutely stunning slow motion. It’s such an easy edit in something like LumaFusion to time stretch it. Even silly little family videos look so much cooler at that resolution in one quarter time. When done right, at a good bitrate, it looks much better than most phones’ potato quality 1080p slow motion. Sony absolutely chose right offering 4k120 over 8k24.

I have my daughter’s first steps in 4K. That was roughly seven years ago. Shot from an old LG. That little clip is amazing, and it looks so much better than what 1080p at the time would have looked like.

More video out support and desktop modes. Mid-ranger phones are more powerful than budget Chromebooks. It’s silly to act like these pocket computers couldn’t replace a LOT of folks home PCs or laptops.

Dang. Those are two rough chips to recommend at the end of 2023. The 8Gen1 isn’t as bad as the 810 that would melt solder, but it’s not gonna age as gracefully as the 865 or the 8Gen2. Sad that Samsung’s own design is still poorer than the 8Gen1.

Oh man. As a little kid I burned a LOT of time on the old DOS trek.exe.

Also still fire up Armada from time to time. With all the new ship classes in Online, I’d love to see an Armada 3.

The situation has been getting MUCH better. The thing a lot of these articles overlook is just the strange structural difference between Android and iOS. We still seem to be primed to look for the big OTA, that’s “THE Update”, but increasingly more of the bug fixes, security patching, and feature refinement are being delivered by individual app updates and Google Play system updates. I’m OK if the OTAs are a bit more sporadic if I see work from the manufacturer and from Google to push better code throughout the year. I’d rather not wait for a big OTA, when a small component needs to be updated. The situation for Android updates has gotten a LOT better.

We care so much about our users’ privacy and security, we make sure their messages fall back to SMS when chatting with non-iphones. We COULD have dictated the future of messaging in North America, and demanded standards that would have benefited us, but we know we make more money by letting out customers bully the green bubbles.