Doesn't it have to be a PHONE (as in voice) in order to qualify? In other words, the Galaxy Tab US version either won't have access to the Market, or it will create precedent for all other tablet manufacturers to get Market access as well...
So basically if I visit the US with my Android phone, I won't be able to get a prepaid SIM with data at all...?
Strange, the rest of the developed world (and a lot of the third world) offers a whole bunch of data packages on prepaid. Time-based (one-day-flat, one-week-flat, one-month-flat) or even traffic based (like just buy a gig for 10 and use it as quickly or as slowly as you want - although those are sort of dying out even here in Europe)...
Not only are they pushing all sorts of new features, they also reduced the battery capacities. 12xx mAh on the HD and 1300mAh on the Z... Idiots. I'll take a millimeter or two more of thickness over a reduction in capacity any day.:(
Either your kind of medium/heavy use is what I'd call leaving the phone on standby, or your Droid has some kind of super battery. As a former Milestone owner, I can safely say that just a solid hour of web surfing via the mobile network or WiFi is enough to drain the battery by 15-20%...
Heavy use for me on a work day is what... maybe 2-4 hours of active use (web/apps/games) a day, as well as phone calls, SMS, maybe WiFi tethering, an hour or two of streaming music. Hell, I'd be surprised if it lasted a whole two days with that kind of usage.
Usually I was down to about 20-30% remaining at the end of a given day... with less usage than I just listed.
My Desire (and the Z/HD probably too) is even worse.
The always-have-it-with-me factor is a huge bonus... I've been using my phone as an eReader for years now, and since I don't have time to actually spend a few hours reading these days, it's great to be able to get 5 or 10 minutes in on the train, or when I'm waiting for someone at a cafe, or on the crapper, without needing to constantly lug around a separate device.
It's especially obvious when I'm out and about without a bag (my jacket pockets are usually filled with other crap... no room for eReaders) - I'm not carrying one around just for an eReader.
That's why you shouldn't read black text on a white background in a dark room... pretty much every decent eReader app for a smartphone (I use iReader on Android) is completely customizable in this regard. I find green text on a black background to be perfect for low-light reading, with no eyestrain whatsoever.
Obviously a bright white backlight 12 inches from your face in a dark room is going to produce eyestrain... so don't do that.
Hey, I used my old Prophet as an E-Reader (MS Reader and LIT files mostly) for a really long time too. Moved to Android now, though... the readers available there are pretty impressive.
#1 tip on Android: iReader. Sounds like an iPhone app, but it's really just a plain text reader with customizable... well, everything. Green text on black background is great, especially with the AMOLED screen on the Desire (one of the few things the AMOLED screen actually does well - green is unaffected by the pentile matrix, and there's no backlight bleed with the black background)... Since I do most of my reading in low-light, this is great for reducing eyestrain, and I don't need a bright light to actually see what I'm reading.:)
LCDs have always been superior to E-Ink for my usage, for this very reason...
And eyestrain? Yah, if you blast your eyes at full brightness with black text on a white background in an otherwise dark room... yeah, you might get some eyestrain. Remember: If it hurts, you're doing it wrong!
I'm sure this could be useful for making, say, crappy capacitive screens like the ones on the iPhone (yeah, I said it!:p) and Android phones more accurate... not just as a standalone technology.
...when the earpieces on phones these days sound like a Marshall stack on 10 (very loud guitar amp) from about 3 miles away? The frequency response is probably somewhere around a spike between 500 and 2k Hz, with next to nothing at all above or below that...
OK, Sipdroid or Skype sounds a bit better than regular phone calls, but the problem really is the earpiece.
Here's a suggestion for manufacturers: Make the screen 1cm shorter, and use the increased space to put in MULTIPLE (I'm thinking three next to each other) speakers with AT LEAST a 10mm membrane in there. That way it'll sound great at low volume during calls, and there's no need to have the speakers for speakerphone/video etc. on the back (which is the stupidest idea ever, by the way... blaring right into the palms of my hands is oh so very efficient).
My HTC Desire is especially bad, but even phones with supposedly decent earpieces sound like shit.
Found the app... Doesn't really seem to work though. Just displays a list of stuff that's been mapped out with checkboxes... no way to actually display a map:(
No, I'm saying that given the same other hardware, this processor won't affect battery life negatively in a very noticable way.
Battery life is already crap, and it's not because of the processors used. All this power optimization should be taking place where it's needed most... crappy AMOLED screens with twice the power draw of LCD when displaying anything remotely useful (i.e. not a mostly black screen), for instance.
True, but then you wouldn't be able to receive calls;)
Just saying, the screen is (in most use cases) the component that draws the most power, usually by far. Manufacturers need to stop screwing around optimizing power draw for when the phone is idle with the display off, but rather make it so that it'll last 24 full hours with the screen ON!
WTF do I need 200+ hours of standby time for if after using the phone for 6 hours heavily it's completely dead?
Correct. That's why I never manage more than 12 hours on a single charge, and carry around an external USB power pack with a 4400mAh LiIon battery in it...
The gist of what I was trying to say was, however, that the CPU is NOT the component that draws so much power on smartphones, but rather the screen, and to a lesser effect (contrary to popular belief) the radios.
Well, they ARE already partially available in NAS type devices. As a matter of fact, the cheapo Buffalo LinkStation Lite I have sitting out in the hall runs on an ARM chip of some sort, IIRC...
Smartbooks and tablets are starting to run on ARM as well. Shouldn't be too long until your wishes are granted;)
Ah, good point. Is there a place where I could check which sources Google uses for their Maps POI? Some of them are clearly marked/stated but others are just there without any hint as to how they got there...
Battery life is fine if you keep the screen off. I get a standby power draw of roughly 5mA on average on my Desire. That works out to about 280h of standby time, and that's with a bunch of always-connected applications (Google Sync always active, an IM client, SIP client) in the background, and WiFi and Bluetooth on. Turn all that stuff off and I get values more around 3mA... 466h.
Obviously a screen that draws almost 100x as much (seriously, at full power the AMOLED screen draws close to 300mA!) is going to kill off the battery very quickly.
In comparison, the SoC uses very little power (full CPU load on the Desire's Snapdragon is 40mA higher than idle - tested with SetCPU's stress test) and scales very well with load. If you really want to increase use time, build more efficient screens... fuck the processor.
Yep, I have ~400MB available on my Desire (576MB in there total according to the spec sheets), and it's still not enough.
My old Milestone (256MB RAM) was constantly killing off applications in the background because it was running out of RAM, sometimes not even saving the app states properly, causing me to lose my place (doesn't sound too bad, but it gets annoying quickly)... my Desire fares better, but there's still the occasional low memory kill when I have a lot of browser tabs open.
What I want is a gigabyte or two of RAM and swap on SLC NAND... *drools*
Why is there no way to add/update POI on apps like Google Maps?
So many of the existing POI are out of date, and many are missing... why can't I just edit the information myself directly from my Android phone or Maps on the PC? Of course, the changes would need to be approved before they're actually integrated into Maps, but I feel like they're leaving a lot of potential untapped here.
OSM supports this, of course, but the Android apps are absolute crap... not to mention the maps of Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe.:(
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Doesn't it have to be a PHONE (as in voice) in order to qualify? In other words, the Galaxy Tab US version either won't have access to the Market, or it will create precedent for all other tablet manufacturers to get Market access as well...
Holy shit, that's shocking: http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=4872
Why do you guys have such stupidly cheap voice/text options while data costs are somewhere close to the way they were in the late 90s?
So basically if I visit the US with my Android phone, I won't be able to get a prepaid SIM with data at all...?
Strange, the rest of the developed world (and a lot of the third world) offers a whole bunch of data packages on prepaid. Time-based (one-day-flat, one-week-flat, one-month-flat) or even traffic based (like just buy a gig for 10 and use it as quickly or as slowly as you want - although those are sort of dying out even here in Europe)...
You guys don't have prepaid data plans? o.O
The main reason for green-on-black is the AMOLED screen in my case... uses less power if less pixels are lit :)
Turning down the brightness with an off-white background should be enough to reduce eyestrain as well, of course...
Just buy the phone outright and put any prepaid SIM you want in there. What's the problem?
Not only are they pushing all sorts of new features, they also reduced the battery capacities. 12xx mAh on the HD and 1300mAh on the Z... Idiots. I'll take a millimeter or two more of thickness over a reduction in capacity any day. :(
Either your kind of medium/heavy use is what I'd call leaving the phone on standby, or your Droid has some kind of super battery. As a former Milestone owner, I can safely say that just a solid hour of web surfing via the mobile network or WiFi is enough to drain the battery by 15-20%...
Heavy use for me on a work day is what... maybe 2-4 hours of active use (web/apps/games) a day, as well as phone calls, SMS, maybe WiFi tethering, an hour or two of streaming music. Hell, I'd be surprised if it lasted a whole two days with that kind of usage.
Usually I was down to about 20-30% remaining at the end of a given day... with less usage than I just listed.
My Desire (and the Z/HD probably too) is even worse.
The always-have-it-with-me factor is a huge bonus... I've been using my phone as an eReader for years now, and since I don't have time to actually spend a few hours reading these days, it's great to be able to get 5 or 10 minutes in on the train, or when I'm waiting for someone at a cafe, or on the crapper, without needing to constantly lug around a separate device.
It's especially obvious when I'm out and about without a bag (my jacket pockets are usually filled with other crap... no room for eReaders) - I'm not carrying one around just for an eReader.
That's why you shouldn't read black text on a white background in a dark room... pretty much every decent eReader app for a smartphone (I use iReader on Android) is completely customizable in this regard. I find green text on a black background to be perfect for low-light reading, with no eyestrain whatsoever.
Obviously a bright white backlight 12 inches from your face in a dark room is going to produce eyestrain... so don't do that.
Hey, I used my old Prophet as an E-Reader (MS Reader and LIT files mostly) for a really long time too. Moved to Android now, though... the readers available there are pretty impressive.
#1 tip on Android: iReader. Sounds like an iPhone app, but it's really just a plain text reader with customizable... well, everything. Green text on black background is great, especially with the AMOLED screen on the Desire (one of the few things the AMOLED screen actually does well - green is unaffected by the pentile matrix, and there's no backlight bleed with the black background)... Since I do most of my reading in low-light, this is great for reducing eyestrain, and I don't need a bright light to actually see what I'm reading. :)
LCDs have always been superior to E-Ink for my usage, for this very reason...
And eyestrain? Yah, if you blast your eyes at full brightness with black text on a white background in an otherwise dark room... yeah, you might get some eyestrain. Remember: If it hurts, you're doing it wrong!
I'm sure this could be useful for making, say, crappy capacitive screens like the ones on the iPhone (yeah, I said it! :p) and Android phones more accurate... not just as a standalone technology.
...when the earpieces on phones these days sound like a Marshall stack on 10 (very loud guitar amp) from about 3 miles away? The frequency response is probably somewhere around a spike between 500 and 2k Hz, with next to nothing at all above or below that...
OK, Sipdroid or Skype sounds a bit better than regular phone calls, but the problem really is the earpiece.
Here's a suggestion for manufacturers: Make the screen 1cm shorter, and use the increased space to put in MULTIPLE (I'm thinking three next to each other) speakers with AT LEAST a 10mm membrane in there. That way it'll sound great at low volume during calls, and there's no need to have the speakers for speakerphone/video etc. on the back (which is the stupidest idea ever, by the way... blaring right into the palms of my hands is oh so very efficient).
My HTC Desire is especially bad, but even phones with supposedly decent earpieces sound like shit.
Found the app... Doesn't really seem to work though. Just displays a list of stuff that's been mapped out with checkboxes... no way to actually display a map :(
http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.MapiaExplorer
Interesting... how do I get it to display as an overlay? I can't really seem to select both Google Maps and the WIkiMapia map at once.
Also, is there an Android app? :p
No, I'm saying that given the same other hardware, this processor won't affect battery life negatively in a very noticable way.
Battery life is already crap, and it's not because of the processors used. All this power optimization should be taking place where it's needed most... crappy AMOLED screens with twice the power draw of LCD when displaying anything remotely useful (i.e. not a mostly black screen), for instance.
True, but then you wouldn't be able to receive calls ;)
Just saying, the screen is (in most use cases) the component that draws the most power, usually by far. Manufacturers need to stop screwing around optimizing power draw for when the phone is idle with the display off, but rather make it so that it'll last 24 full hours with the screen ON!
WTF do I need 200+ hours of standby time for if after using the phone for 6 hours heavily it's completely dead?
Correct. That's why I never manage more than 12 hours on a single charge, and carry around an external USB power pack with a 4400mAh LiIon battery in it...
The gist of what I was trying to say was, however, that the CPU is NOT the component that draws so much power on smartphones, but rather the screen, and to a lesser effect (contrary to popular belief) the radios.
Well, they ARE already partially available in NAS type devices. As a matter of fact, the cheapo Buffalo LinkStation Lite I have sitting out in the hall runs on an ARM chip of some sort, IIRC...
Smartbooks and tablets are starting to run on ARM as well. Shouldn't be too long until your wishes are granted ;)
Ah, good point. Is there a place where I could check which sources Google uses for their Maps POI? Some of them are clearly marked/stated but others are just there without any hint as to how they got there...
Battery life is fine if you keep the screen off. I get a standby power draw of roughly 5mA on average on my Desire. That works out to about 280h of standby time, and that's with a bunch of always-connected applications (Google Sync always active, an IM client, SIP client) in the background, and WiFi and Bluetooth on. Turn all that stuff off and I get values more around 3mA... 466h.
Obviously a screen that draws almost 100x as much (seriously, at full power the AMOLED screen draws close to 300mA!) is going to kill off the battery very quickly.
In comparison, the SoC uses very little power (full CPU load on the Desire's Snapdragon is 40mA higher than idle - tested with SetCPU's stress test) and scales very well with load. If you really want to increase use time, build more efficient screens... fuck the processor.
Yep, I have ~400MB available on my Desire (576MB in there total according to the spec sheets), and it's still not enough.
My old Milestone (256MB RAM) was constantly killing off applications in the background because it was running out of RAM, sometimes not even saving the app states properly, causing me to lose my place (doesn't sound too bad, but it gets annoying quickly)... my Desire fares better, but there's still the occasional low memory kill when I have a lot of browser tabs open.
What I want is a gigabyte or two of RAM and swap on SLC NAND... *drools*
Why is there no way to add/update POI on apps like Google Maps?
So many of the existing POI are out of date, and many are missing... why can't I just edit the information myself directly from my Android phone or Maps on the PC? Of course, the changes would need to be approved before they're actually integrated into Maps, but I feel like they're leaving a lot of potential untapped here.
OSM supports this, of course, but the Android apps are absolute crap... not to mention the maps of Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe. :(
"Why do I hear my voice?" during a video conference.
Makes me feel hella smart. :D
PS3 and XBox360? You mean there's no PC version of the iconic PC shooter?
Run, it's a scam!