But that's a fact about the N5, not the N5X/6P. I mean, what would you want from a new phone that would show up on a spec sheet?
Faster? Check, both of these are. The 808/810 aren't gigantic generational leaps over the 800, but they're significantly faster + 64-bit.
Better screen? They're both bigger; >1080p resolution seems irrelevant on a 5"-ish screen (though obviously welcome on larger screens where 1080p would be under 400 dpi).
More storage? Well, the 6P gives that to you, though the 5X doesn't.
USB Type-C and faster charging? Check.
Better camera? Check.
Bigger battery? Check (2300 mAh for N5, 2700 mAh for 5X).
More RAM? Check on the 6P, the same on the 5X.
Plus the fingerprint thing is probably a bigger deal than you think. Loss of wireless charging is definitely a minus, though.
So that's one downgrade, two specs that haven't changed on the 5X, and six that have; eight of those specs are better on the 6P. That's not a small upgrade, it's just that you have no reason to bother with an upgrade.
1. The wireless charging, while seemingly a small thing, was to me a huge improvement in my experience of using the phone. The fact that I can sit down at my desk, plop the phone down, and it'll just work, and when I get up to leave I can just pull it off my desk. Removing the USB cable interaction made the phone a much more invisible and organic part of my day. Might not be important to others, but I would very much miss it.
2. Lack of removable storage. Small deal but it was a nice quality of life feature.
3. Battery that's hard to replace. My phone upgrade cycle is very long, usually longer than the lifetime of the battery. I'm feeling it in my Nexus 5 right now.
But the main thing that might prompt me to upgrade is just software performance creep. The latest software updates have really turned my phone into a slideshow, and that's getting really frustrating.
But the spec improvements are certainly both appreciated and necessary.
And before some of you say that MagSafe has patents on this, remember that the magnetic catch for a power cord was used on deep fat fryers YEARS before MagSafe [2].
[1] http://www.dxsoul.com/product/wsken-micro-usb-metal-magnetic...
Nexus phones never had an SD card unless you count the Nexus One. The Nexus One really needed it though, since it only had 512MB of storage. Every phone since has had enough it isn't a huge deal.
As with all puchasing decisions, there are tradeoffs, but I definitely don't think it's wishful thinking to want some hardware features common in competitors' phones. Surprising? No, I'm not surprised, but that doesn't stop me from wanting certain features that I liked in other phones I had.
Am I the only person on the planet who doesn't want a fingerprint reader on my phone? I don't want to secure anything of importance with my fingerprint - fingerprints are usernames, not passwords. This just feels like the equivalent of writing your password on a Post-It and sticking it to your monitor.
My bank emailed me the other day with an announcement that I could access my account through their app via my fingerprint. WTF? My text messages are one thing by now my money is protected by just my fingerprint? I took my bank to task because they allowed my username to be twice as long as the allowed characters in my password. Someone at the bank said, "Hey, all these new-fangled phones have fingerprint readers, why don't we tap into that and sell it as a feature?" When everyone is doing it, no one is going to stop and ask if they should, it's just a race to incorporate the newest features. Normal people aren't asking if this is secure, they are buying into the marketing copy pushed on them, so they start thinking that it has to be secure, because why would my bank not have my interests in mind?
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/us-governm...
Otherwise the data is still there in the plain, accessible by anyone who can read the flash.
Android 5 has full disk encryption but was disabled by default on the Nexus 5 (and most other phones) due to performance issues.
I didn't notice any mention of those, specially because they failed miserably last year parading full disk encryption on Nexus 6 and got bitten when reviews showed the performance degradation and lack of hardware encryption.
If it's not, then Google are starting to take the piss..
I think this misses the point. Accessing a device using a "cloned finger" (not tremendously difficult) can be done without the target ever knowing it has happened.
The wrench technique, less so.
Whyever not? They might have a copy of it lying around. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/us-governm...
> Yes, but is it worth spending the required resources?
When it becomes easy - and it will become easy, there's nothing basically hard about printing out some ridged plastic - it will become commonplace. And unlike stolen passwords, an attacker can be fairly sure that you haven't changed your fingers.
There's a legal difference in some places between having your phone secured by a fingerprint and a password. If your phone is secured by a password, then in some places you cannot be obliged to provide the password, but a fingerprint you can.
There was a bunch of reporting in the past few days that a Federal District Court in Pennsylvania found that Fifth Amendment rights apply to smartphone passcodes.
Random link: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/why-the-government-cant-...
That same protection doesn't seem to apply to fingerprints. Random link: http://time.com/3558936/fingerprint-password-fifth-amendment...
Again, I'm not a lawyer, but that seems to be how the law falls out on that issue.
Whether that's an issue for you, personally - no idea. It might be a factor for some.
One of the neat things about encryption, historically, is that the government couldn't force decryption even if it were willing to break the law in doing so. That's why there were export controls and demands for backdoors in the '90s, and that's why there are demands for backdoors today. Fingerprint locks may mathematically involve encryption, but they don't have this property.
In my mind, the only reasons tech giants continue to force centralization on their users are PRISM and data mining. Today’s devices have sizable internal drives, so all personal data could realistically be stored and processed locally; and secure, distributed systems have been proven to work for data transfer (BitTorrent), monetary transactions (Bitcoin), message boards (Aether—sort of), and more. Hopefully solutions like Copperhead OS and Blackphone that secure our mobile devices and communication channels, respectively, make it to the mainstream.
1. Attacker sees random data.
2. Attacker knows you might be smart enough to use a plausible deniability file system.
3. Attacker starts beating you with the wrench.
At this point, there are several possibilities that could happen:
1. You give up the secret and give the attacker what he wants. The beating continues after this point, because the attacker really has no idea if you've given up the right secret.
2. You give up a fake secret and give the attacker what he thinks he wants. The beatings continue. See possibility #1.
3. You don't give up the secret and he continues beating you with the wrench anyway to try to get you to reveal the secret.
4. You're not using a plausible deniability encryption at all, and it truly is random data, and he continues to beat you with the wrench to make sure.
As you can see, the wrench doesn't give two shits about your plausible deniability.
NOW GIMME MY SHITS
Aren't these the things where you'd want security?
Buying things on the App Store requires you to type in a password for the first purchase every so often. Then you use your finger print.
My friends often have to share their passcodes with me; at which point it's like, what's this adding?
I guess that I think once you share it a few times and it's used regularly, then it becomes fairly public knowledge. Maybe this is a mis step from password security.
> So that's one downgrade
Two, and one critical. The Nexus 5 was absolutely the biggest phone I would consider, and even that was really too big. Making one phone a dinner plate and one phone a centimeter-larger dinner plate is atrocious.
Apparently only Sony wants my money (and honestly the Z Compact series is still too big).
Kind of a letdown the 5X is so large. It is annoying that all phones coming out are trying to outdo each other on the same form factor that's both too large to fit in a pocket and too thin to have a useful battery.
It's higher resolution, but the 6P is physically slightly smaller; 5.7" vs 6"; (77.8 x 159.3 x 7.3mm vs 82.9 x 159.2 x 10.0mm).
https://store.google.com/product/nexus_wireless_charger
Are there better ones out there that don't have as much of an issue with placement? My blind assumption was the problem lies with the phone's limited charging area, not the charger (which I presumed was nearly the whole surface).
As a Nexus 5 user I'm pleased with most of the changes and non-changes. 2GB is fine for a smartphone, and an image sensor with more than double the light capture area per pixel is brilliant, and if it delivers the better photographs will be worth it right there. Losing OIS...I don't think that's a downgrade as OIS was always suspect to begin with (not least because OIS only helps for lateral movements. It does nothing for rotational movements, and of course make subjects stand still. It yielded a tonne of unusable photos).
The only thing I'm really displeased about is the removal of wireless charging. That was a really nice feature.
Between the Snapdragon 810 and 808, the only real items of concern is that the 808 does not have h265 hardware encoding (the 810 does), and its image processing DSP is 12-bit per pixel rather than the 14-bpp of the 810.
non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers.
There reason why is pretty simple.
In an ideal world, you don't want anything running at all. You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". What you want is to wake up, do whatever work is needed as fast as possible, and go back to sleep. Period. Sleeping chips are lower power, by far, than idling chips.
If it's faster to do that work with an A57, it'll generally give you better battery life to do that. Again, this is right now, based on perf per watt/blah blah blah. Maybe someday, in the future, a53's will be so low power vs a57 that doing something else makes sense. But it's not true now, AFAIK.
Instead, they make big-little because they can't really increase the speed of the higher end cores more without increasing power usage too much.
Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question.
An A53 has a much lower ceiling, but a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57. Yes, if you want to run a benchmark the A53 is not a good bet (and is generally worse in a workload power usage), but it is a very good bet for most real world usage.
Encoding a video should not be CPU, so let's get that out of there. Most of the rest is more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. The amount of CPU time you should be spending on these tasks is really low.
For example, web browsing and reading, the CPU should be asleep most of the time.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of very silly little tasks for A53's to do, but what you listed are not those tasks.
It's more things like "syncing" or something that is a poll loop and event bound, not something that is in any way CPU bound. Period. CPU bound stuff is not something for the A53's in this to tackle. It makes battery life worse. That is what the actual, in-the-field data says.
" a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57"
Truthfully, for most A53 cores, this is true only in the dreams of the chip designers.
"but it is a very good bet for most real world usage."
Then what, pray tell, do you expect the A57's to be doing in this world?
And why, in practice, has big.little and other things not shown any better battery life at all if it's really a better way of doing things.
I have no doubt it may be a better way of doing things in the future, but it ain't right now ;)
This is 100% false. I do bringup on these platforms. I know a lot about them.
"I'm going to favor the industry's interpretation of this a bit more than your anecdotal, occasional compiler-writer knowledge. "
Dude, i literally do the toolchain bringup on these platforms you claim i have no knowledge of. This is not "anecdotal occasional compiler-writer knowledge". This is "I get paid to make the stuff you keep talking about work fast and get good battery life out of it".
If what you say was true, then one would expect that when they were brought up, they would have worse performance and better battery life. Instead, the exact opposite is true in most cases. They have slightly better performance, and much worse battery life. Try it sometime.
Battery life is gotten back mainly through .. wait for it ... compiler optimization ... to speed up the software so things can sleep faster.
Not to "move things onto the little cores to save power", as you seem to think.
Since you want to attack my experience, remind me again, what background do you have in this again? (FWIW - I would stay away from this argument line as it is unlikely to serve you well)
As swetland (who was android's main kernel guy for a long time) pointed out to you, you literally have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to CPU sleeping and what the main power policies are.
BTW, much earlier i asked if you had anything other than self-serving industry press releases to back up your claims. I'm guessing the answer is "no", given what you've written.
Anyway, i'm going to stop responding now, because i'm just some anecdotal compiler writer, and clearly i can't compete with your vast knowledge store and experience on this one.
The fact that your response to someone like swetland is "Not to mention that their comment is simply dated and wrong now regardless." is hilariously arrogant and amazing.
I'll just continue to find it funny that you want to cite chip manufacturers (who uh, might be slightly self-serving in selling their architectures, and produce zero actual phones except for samsung. Except, of course, that the division of samsung that produces the phones is separate and does not really talk to the chip making division. I'm sure you know this), when i am talking about the actual qualification and testing of real world phones, and not "whatever random crap they made up to put in their marketing material".
You can try to gussy that up as "actual field observations of SOC vendors" or whatever, but that just shows further ignorance in how SOC vendors actually operate.
Again, I urge you: Buy an evaluation board or two. They are cheap. Put an OS on them. Try out what you claim is true. Measure the power draw. I think you will be surprised.
Have a good one!
1) I can easily envision a scenario where he really is an expert but is not necessarily allowed to come out and say "I am a senior embedded systems engineer working for XYZ Mobile Devices" and has years of experience and is sitting there laughing at you. I should know because there are a couple of completely unrelated subjects that get widely discussed on the internet where I am an expert but can't just flat out state all my qualifications. I try to contribute sometimes in discussions about these subjects but often people say I have no idea what I'm talking about.
2) You seem to believe that he cannot possibly be an expert. He disagrees, and offers no absolute proof (and really, does he have to do that? Why can't we just be nice to each other).
3) I am embarrassed for you because you have seemed to be very mean and dismissive. Even if you're right, using phrases like "You are a Hacker News "Expert" and a bore" and "Save the world from your ignorance" just makes me feel that you're being rude.
That said there's plenty of lightweight threads and processes that are mostly IO or event bound, do very little compute, and will run in roughly the same time on a small core as a large core, but the small cores have a lower static power footprint (base cost to have them powered up at all), so big.little works out well there.
A sleeping core is obviously the most efficient core, however you have said nothing to discount what I said. Putting a core to sleep is a very costly activity, which is exactly why it happens at the millisecond scale.
Before that happens, the core will likely have been frequency scaled to more appropriately fit the window's loading. I mean, we know this is the case right now, and that "run fast and go to sleep" is not the primary policy. It's "run as fast as appropriate for the workload to fill a quantum, and sleep when there is no workload". There are many if not most workloads that are externally bound, or event triggered enough that sleep is completely out of the question and running faster does nothing.
Your words have been used (out of context and inappropriately) to bolster DannyBee when they represent, literally, all that is wrong with Hacker News.
Modern CPUs have many different levels of "going to sleep" and many of them can be switched in and out of very quickly.
Given a price to stick to, it is very difficult to improve the specs substantially to wow the existing customers. Look at Oneplus one- the flagship killer and its successor- two not considered to be killer at all. I don't think existing customers would want to upgrade to the newer version.
Speaking as someone who does not own a Nexus 5, I would say I am very impressed by the specs and am waiting to purchase it. There aren't many phones better than this (keeping in mind the price).
A lot of Nexus 5 owners have pointed that the newer one does not have wireless charging and OIS. I feel that improving the overall experience matters more. Even though both are nice-to-have features it still does not help the crappy battery and low-quality camera that much. The 5x solves the existential funks first by adding those improvements. And due to the price limitation the nice-to-have features had to be dropped.
I wonder if devices will start to be built better, with more replaceable components as the rate of spec improvements in mobile devices slows down.
I may well buy a new phone, but there is zero chance it will be a 5x.
Can you tell me where you found the battery you are using now?
I'm disappointed by the 5X. I was planning to replace the Nexus 5, but the 5x really does not appear to be a good value. If I can really get usable battery life out of the Nexus 5, I'll gladly keep using it, because there's very little else about it that seems in any way deficient.
I followed this guide (without their tools): https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Nexus+5+Battery+Replacement/260...
Turn off Google Fit, turn off always on OK Google hotword detection, clear the Google Play Services cache.
I purchased the first gen on release day (2007) and carried it my pocket every day without a case until the 5 came out in 2012. I still have it, it still works.
I bought my iPhone 5 in 2013 and carry it my pocket every day without a case. It has some cosmetic damage.
Not fanboy-ing; I think it's legitimately interesting that most smartphones are still designed the way early cell phones were: plastic case around components, clipped or screwed on, flimsy from day one.
My wife is hard on her stuff; even with a case, her phones (one iPhone, two Android) need replacing every few years.
I don't use a case, and except for slightly lower battery life, my Android phones still look brand-new 4 years later.
Now that Nexus has the fingerprint sensor I'm never getting another iPhone.
They also just updated the apk file size limit from 50MB to 100MB. On top of that, they made the video camera capture at a higher frame rate which will take up more space.
My iPod from nearly a decade ago has 80GB of storage. I don't want to have an extra device just for music anymore.
* CPU: Processor evolution is stagnating, and processors are so powerful that they can handle most typical workloads with ease. Efficiency is now the order of the day, not raw power.
* Screen: Densities are so high it that not only does it become difficult to manufacture higher density panels, but it actually hurts the device by draining more energy and killing performance and battery life to display pixels you aren't going to see.
* RAM: 2Gb, the standard in mid-range phones and up, is sufficient for moderate use. 3Gb is comfy and 4Gb is gigantic. Again no substantial improvements in the horizon.
* Storage: The more storage the better, but phones seem to have stabilized in the 16/32/64/128Gb, and anyway with cloud storage this is less and less of a concern.
* Battery: A major pain in modern devices, with no imminent breakthrough in sight.
* Camera: Incremental upgrades are looking promising, but there's only so much you can do with optics in a small form factor.
In short, no major improvements or evolutions in the smartphone field are in the horizon, but they aren't really necessary for the short-term anyway.
All the above are requirements, yes (CPU, Screen, RAM, Storage, Battery, Camera). I'd add one more requirement: manufacturers should be required to supply as a part of an extended warranty the latest release of Android. No more orphaning year-old phones.
Once that's squared away, then I imagine manufacturers could compete on features -- things that customers want. Here are some examples:
* Battery life. User-serviceable battery.
* Removable storage
* Wireless charging
* Multiple SIM slots (popular in Japan)
* FM Radio (popular in Japan)
As you can imagine, a phone with all the above would be pretty large, but it turns out customers like a large phone. Sadly, no such phone exists today.
Try the 3D touch on the iPhone.
Adding what is the equivalent of contextual menus to the UI is a major improvement to the overall experience and I know I will be upgrading to the 6s purely because of this.
3D Touch is about how much force you use, not how long you touch for.
If I still had my Nexus 5, I doubt I'd even be considering a 5x or a 6p.
$499 for a decent 6 inch phone seems like the real story here. Especially if it gets the typical Nexus price cut 6-9 months out. $449 or $399 for this could happen sooner than later, which would be an amazing deal. $499 is still really good, considering the previous N6 launched at $650. I'm surprised Samsung didn't balk at this, its pretty much a shot at their Note line which typically sells for $600+ unsubsidized. I think Google is trying hard to make phablets happen for non-techies any way they can, even to the point of pissing off their biggest OEM's. I also suspect there's some politicking here as Google is trying to groom Huawei to go after Samsung's massive marketshare. Samsung being the defacto Android product isn't good for Google or Android.
The screen kinda has to be made of glass, and even Dow Corning's finest will break if it hits a hard surface. I believe synthetic sapphire is available for watches and smartwatches but not for any actual phones?
Best solution is a case with rubberised corners.
Extending the bezel to the edge of the phone means there's no "crumple zone" to absorb energy of impacts - that shock goes to the screen.
Personally I think a mobile phone that looks lovely but has little chance of surviving metre drop is a design fail.
Modern phones are stupidly flimsy.
That was also the big era of replaceable phone cases. I think people who are worried about the frailty of the phone buy secondary-market protective cases these days.
I just checked -- the 2nd gen model Moto G is $149.99 on the Motorola website (free shipping). Add a few bucks of tax and it's still one third the price of these other offerings. MicroSD slot, water resistant, 5" display, pure Android experience. This is what the Nexus should have been. Except unfortunately it lacks NFC, ditto the 2015 model.
If it had NFC I'd consider getting one myself, but unfortunately that's a showstopper for me -- I write NFC apps for a living.
If Moto would put NFC in this bad boy, they'd have a killer phone!
Now, the Moto X for $400 does have NFC - plus a microSD slot. Hmmm.
Wireless charging is something I use with my 5, but it is slow compared to USB. Compared to type C, is will be incredibly slow. There just won't be a need to charge the phone overnight like the wireless charger did.
The battery life is better.
The resolution is the same. This is a plus for me. I don't need higher resolution on such a small screen. It is already incredible for even the tiniest of fonts. Higher resolution = higher power use, higher CPU/GPU use, and more memory use. It would be fine, but I don't need it.
I will use the fingerprint reader. I'm excited to see Android Pay take off. I hate getting my credit card stolen, and I don't like typing in a code every time I use GoogleWallet or whatever I used to use.
The camera is a big deal. I'm excited for slow mo capable capture. I have a small child, and he is a ham.
I also am looking forward to the speed increase. More cores = more potential concurrency = smoother interfaces.
The primary reason I bought it was because it is financed (0%) over 24 months when you sign up for Project Fi. I get the $50 play credit, get to switch to Project Fi, and I get the phone in 2-3 weeks.
The total cell phone bill w/ 1GB of data and the phone included is less than the $50 TMo wanted for their cheapest plan directly.
Note: I would have gotten the 6P, except it was 4-5 weeks instead of 2-3, and I need it here soon as my cell phone plan is expiring.
I don't see any official dock for the 5x so far, and most 3rd party ones won't support landscape.
Wireless charging seems to be something very few people use, but those that do love it so much they would not want to trade it. Being able to simply lay my phone on my bedside table at night and have it fully charged the next morning is such a nice thing to have.
1. an always on sensor.
2. more powerful processors
3. larger battery
4. project Fi support
5. quick charge
This means you probably should only buy Nexus devices when they're new to market, unless you're happy with a 18 month lifespan for your device.
p.s. People please stop claiming what you a fact.
p.s. Being right about not getting update (n7 v1) dos not make your argument true.
> Nexus devices will also receive updates for security issues considered Critical for at least the following periods:
> * Three years from when the device first became available on the Google Store
> * Or, 18 months after the device stopped being sold on the Google Store
p.s. For multiple times when somebody claimed that , their only references was AndroidPolice site , which I don't give shit about . But seems google quietly updated their policy. (which is unacceptable for me as power user)
Not trying to be snarky, but Google's policy is as good or better than most (perhaps all? I haven't heard of a better option, though they may exist) and at least they are completely transparent about it. They also have good policies around keeping the bootloaders unlockable so if they do EOL it and you want to update with unofficial builds, that's an option, just not one they officially support for all sorts of obvious reasons.
Nexus has so far been the one Anroid brand that people considering future updates were buying.
The problem with old devices was their lack of power for new increasing computing even for ordinary people (because this industry was infant). But ARM architecture based SoC and embedded CPU will pass (or passing/passed) a threshold . After this threshold you will be able to run ordinary app (I am not talking about high end 3d 4k gaming, I am talking about browsing internet,chatting , reading) for daily usage maybe for 5 year or even more. but your device will become obsolete , because of these thief's . ( I hate how big corporation ripping people off )
Let me give you an instance , you can have a pc desktop with 2gb ram from 2008 . If you are using your device for reading and ordinary job I bet you can install windows 10-32bit (which is state of art) on it and use it without any serious issue . This is the problem with whole ecosystem of Gadgets. Even if you buy a device with tegra x1 SoC(which is powerful as shit) , You should throw it away after 2 year , or you are sticking to old version of android (put aside how much security threat it has) .They can develop a solution for this problem with spending money. But why spending money when they can rip off people ?
I can understand your (and most people) point of view about this problem , but this is not how I encounter with my problems. Personally I am sure non of nexus device (no matter how they will be good) will be my next device . (I am planning to switch device in next month)
The one thing I want to mention and personally I cannot tolerate Google shows himself as savior of us from Microsoft/Apple.But it is not , it is as bad as Microsoft of Apple (I would say maybe even worse than them). I just hate how they can handle media and most people thinks Google is different than any other dirty company out there.
Google literally ripping people off.Google can provide more update to solve the problem(or at least make problem less intense ). But instead they just went to opposed direction. They instead of solving problem. Literally made it harder to solve .
Even the handsets that are sold on the idea of open source have spotty records when it comes to supported OTA updates beyond a year or so after release.
Given the lack of any ideal alternative, I'm personally sticking with Nexus devices and just going with unofficial builds of the OS when it makes sense to do so.
They should commit to providing updates to the phones forever.
Given the US cell carriers move towards a leasing model for devices, I think there are many people who don't want to pay for updates to 5 year old devices. I don't like that move, I'd prefer to see people paying upfront for cheap devices, but I take it as a evidence that more people want new devices than want updates forever.
However, I have been impressed by the 6P - I might consider the $550 64GB instead of switching to the iPhone 6S.
If you're talking about thumb-stretching to reach the top of the screen, though, that might get a bit more difficult.
be glad your two year phone still feels like current gen. keep your money. don't throw away a product that is full of heavy metals (yeah you won't throw away, but sell. but the person buying will throw his old one away. so it's the same)
but no, let's instead complain i can't consume blindly and constantly. sigh.
They have the same resolution, same amount of memory, same amount of storage. I don't shoot video, and I probably won't use fingerprint reader - but I do use wireless charging every day.