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Google Will Release a New Pixel Phone this Year (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report: The Pixel represents Google's first proper foray into the smartphone market, allowing the search giant to directly compete with Apple and cement Android's reputation as a premium platform. While sales have been steady, it's been particularly hard to get a hold of one due to component shortages. That hasn't dampened the company's plans to continue investing in its own smartphones, though: according to Rick Osterloh, VP of Hardware at Google, there will be a successor to the Pixel this year and will continue to carry a high price tag.
:)
Company will release new product. Product is expensive product to compete with competition's product. Company has implemented previous strategy to dominate market, but will now try competition's strategy to dominate market. Company has more money than God to compete with competition who has more money than God. Fans of company wonder if company will include support for ________ technology, and also what the buttons will be shaped like. Product will exist in marketplace of products very similar to product to be released.
Hey re pixel has only had one release. Getting bored comes with release two
Personally I want a new nexus 7-8 tablet. Mine is three years old and still awesome but I look around for replacements and see only cheap things
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I want a mobile computer, not a corporate hookup to my consumer life.
You can't get the phone everyone wants, the Pixel XL with 128gb of flash. It is never available for order. You won't be able to get this phone either. It's a mid-priced generic Android for me, like Nokia or whoever.
They'll make it work, get a following, then get bored with it.
Here's a great opportunity to pick up a sizable new market.
A bunch of us are waiting for a new truly flagship device with a replaceable battery, and a MicroSD slot. We have a lot of money to spend on this device, and the only competition right now is the LG V20.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Will Google et al please look at the possibility that some people might NOT want a bigger, thinner, flimsier phone, but something small ( 4 inch screen ), fat and sturdy.
We all used to laugh at phablets, now they are the - still ridiculously inconvenient - default.
Haven't these phone thingies stopped being new? Can't some vendor come up with a model that only changes every other year, rather than every 5 minutes? No wonder phones are deprecated landfill garbage the very moment they're launched, or announced to the press.
Steady sales? You mean crap sales. Samsung is expected to do an initial run of 12 million S8s to meet demand.
That's because Samsung's phones have proven to be the hottest devices, and therefore slated for a flaming success. Competing against a company on fire, like Samsung, that has all but reignited the public's interest, is an explosive proposition. It blows my mind that Google is even trying.
I don't give a flying fuck about all these gimmicks the top-end phones push, what with fingerprint-sensors on every surface, 8K displays, 128TB RAM and 256PB storage, not to mention with "premium" materials, like e.g. slippery, ugly glass-backs or aluminum-backs that get scratched easily and that affect signal-quality -- I just want a mid-end phone with stock Android and a plastic, soft-touch back, that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Does anyone sell such? Nope, no stock Android on anything but these ridiculously expensive Pixels that are nowhere near worth the asking-price.
I used to laugh at phablets. I thought they were unwieldy and way too large. Then I tried out an iPhone 7+, and holy shit it's amazing (for me at least). The only thing that it's annoying for is calls, but I primarily use mine for content and texting, and the occasional game.
Why is no manufacturer capable or willing to release a smart phone with 100% free software from the start?
If they really have to keep the baseband firmware proprietary, isolate it with an IOMMU.
What are they afraid of?
http://www.gsmarena.com/bq_aqu...
Nearly stock Android, reasonably priced.
2 GiB RAM, 16 GiB Flash + microSD.
Root and unlocked boot loader included.
Previous Bq models have LineageOS support. This one will most likely follow.
There is no reason to spend $500 or more on a phone when I was able to order a Samsung Galaxy Express 3 Marshmallow device for AT&T yesterday that cost a total of $42.50.
Google needs to do several things with the Pixel and greater Android: lower the price, fix the architecture, improve code quality, unify Android among all manufacturers, and implement Google-issued patches that can apply against the whole Android ecosystem at once without interference from carriers or OEMs.
Apple can do all these things. Google has talked themselves out of it, and they need to change their minds.
Have we learned nothing from our mistakes?! This is the new africanized bee aka killer bees! If one of these smartphones gets into the wild it will destroy the delicate smartphone ecosystem as we know it! Do you want killer smartphones because this is how we get killer smartphones! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Getting bored with it is still better than killing it with the "last supported os update" that some of us are familiar with.
from: Ars Favorite phones from 2017's MWC
...is a "premium platform"?
Why is no manufacturer capable or willing to release a smart phone with 100% free software from the start?
There *ARE* a few example of nearly 100% software smartphone.
Random examples :
- OpenMoko's FreeRunner. (about a decade ago)
Basically a "do the fuck you want to do with it" platform, which was designed from the ground up to run free-software. At least within what was possible back then.
They manage quite well on some fronts (the GPS and the baseband are basically glorified external modems talking over a serial line with the main computers), and butchered a bit other elements (screen and GPU aren't quite correctly matched - the GPU isn't able to do accelerated 3D OpenGL on a buffer the size the screen has at native resolution) (and there was quite a scandal around some firmware that got stolen and reverse engineered breaching some NDA in the process)
But at the end, it was a device were you could run lots of different things.
- Fairphone 2.
The second device designed by Fairphone is on purpose designed to give possibilities to the end-users to replace the OS.
AOSP is on purpose supported on the device.
(I don't remember if you can order a phone with AOSP installed out of the box.
But AOSP is among the officially supported OSes, and is installable as easily as possible for end-users)
The device has an unlocked boot-loader and is designed to help other efforts to port OSes (there's a very functional port of Sailfish done by the community)
There is effort underway to make upstream kernels run on the hardware (currently the device is limited to an older 3.10 kernel due to hardware). Hope is to manage what RaspPi has (was initially locked-version kernel due to drivers, but latest kernels finally support all of the hardware)
If they really have to keep the baseband firmware proprietary, isolate it with an IOMMU.
What are they afraid of?
There are a few stopper that prevent open-source software :
1. - Effort / End-user :
the total number of geek that actively want an opensource OS on their phone is only a tiny fraction of the market of a smartphone. It's not worth actively spending resource to make sure that users can install opensource software on it (e.g.: OpenMoko was a small scale operation by geeks, for geeks).
But, simply by selecting components that are at least supported up to some point might make the work easier. (That how Fairphone 2 is doing it now, that's how openmoko was built back then).
Though on the other hand, there might be a bigger number of end-users who would have a more general interest of not having their privacy completely raped by the crapware preinstalled on the phone - but they don't all understand that having a full FLOSS OS supported would help. :
(But
Fairphone pushed for AOSP exactly for this reasons : so privacy conscious users can have at least a possibility to have an opensource OS that can be reviewed by others.
Turing phone is specially targeted at privacy conscious / security minded users. It comes with Sailfish OS pre-installed. Though it's not fully free/libre it's pretty close to it : the core is Mer (the descendant of Meamo/Meego : a pretty normal GNU/Linux base), and the interface is QML based (so although the license isn't currently free/libre, the source is directly accessible for patching being non-obscured/non-minified text. Jolla is promising to eventually completely opensource the whole Sailfish)
2. - Baseband
As you mentioned, for licensing reason, the baseband firmware can't be opensourced. Only someone holding a cellular-band license can modify a software that control radio emitted on these frequencies.
Now this comes with an even bigger problem : the baseband modem itself.
For cost and space saving reasons, on most recent device the modem isn't a separate chip (that used to be the case back in the openmoko era, and back when TI's OMAPs where the most popular smartphone CPUs - the modem was logically a comp
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"... into the smartphone market." That is the ridiculous thang that I have read in a long time that did not come from Donald fucking Trump. What in the HELL is the matter with you? "Shut the fuck up, Donnie!"