I'm not so sure there's a big market for 6" phablets yet -- that's going into uncharted territory, somewhere not even Samsung dared to go (this year's Note 4 has the same screen size as last year's Note 3, at 5.7"). At some point, phones are simply going to get too big for people, and this phone is going to be very hard to fit in a pocket or use one-handed.
It's also worth pointing out that Google's previous Nexii have had very mixed success sales-wise, so I'm not sure you can really assume that they've got the phone marketing thing down pat, or even that they care about sales that much. With a $650 price tag, the N6 seems more like a developer niche thing to me -- just as the Nexus One, Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus were (which also all had similarly high price tags).
But, I could be wrong... maybe it'll sell like hotcakes, and we'll be seeing a 7" phone next year.
The 2nd gen Moto G isn't 1080p, and it's not exactly a flagship phone performance-wise (although it's very nice). Thankfully, it looks as though Google is keeping the N5 around for another year...
It's available in Europe and seems to be selling pretty well on Amazon UK right now. I don't know why Sony ignores the US...
If I was looking for a phone right now I'd be seriously considering the Z3 compact. Seems pretty much the perfect size to me, and the battery life is insane.
No one was using their "smartphone" (or super duper feature phone like the N95) because they were a disaster to use.
Hey, don't you go insulting Symbian! "Feature phone" my grandmother! The N95 was very much a smartphone. The number of 3rd party apps for Symbian back in the day was enormous, it was easy to develop for, the OS had a history reaching back to the days of the classic psion PDAs, and you could customise just about any aspect of the OS. And if you think about what a Symbian phone could do with crappy processors and no memory to speak of, it was even more impressive. Plus, the N95 had a superb camera -- far superior to the iPhone's shooter when it came out six months later. Your/. userid suggests you should be old enough to remember the N95 and its kin -- I'm surprised.
I also remember the first iPhone, and while it had a lot of promise and iOS was ground-breaking in its use of a touchscreen, it really wasn't that power-user-friendly. There was no cut and paste (remember how you had to jailbreak to add this?), no multitasking, no 3G, and there were very limited numbers of apps when it was released. Yes, it was a preview of the future and the sheer beauty of the graphics of iOS was amazing; but that first iPhone was a gimicky toy in comparison to what you could do as a power user with Symbian.
CyanogenMod. I have a six year old HTC Dream running the latest version of Android.
Seriously? You're running KitKat on 192Mb of RAM and a 512MHz processor??
That's... well, I'm not sure whether that's insane, masochistic or extraordinary. But you definitely earn my respect for trying (and for saving the world's resources by not upgrading your phone in six years.)
Perfect example: Apple Pay. Google has had NFC payments via Google Wallet in Android for years. They could have built a huge business there, but they completely fucked it up. They put out the feature with almost no retailer support, minimal bank support, even worse CE vendor support, only in the US, and a half-assed marketing effort even for Google's usually low standards.
This article might be an interesting read. Timing is definitely on Apple's side, but you shouldn't underestimate Google's attempts to trail-blaze.
Personally, provided neither ecosystem destroys the other, I'm happy. The iPhone6 is at least some serious competition against an Android juggernaut which has really stagnated in the last year. Similarly, it was the larger displays of Android phones and their market dominance that spurred Apple to finally break away from their tiny screens. Competition is always good.
$350-$500 puts you into the range of cheap trash and knock-off timepieces.
Well, the watch I'm wearing right now is a Seiko automatic that cost well below that price range; yet it has a fully in-house movement (right down to Seiko's own oil formulations) and it's accurate to within half a second a day (technically it loses 8 secs every 30 days on average, after regulating it myself). As you may be aware, Seiko's movements are so good that Tag Heuer famously used one of them as the basis of their own "100% in house" movement several years ago:)
Getting back to topic, though, I agree that real watchmakers aren't in any danger from smartwatches. Mechanical watches are highly fashionable elite items that are valued because they are rare, handmade works of art. It's like suggesting that oil paintings will be threatened by digital photo frames -- the markets for the two products are pretty much non-overlapping.
I still miss sawfish. So customizable, and the undo feature on window move/resize was awesome.
Yeah, but -- lisp!:( (Personally I was rather fond of IceWM back in the day, and contributed a bit of code to it. Customisability wasn't it's strong suit, but it was so damn fast on the crappy hardware I had fifteen years ago...)
FWIW, Ubuntu still has both sawfish and icewm available as packages, not that'll stop the clowns here complaining that Unity took away all their desktop choices...
This means apps won't risk showing important information in the corners of the square watches.
Not a bad thing if it pushes manufacturers away from the fugly square smartwatch screens, but it'll be interesting to see how they're handled in the software. And to be fair, important things like message text will wrap in the space available just fine, whether that's round or square.
other than tell me the weather that i can already do by looking outside or checking my phone in the morning
Was this a serious question? It tells you the time (that's the watch bit) and it displays notifications and information (that's the smart bit), all without you having to dig your phone out of your pocket/bag and unlock it. Presumably the intended market is executives in meetings -- something like this allows you to remain connected far more discretely than playing with your phone. (Although FWIW having a feed of a hyperlocal weather source such as forecast.io would also be significantly more useful than looking outside the window... and navigation whilst cycling would also be kinda handy.)
Personally I like mechanical watches and I'm not going to buy one of these. But this (or at least the Moto360 version) is at least the first smartwatch that's actually appealed to me, and the interface Google's dreamed up (swipe-based without apparent multiple touch targets) seems sensible and intuitive. Even if you didn't care for the "smart" bit at all, it's a good looking watch in its own right... and that's a first for the wearables industry.
The real point behind having a large camera is to restrict the focal depth of field. This allows you to highlight a subject in the foreground whilst blurring the background (think portrait photography). And the laws of optics aren't going to allow a pinhole camera to ever manage that, sadly.
Incidentally, the laws of optics also mean that most of these camera phones are diffraction limited around 8mp (and that's being generous). I'm not sure why more manufacturers don't stick with a decent 5mp rather than throwing away dynamic range on silly sensors packed with unnecessary pixels...
Well, 32Gb isn't exactly acres of space these days, but I think it'll be enough for me. 16Gb definitely isn't anymore.
I do wish they'd use SD cards (ext-formatted, of course) mainly because I'd know at least some of my data was safe if my phone ever died or bricked. But I realise it's never going to happen with a Nexus, and I'm more-or-less happy to pay that price.
Without digging into it for more than 30 seconds, I see a phone with a different screen, different camera, different battery, different physical button layout, and different UI, and with significantly different physical properties (e.g. wireless charging on the Nexus)--these might be distant cousins, but they are most decidedly not "mildly revamped" versions of the same thing.
But the screen, camera, battery and buttons are all extras; the point is that at the core of both devices is the LG G2's mainboard with a Snapdragon 800 sitting on it. If I take my desktop box here at work and change the monitor, keyboard and mouse, it's still the same box, and that's pretty much how most of us are viewing the Nexus 5.
I see this as a good thing, mind you. LG does the low-level stuff well; they just have no idea how to make an interface (either physical or graphical) to save themselves. Mate LG's tech with Google's design sense and you've got what should be the best phone of the year.
I wouldn't begrudge paying for ebooks, if I though the balance of the money went to the author instead of some publisher who is doing what exactly? Editing? Possibly.
Editing is a huge job. An education editor will spend a lot of time working on the layout of the work as well as on the writing; a trade (i.e. popular fiction/non-fiction) editor will also interact with an author at every stage of the writing process and help sculpt the finished work. Just look at how much thanks fiction authors give to their editors in their acknowledgements to get an idea.
I'm still amazed that most authors don't self publish. Especially well known ones. What do they need the publishers for? To set up book tours?
Amongst other things, yes. Publicity is pretty vital in getting your book noticed. But I suspect most go through the major publishing houses to (a) get the services of a good editor and (b) get an monetary advance ahead of publication to support their writing.
Yes, I'm sure that publishers are making a bit more profit on ebooks than on p-books. But I'm not sure it's as much as you think it is, and most authors don't have the ready cash to be able to replace all that infrastructure and support through hiring freelance staff.
I agree, but I feel that the reduced ownership and lower costs of production and distribution should be reflected in the price.
Well, I agree with that too:)
With regards to your first point, I do hope that ebooks will eventually move to a DRM-free format just as has happened with digital music. But we'll see... in the meantime, thank god it's easy to strip the DRM straight off my kindle books.
I don't know if other people are as cheap as me, but I sure can see how once you find Project Gutenberg you might purchase a lot less at $15/pop.
Personally I quite like supporting authors whose works I enjoy by buying their books. I have this naive theory that if enough people buy their books, they might write some more. But maybe I'm just dreaming...
(Not dissing PG for a minute, incidentally, and more power to it -- but there's times when the classics don't cut it)
you can't lend them easily to your friends or resell them, you can't rent them from the local library, depending on the device used, annotating or marking the pages is not effective and can't easily be shared between two people reading the same book at the same time (keep slowly browsing through to get to the current page)
Am I the only person who removes DRM from their ebooks?? (I mean, seriously, this is/. -- we're supposed to enjoy this sort of challenge!) A few google searches will tell you how to do it for most popular formats, and then you can give the book to your friends without issue.
What we should be pushing for is DRM-free ebooks at purchase, of course. A switch from DRM to DRM-free formats eventually happened with music files so I have every hope that it will happen with ebooks as well.
The real reason to me to get a kindle over a table for reading is simply the weight difference. The tablets I held would be uncomfortable compared to a 6" kindle which easily weighs the same as or less than a fiction paperback.
Dunno... a nexus 7 is pretty light. Personally, the reason I still use a kindle is because of the battery life. If tablets ever ran for a couple of months without needing a recharge then I might consider swapping.
Thankfully, neither a kindle nor a 7" tablet is particularly bulky or heavy, so when I travel I carry both.
There's really no nicer way to say it... ebooks, in their current form, are a miserable failure for anything besides reading novels from start to finish.
Um, I think reading novels (and non-fiction books) is the market. E-readers obviously can't replace reference works that you need to jump around randomly in -- page turns are far too slow on e-Ink.
Much of it is just due to underpowered hardware. 2D text isn't sexy like photorealistic rendered 3D, but realtime font rendering at high quality is a demanding (and unappreciated) task in its own right.
Why on earth would you need any better font rendering than freetype happily provides?
What's more concerning is that Tim Cook just came out and said that Apple wouldn't be considering larger screen sizes in the foreseeable future. I'm not entirely sure what I think about 5" phone screens either, but trying to deny they're not popular is as stupid as trying to deny that 7" tablet screen sizes aren't popular.
It seems too me that ever since the iPhone 4 Apple has reacted to the loss of its market share by not daring to change anything. The phone design is still the same (nearly three years old now, and it wasn't even a very attractive or practical design to begin with) and the screen is the same width (which feels too small and cramped to me, now that I'm used to larger Android screens). It's like they're caught in the headlights and don't dare move, not realising that standing still is what's killing them.
Out of interest, does either have an IPS screen? It's the low-viewing-angle hideous TN screens that drive me to distraction, and I don't know why more manufacturers don't care about screen quality. Even Apple seems to be slipping with their latest laptops.
I would have thought that viewing photos and watching movies on laptops is pretty common these days, so screen quality *should* be important to people.
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I'm not so sure there's a big market for 6" phablets yet -- that's going into uncharted territory, somewhere not even Samsung dared to go (this year's Note 4 has the same screen size as last year's Note 3, at 5.7"). At some point, phones are simply going to get too big for people, and this phone is going to be very hard to fit in a pocket or use one-handed.
It's also worth pointing out that Google's previous Nexii have had very mixed success sales-wise, so I'm not sure you can really assume that they've got the phone marketing thing down pat, or even that they care about sales that much. With a $650 price tag, the N6 seems more like a developer niche thing to me -- just as the Nexus One, Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus were (which also all had similarly high price tags).
But, I could be wrong ... maybe it'll sell like hotcakes, and we'll be seeing a 7" phone next year.
The 2nd gen Moto G isn't 1080p, and it's not exactly a flagship phone performance-wise (although it's very nice). Thankfully, it looks as though Google is keeping the N5 around for another year ...
It's available in Europe and seems to be selling pretty well on Amazon UK right now. I don't know why Sony ignores the US ...
If I was looking for a phone right now I'd be seriously considering the Z3 compact. Seems pretty much the perfect size to me, and the battery life is insane.
No one was using their "smartphone" (or super duper feature phone like the N95) because they were a disaster to use.
Hey, don't you go insulting Symbian! "Feature phone" my grandmother! The N95 was very much a smartphone. The number of 3rd party apps for Symbian back in the day was enormous, it was easy to develop for, the OS had a history reaching back to the days of the classic psion PDAs, and you could customise just about any aspect of the OS. And if you think about what a Symbian phone could do with crappy processors and no memory to speak of, it was even more impressive. Plus, the N95 had a superb camera -- far superior to the iPhone's shooter when it came out six months later. Your /. userid suggests you should be old enough to remember the N95 and its kin -- I'm surprised.
I also remember the first iPhone, and while it had a lot of promise and iOS was ground-breaking in its use of a touchscreen, it really wasn't that power-user-friendly. There was no cut and paste (remember how you had to jailbreak to add this?), no multitasking, no 3G, and there were very limited numbers of apps when it was released. Yes, it was a preview of the future and the sheer beauty of the graphics of iOS was amazing; but that first iPhone was a gimicky toy in comparison to what you could do as a power user with Symbian.
CyanogenMod. I have a six year old HTC Dream running the latest version of Android.
Seriously? You're running KitKat on 192Mb of RAM and a 512MHz processor??
That's ... well, I'm not sure whether that's insane, masochistic or extraordinary. But you definitely earn my respect for trying (and for saving the world's resources by not upgrading your phone in six years.)
Perfect example: Apple Pay. Google has had NFC payments via Google Wallet in Android for years. They could have built a huge business there, but they completely fucked it up. They put out the feature with almost no retailer support, minimal bank support, even worse CE vendor support, only in the US, and a half-assed marketing effort even for Google's usually low standards.
This article might be an interesting read. Timing is definitely on Apple's side, but you shouldn't underestimate Google's attempts to trail-blaze.
Personally, provided neither ecosystem destroys the other, I'm happy. The iPhone6 is at least some serious competition against an Android juggernaut which has really stagnated in the last year. Similarly, it was the larger displays of Android phones and their market dominance that spurred Apple to finally break away from their tiny screens. Competition is always good.
$350-$500 puts you into the range of cheap trash and knock-off timepieces.
Well, the watch I'm wearing right now is a Seiko automatic that cost well below that price range; yet it has a fully in-house movement (right down to Seiko's own oil formulations) and it's accurate to within half a second a day (technically it loses 8 secs every 30 days on average, after regulating it myself). As you may be aware, Seiko's movements are so good that Tag Heuer famously used one of them as the basis of their own "100% in house" movement several years ago :)
Getting back to topic, though, I agree that real watchmakers aren't in any danger from smartwatches. Mechanical watches are highly fashionable elite items that are valued because they are rare, handmade works of art. It's like suggesting that oil paintings will be threatened by digital photo frames -- the markets for the two products are pretty much non-overlapping.
I still miss sawfish. So customizable, and the undo feature on window move/resize was awesome.
Yeah, but -- lisp! :( (Personally I was rather fond of IceWM back in the day, and contributed a bit of code to it. Customisability wasn't it's strong suit, but it was so damn fast on the crappy hardware I had fifteen years ago ...)
FWIW, Ubuntu still has both sawfish and icewm available as packages, not that'll stop the clowns here complaining that Unity took away all their desktop choices ...
I couldn't see riding without it...
... ah yes, but can you see the road, riding with it?? :P
In all seriousness, when did /. become so goddamn conservative? I can't believe how dismissive people are of wearables around here ...
And there's other problems that really sound lame. I'd hate having to charge my watch every night.
Have you actually seen battery life estimates for the Moto360? I really hope it's not a charge-once-a-night scenario ...
I know a couple people who ordered Pebble watches. I haven't seen anyone who wears one regularly.
I have, and it's not pretty. I've got higher hopes for this Moto watch -- at least it's actually stylish.
This means apps won't risk showing important information in the corners of the square watches.
Not a bad thing if it pushes manufacturers away from the fugly square smartwatch screens, but it'll be interesting to see how they're handled in the software. And to be fair, important things like message text will wrap in the space available just fine, whether that's round or square.
other than tell me the weather that i can already do by looking outside or checking my phone in the morning
Was this a serious question? It tells you the time (that's the watch bit) and it displays notifications and information (that's the smart bit), all without you having to dig your phone out of your pocket/bag and unlock it. Presumably the intended market is executives in meetings -- something like this allows you to remain connected far more discretely than playing with your phone. (Although FWIW having a feed of a hyperlocal weather source such as forecast.io would also be significantly more useful than looking outside the window ... and navigation whilst cycling would also be kinda handy.)
Personally I like mechanical watches and I'm not going to buy one of these. But this (or at least the Moto360 version) is at least the first smartwatch that's actually appealed to me, and the interface Google's dreamed up (swipe-based without apparent multiple touch targets) seems sensible and intuitive. Even if you didn't care for the "smart" bit at all, it's a good looking watch in its own right ... and that's a first for the wearables industry.
The real point behind having a large camera is to restrict the focal depth of field. This allows you to highlight a subject in the foreground whilst blurring the background (think portrait photography). And the laws of optics aren't going to allow a pinhole camera to ever manage that, sadly.
Incidentally, the laws of optics also mean that most of these camera phones are diffraction limited around 8mp (and that's being generous). I'm not sure why more manufacturers don't stick with a decent 5mp rather than throwing away dynamic range on silly sensors packed with unnecessary pixels ...
Well, 32Gb isn't exactly acres of space these days, but I think it'll be enough for me. 16Gb definitely isn't anymore.
I do wish they'd use SD cards (ext-formatted, of course) mainly because I'd know at least some of my data was safe if my phone ever died or bricked. But I realise it's never going to happen with a Nexus, and I'm more-or-less happy to pay that price.
Without digging into it for more than 30 seconds, I see a phone with a different screen, different camera, different battery, different physical button layout, and different UI, and with significantly different physical properties (e.g. wireless charging on the Nexus)--these might be distant cousins, but they are most decidedly not "mildly revamped" versions of the same thing.
But the screen, camera, battery and buttons are all extras; the point is that at the core of both devices is the LG G2's mainboard with a Snapdragon 800 sitting on it. If I take my desktop box here at work and change the monitor, keyboard and mouse, it's still the same box, and that's pretty much how most of us are viewing the Nexus 5.
I see this as a good thing, mind you. LG does the low-level stuff well; they just have no idea how to make an interface (either physical or graphical) to save themselves. Mate LG's tech with Google's design sense and you've got what should be the best phone of the year.
I wouldn't begrudge paying for ebooks, if I though the balance of the money went to the author instead of some publisher who is doing what exactly? Editing? Possibly.
Editing is a huge job. An education editor will spend a lot of time working on the layout of the work as well as on the writing; a trade (i.e. popular fiction/non-fiction) editor will also interact with an author at every stage of the writing process and help sculpt the finished work. Just look at how much thanks fiction authors give to their editors in their acknowledgements to get an idea.
I'm still amazed that most authors don't self publish. Especially well known ones. What do they need the publishers for? To set up book tours?
Amongst other things, yes. Publicity is pretty vital in getting your book noticed. But I suspect most go through the major publishing houses to (a) get the services of a good editor and (b) get an monetary advance ahead of publication to support their writing.
Yes, I'm sure that publishers are making a bit more profit on ebooks than on p-books. But I'm not sure it's as much as you think it is, and most authors don't have the ready cash to be able to replace all that infrastructure and support through hiring freelance staff.
I agree, but I feel that the reduced ownership and lower costs of production and distribution should be reflected in the price.
Well, I agree with that too :)
With regards to your first point, I do hope that ebooks will eventually move to a DRM-free format just as has happened with digital music. But we'll see ... in the meantime, thank god it's easy to strip the DRM straight off my kindle books.
My point was simply that people shouldn't begrudge paying for ebooks ...
I don't know if other people are as cheap as me, but I sure can see how once you find Project Gutenberg you might purchase a lot less at $15/pop.
Personally I quite like supporting authors whose works I enjoy by buying their books. I have this naive theory that if enough people buy their books, they might write some more. But maybe I'm just dreaming ...
(Not dissing PG for a minute, incidentally, and more power to it -- but there's times when the classics don't cut it)
you can't lend them easily to your friends or resell them, you can't rent them from the local library, depending on the device used, annotating or marking the pages is not effective and can't easily be shared between two people reading the same book at the same time (keep slowly browsing through to get to the current page)
Am I the only person who removes DRM from their ebooks?? (I mean, seriously, this is /. -- we're supposed to enjoy this sort of challenge!) A few google searches will tell you how to do it for most popular formats, and then you can give the book to your friends without issue.
What we should be pushing for is DRM-free ebooks at purchase, of course. A switch from DRM to DRM-free formats eventually happened with music files so I have every hope that it will happen with ebooks as well.
The real reason to me to get a kindle over a table for reading is simply the weight difference. The tablets I held would be uncomfortable compared to a 6" kindle which easily weighs the same as or less than a fiction paperback.
Dunno ... a nexus 7 is pretty light. Personally, the reason I still use a kindle is because of the battery life. If tablets ever ran for a couple of months without needing a recharge then I might consider swapping.
Thankfully, neither a kindle nor a 7" tablet is particularly bulky or heavy, so when I travel I carry both.
There's really no nicer way to say it... ebooks, in their current form, are a miserable failure for anything besides reading novels from start to finish.
Um, I think reading novels (and non-fiction books) is the market. E-readers obviously can't replace reference works that you need to jump around randomly in -- page turns are far too slow on e-Ink.
Much of it is just due to underpowered hardware. 2D text isn't sexy like photorealistic rendered 3D, but realtime font rendering at high quality is a demanding (and unappreciated) task in its own right.
Why on earth would you need any better font rendering than freetype happily provides?
Of course, "anecdote" isn't the singular form of "data"
Not to split hairs, but an anecdote is very much a single point of data.
I think you were looking for "the plural of anecdote isn't data", which isn't quite the same thing ... :)
What's more concerning is that Tim Cook just came out and said that Apple wouldn't be considering larger screen sizes in the foreseeable future. I'm not entirely sure what I think about 5" phone screens either, but trying to deny they're not popular is as stupid as trying to deny that 7" tablet screen sizes aren't popular.
It seems too me that ever since the iPhone 4 Apple has reacted to the loss of its market share by not daring to change anything. The phone design is still the same (nearly three years old now, and it wasn't even a very attractive or practical design to begin with) and the screen is the same width (which feels too small and cramped to me, now that I'm used to larger Android screens). It's like they're caught in the headlights and don't dare move, not realising that standing still is what's killing them.
Out of interest, does either have an IPS screen? It's the low-viewing-angle hideous TN screens that drive me to distraction, and I don't know why more manufacturers don't care about screen quality. Even Apple seems to be slipping with their latest laptops.
I would have thought that viewing photos and watching movies on laptops is pretty common these days, so screen quality *should* be important to people.