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.
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.