> Premium materials and true craftsmanship shouldn’t just be for the few.

Then maybe they should not have priced it in line with the iPhone?

YES. This one of the major reasons of the Android versions fragmentation.

However, most of them don't even have mainline-able drivers. See Amlogic which got rejected because of "shitty code".

For some fun reading, 357 CVEs in the linux kernel in 2017, 191 of them remote root, 95%+ of the total in closed source ARM drivers. (basicly everying labeled broadcomm and qualcomm).

For those keeping score, 2017 ALONE has produced 1/3rd of the linux kernel vulnerabilities ever observed.

We need to demand vendors do better.

[1]: http://linux-meson.com/doku.php [2]: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-amlogic/list/

[1] https://github.com/steeve/linux-amlogic

[2] http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/08/19/amlogic-releases-linu...

Doesn't have a removable battery...so, how exactly is this going to last me any longer than anything else?

A press push for environmental reasons has made sure most smartphone batteries aren't glued in.

Now MacBooks and Surface Books, on the other hand, do tend to have glued-in batteries on newer models, so more pressure is needed there. We can still replace them, but they're a pain, and glue is not environmentally friendly at all.

The Xiaomi Mi Mix from 2016 contained more innovative features.

The Essential phone is just another large, high end Android very similar to the Samsung S7/S8 or Xiaomi Mi6 or new LG - Very nice, but not a major innovation.

I really don't understand this sentiment.

I've still got my iPhone 6 Plus. I haven't seen the need to upgrade yet. It does absolutely everything I want.

At this rate, the only reason I'm going to upgrade is if I destroy my phone somehow (I've yet to even put a major scratch on any of my smartphones over the years) or if a vendor comes out with some feature where I'm like "yeah, I could really see myself getting use out of that"

>> Technology should assist you so that you can get on with enjoying life.

It's a smartphone for crying out loud. It's a platform designed for communication. Bonus points for having a camera in my pocket and some apps which help me for various tasks.

> The first actually open platform phone is the one that will have longevity.

Exactly, I feel that we're kind of getting there with all of the recent phones that have come out in the last couple of years. There's no real killer feature anyone's come out with, just nice things to have.

Not the parent, but that's pretty new. I used a 4s earlier this year and there were several apps that couldn't be upgraded and/or stopped working.

The Nexus 6 reached it final OS update with N but the 6+ is about to get iOS 11.

The iPhone 5s is about to get iOS 11. If it weren't for the 64-bit transition I wouldn't be surprised if it had gotten on the iPhone 5 as well.

Apple gives about 5 years of iOS updates, which makes keeping the same phone a lot more feasible. Meanwhile my Google sourced Nexus barely makes it two without landing on security patches-only.

Maybe I got really lucky with both of my iPhones but even though I hate to pay this ridiculous premium price for iPhones it kinda evens out in the end considering I use the phone for 4-5 years.

I used an iPhone 4 up until late last year, my dad is still using it. Now I upgraded to an iPhone 5s.

The annoying part is generally apps that require a higher OS, which is the app developers fault. But even then you don't always necessarily /need/ the absolute newest version of an app.

Planned obsolescence by big fat arse.

In case of tablets, my partner is still using her iPad 2 and Netflix has a version of their app that still runs on that.

The core software on her tablet, like the core software on my older phones that were given to family members still work fine.

Its the 3rd party apps that seem to be abandoned by software developers. That's going to happen regardless of what phone manufacturer's want.

So in my view it's a bit of both. These devices could have a longer life with manufacturer support, but the app developers are the ones driving the obsolescence.

From (solo) developing an sms based app in 2017 there was little incentive to target an API level lower than 19 (KitKat), which provided a standard API for SMS.

The majority of devices support it so what's the incentive to support legacy software?

Now if there are breaking changes introduced to telephony in the future I'll probably maintain 4.4 support and add a check for API level. That isn't feasible for every app, though...

That's hardly an old phone. Do you see yourself still using it in 3 years time?

They were all either broken, at yard sales, given to me my clients / contacts that don't want them, or were <$20 on ebay.

In general four things kill these devices:

* Touchscreen breakage. It is almost never worth trying to replace if the screen cracks.

* Flash burnout. Shitty flash chips don't last forever. I've binned almost every older phone than this crop because the flash memory dies.

* Charger port wear. Microusb sucks, replacement parts vary wildly depending on model - I can get an S series charger for <$5 most of the time, but trying to replace a Droid phone charger once was impossible because the charger harness was soldered to the pcb.

* Software. I generally outright ignore devices without a ROM scene and an unlocked bootloader, but even then it is entirely volunteer how long Cyanogen/Lineage/Paranoid/etc are willing to keep supporting these fossil kernels. The S3, Note 2-3, and original Nexus 7 are all on their deathbeds because of lagging community support for these devices. It is worth mentioning, however, for the Samsung devices they have gone community supported far longer at this point than their official support periods lasted. Great job Samsung.

Batteries are usually a non-issue. You can buy shitty Chinese knockoff batteries (or if you are lucky Anker) that don't hold a charge and don't last long, but you can keep these devices running on bootleg parts for a while.

The software is the ultimate killer. What should be the easiest to maintain is the hardest, because corporate greed and hunger for control trumps customer respect. All my mobile devices are cheap, used, or broken when I get them because none of these exploitative abusers are worth giving a direct cent to.

I have never experienced this before, what are the signs that the flash chip is going sour? Slow to load? Losing information? Is there anything you can do about it ?

* Sector reallocations. As flash stops writing or reading the package will reallocate data. This process is intensive and usually lags out the phone. If when moving large amounts of data into / off the flash the whole phone is freezing, it can be due to this.

* Stunted read / write speeds. As the flash degrades and more sectors go bad, your read and write performance suffer. Fragmentation gets worse as working sectors dry up. If your phone was benching ~80MB/s read or write speeds the day you got it and is down to ~20 5 years later, it is likely nearing a failure point. This is usually a gradual aging thing, but you do often see a steep slope of sudden performance crash before the whole chip becomes unusable.

* Crippled access times. The former was data rate, this is data latency. The latency should always be consistent and not age much throughout the life of the chip - the ability to access flash almost always stays near-constant over the lifetime of the chip. If this starts going, for very small data sizes, the chips controller can be dying. Which happens, because in phones a lot of corners are cut, and flash mmus are often really, really cheap.

There is also the really rare chance you find a corrupted file you cannot open that used to work, which can in extremely rare circumstances mean that your phone has ran out of unallocated sectors and is now losing capacity including written data, but that is highly unlikely - flash almost always becomes unwritable way before becoming unreadable, and your phone will fail before unreadability starts manifesting en masse.

It would be useful if we could get A. lifetime write averages for the flash chips in popular phones and B. trace such a number throughout the lifetime of the device, but we don't have those, so you are almost always flying in the dark on when your phones memory will die.

I was almost convinced it was a problem with the flash chip as symptoms were exactly what you describe here.

My wife has a four-year-old Windows phone, the Nokia 1020, which is completely fine in all aspects other than suffering from this.

My vision isn't great, so I upgraded from my iPhone 4 to the 5 because of the larger screen, and the 5 to the 6+ due to a larger screen.

Really, the screen size has been the main driving factor in my phone purchase decisions.

My 4 & 5 have been passed down to my mother, so they're still in use. Hell, I was still using my 1st gen iPad until just over a year ago when the screen just failed.

In the smartphone business, it's practically an antique.

FairPhone is trying to do that, in software, hardware and way beyond: https://shop.fairphone.com/en/

https://forum.fairphone.com/t/is-it-worth-to-buy-a-fairphone...

when was that written?

> we’re working around the clock

Why are they working around the clock? It sounds like they are running late and/or don't know what they are doing.

Who owns Javascript? ECMA is a public standard.

> // Polyfill for creating CustomEvents on IE9/10/11

> function EmailInput(e,t,i,n){function r()

but it does contain some proprietary code from GreenSock.

https://blockmetry.com/blog/javascript-disabled

LTDR; Supporting non JS users tends to be very cheap, so it's often well worth the investment.

Even at 1/20 I don't think people who turn of JS would make the best kind of customers. I'd expect them to be cranky and demanding...

>LTDR; Supporting non JS users tends to be very cheap, so it's often well worth the investment.

Spending opportunity cost time because there might be some users missing out in Taiwan or some Android tablets? Bah...

you mean like openmoko?

Genuinely curious - I'm actually trying to answer this myself at the moment. The best I've come up with is, go to >2 fabs, have them deliver wafers but not saw them, scan and compare the wafers using trusted equipment, then take the wafers back to the fab for sawing.

The last step is the biggest issue; you could be bait-and-switched. Sawing doesn't sound as expensive as actual photolithography/etching kit, but I suspect it would still be prohibitive for most.

Thing is, you could tamper with a small number of chips on the wafer image in such a way that a quick but unlikely interaction with the end device would easily spot the tampered units. Then it would be a simple matter to insert a "picker" into somewhere in the manufacturing/shipping logistics to find the tampered device(s) and reroute them.

Also, I'm not 100% sure that two fabs would actually produce optically identical chips; would there be process differences?

Very good point about process differences. That totally makes sense, and would likely require human verification to handle, which for big chips would be, at the very least, hilariously expensive.

"Instead of adding additional cir- cuitry to the target design, we insert our hardware Trojans by changing the dopant polarity of existing transistors. Since the modified circuit ap- pears legitimate on all wiring layers (including all metal and polysilicon), our family of Trojans is resistant to most detection techniques, includ- ing fine-grain optical inspection and checking against “golden chips”. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by inserting Trojans into two designs — a digital post-processing derived from Intel’s cryp- tographically secure RNG design used in the Ivy Bridge processors and a side-channel resistant SBox implementation — and by exploring their detectability and their effects on security"

Thanks. But ugh. That is both absolutely amazing and... well, what did I expect. Of course there are going to be process attacks :)

Hmmm. I guess the only defenses against this are

- trying to design the layout to get good "route coverage" via test routines (sounds hard)

- aiming for super-simple designs that make it difficult to constructively alter the design (pathological simplicity is one part of my idea; yet to determine viability)

- trusting the fab (ha!)

I wonder if using a huge process like ~30nm (or even bigger) would mitigate at all.

Edit: Small work fixes, added sentence

If you really want to carry on down this route, I would say the most effective approach would be to regard fab interference as a strange form of "single event upset", and borrow high-availability techniques such as lock-step mode across duplicated processors or subsystems.

Lock-step sounds interesting but really really hard - the basis of my idea is security through simplicity, and packing everything onto the one chip so only signed encrypted data comes out. Breaking the design down so that lock-stepped processors would reveal tampering would probably violate integrity and likely have blind spots too.

For the prior, I imagine going there and observing QC procedures is the only hope. For the latter, I imagine it involves keeping discrete critical components isolated -- firmware from silicon (and beyond), using different factories so that neither independently has a functional device.

Unfortunately my idea would have both the layout and the (OTP-fused) firmware fully open. I'm learning a lot about the challenges of "transparent security" as opposed to security by obscurity...

I hear that a lot, but rarely see it work out that way in practice.

Yes. This means no Google services.

To play the devil's advocate here, you could also blame Linux for not providing a stable driver ABI and instead tries to force all vendors to adapt their coding practices if they want to play along.

Many companies don't want to take the burden to rewrite their code if the Kernel maintainers have a different opinion on how things should be done.

Of course, it would be preferable that companies support their hardware in (open) software themselves (like Intel and AMD do for their GPUs / wifi / ethernet / ASM extensions), but we don't have anything close to that right now in mobile.