Marques doesn't have kids.
I loved my Redmi Note 4. I even liked the chin, as the buttons were on it - so my usable screen size was actually larger than the Pixel XL that replaced it.
That phone took perfectly acceptable shots with still subjects that I'd have been happy to live with but the shutter lag was terrible. I have six months of mostly blurry photos of my kids solely because the phone couldn't deal with any amount of fast motion so it had to go.
Recently upgraded to a Pixel 3a solely because of Night Sight and for my use case it was a no-brainer as I can't get the time back. I also couldn't give a rats behind about notches and bumps - my phones go straight into bumper cases and 9-glass before they're turned on.
Some people really do need the less-talked-about features that are only of late getting any amount of attention by manufacturers.
But say you had bought iPhone 8 (same year as Redmi Note 4) and you share pictures to social media; Pictures from iPhone 11 would be indiscernible to those who see your photos at the other end.
I disagree. As an iPhone 8 user even iPhone X pictures are massively improved, not to mention a Huawei P30 or Pixel 3XL... night sight doesn't exist and post-processing by external apps only.
The same goes to X and Xs, although the difference is a little less drastic, but P30 and Pixel were both winning, and when you compare it, it was obvious.
I am excited about the possibility of graphene based batteries. https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-batteries and https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-battery-mat...
Which could be as early as 2020-2021 if the leaks are correct https://www.techspot.com/news/81435-samsung-rumored-readying... my current phone will last me until then.
More about that https://www.wired.co.uk/article/graphene-batteries-supercapa...
It seems this graphene tech can be used for other things too, the future looks exciting.
• https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-solar-panels
• https://www.techpowerup.com/253839/amd-says-not-to-count-on-...
• https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/16-bit-risc-v-proces...
But, it will happen in increments and for all the above features to be available in one smartphone which is affordable, will take another 3-4 years and hence my OP comment that current generation is done.
Edit: 1TB
These are all nice, but I'd rather have thin AR glasses powered by the phone's CPU/GPU at some point. Might fix the smombie infestation, too.
https://www.google.com/glass/tech-specs/
Why are these not available to the public?!? Because of the Google glass PR disaster?
I think that's probably the reason Apple decided not to take a risk with their version:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apple-ar-glasses-cancel...
5G Network? Every phone will have it in 3 years.
>1TB storage? In Android land you can already buy a 1TB microSD card and stick it into your phone resulting in >1TB total storage. Are many people doing that?
Fingerprint reader in the screen: Who cares if its below the display or on the back of the phone? It's a rather small improvement.
>Fingerprint reader in the screen: Who cares if its below the display or on the back of the phone? It's a rather small improvement.
Fingerprint authentication at any point on the screen could decrease the overall time taken for unlocking the phone and getting to the intended action. It's quite common in android to have always on Amoled display for notifications, touching the notification can directly take one to the app without having to authenticate separately first.
May be it should have worded better, I reread the comment multiple times and I don't get where the current generation is done comes from. It reads to me as Hardware is done, period.
The market is saturated, and of course every company will try to milk it for as long as they could, while trying to figure out the next big thing, if there is any that is the size of current Smartphone market.
Well yes, all cameras look the same if you do a "blind" test. :)
Essentially, camera quality in this day and age doesn't matter, unless you're a "pro" (which I predict 90% of the people who buy the 11 pro aren't)
Case in point: I have a SE and it takes photos fine. I'm not any model or pro, so taking pictures of basic day-to-day events or things is good enough for me.
They had people vote on the 'best' picture, and they always chose the sharpest one. You could clearly make out which camera took which photo. The biggest problem was that the DSLR was never focused right so it was blurry.
This simply means that it was a crappy test. As far as I remember, people choose a colour profile that was much more punchy.
Cameras are much, much more than a colour profile. These tech reviewers are fun to watch but I wouldn't base my opinions solely on their work.
This test for real-life camera usage is as objective as it can get. Most people shoot pictures to put on social networks, not to submit for documentary film awards.
Not at all, most people do not take different pictures of the same scene under the same settings from about half a dozen flagship phones, post it on Instagram and ask which one is better. In fact, this is the only time I've seen such usage.
In practice, people use a single phone to capture moments that do not come back and even if the scene is repeatable people prefer to succeed on the first take, therefore they will take photos until they get one that is good enough and editable. Most people don't even know how the photo will look like until they try a few edits. It is an intuitive process that involves multiple trials and misses.
So the best camera is the one that gives you the photo that is easiest to edit to achieve the picture you desire. #nofilter is a special case, a niche and If you ask me, it's not a nofilter just because the device applied a filter by itself.
Anyway, if that test was correct the cheap and great photos phone would have been a viral hit. When people see a great photo, they do ask how you took it. That did not happen.
If you want perfection, get a proper camera and more importantly learn how to shoot with it
I don't give a rat's butt whether 70% of consumers don't care about the features and characteristics of my phone. I care about them, and that's all that matters. Currently rocking a 6s which is serving me fine though.
That's true in the Android world as well. When the GPS in my three-year-old LG Stylo 2 finally crapped out so thoroughly (along with a puffed-up battery, perhaps with a built-in antenna being damaged?) that I couldn't ignore it anymore, I wound up getting a Stylo 5.
As it turns out, it has the same Qualcomm 450 SoC as the three-year-old phone it replaced. It's fast enough for my needs, but no speed demon. The only real upgrades are support for more of T-Mobile's LTE bands, a higher-resolution screen, an aluminum frame, a 3500 mAh battery up from 3000, and Android 9; the camera app is improved, and the Bluetooth stack is more up-to-date. Much to their credit, they had the courage to not remove the headphone jack. There is one major downgrade: the inevitable sealed-case, non-removable battery schtick that I really hate. I hope that fad passes by the time I need to replace this one, but there's too much money at stake for the phone manufacturers not to shaft their customers. I better hope the battery doesn't crap out prematurely.
That being said, I like the Stylo 5; the 2 had excellent battery life even when the battery got puffy, and the 5 is even better (at least in my first week of usage). That relatively-anemic 450 SoC is at least power-efficient.
The smartphones will continue to grow and accelerate their hardware and software development. This is simply the future. I the next 50 years I think everyone will use just one device and this is more likely to be something like a smartphone.
What Steve Jobs did in his first iPhone presentation can't be done again. He simply set the bar so high that there is no bar anymore, I don't see how other companies will reach them, not because they can't but because they all try to copy them from that point on, instead of trying to innovate like they did.
I can't also really understand why the public is bashing so hard those events expecting miracles, and making statements that Apple is not innovating. What do you want cloaking software making you invisible? Let's be real, also who is that naive to think that even if they have developed something amazing they will release it right away. Things don't work like that in the real world.
Apple and Steve did some truly "breakthrough" product announcements. Steve mentioned this in his iPad announcement. The timing was right, the technology was right, the market was right.
It's possible we're not going to get another one of those remarkable revelations like the iPhone and the iPad in our lifetimes. And that's ok.
The speed of change has been tremendous in the past 100 years and –besides doing a lot of good– also has serious social and ecological repercussions.
Perhaps I'm getting old, but maybe it's a good thing that the pace of change is slowing.
Yep. I have a BLU smartphone that I bought for $55 bucks off of Amazon. It literally does everything I need and has now lasted me > 2 yrs with no sign of slowing down. I will never understand why people would pay the price equivalent to buying a decently speced out desktop or laptop for a phone when there are so many cheaper alternatives that provide the same features and functionality.
Agreed. Even a Xiaomi Mi A2 with Android One for 130-150€ is almost on par with these high end phones that cost eight times as much: It's fast enough. It has a gorgeous display. It has a decent camera and it has up-to-date software. In these times of diminishing returns it's amazing that Apple is able to fetch these prices. It shows us how much of a vendor lockin there is. Perhaps (hopefully) also how much people are willing to pay extra for more privacy.
[1]:https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/apple...
I'd bet given the rise in privacy plugin use for browsers (Privacy Badger, uBlock, etc) I'm not the only one doing that either.
Snd it can't be a small number, as Apple constantly mentions privacy in their marketing, down to the level of individual services.
For the subset of people who care, they're virtually a monopoly.
Strongly agree, and the reason for that is that is that level of quality is good enough for the 99.99% use case of photography and anything above is simply a waste of storage space.
If you are actually a professional artist, it matters. If you're doing computer vision, it matters. For the other 99.99% of photos, it doesn't matter.
What Apple is selling at this point is just the aspiration that you're in the special 0.01%, or could be.
Yes, the chips and sensors used in modern phone cameras are ridiculously good for the size and cost. And phone cameras started replacing budget and mid-price P&S cameras years ago.
But, Apple's move to a triple camera set-up is really compelling. Not only has the phone replaced the average P&S, it's now replacing higher end P&S. The main argument for a separate P&S these days is a zoom lens. Apple just made that argument moot (superzooms notwithstanding). You can now take landscape, snapshot, and portrait photos natively on the camera without stitching or cropping. That's amazing. Or, at least I think so.
I was considering replacing my wife's older Canon S90 P&S with a new Sony RX100 IV. I probably won't bother - I'll just replace her iPhone 8 with an 11 Pro.
This opens a huge area of business for them, if they can convince ad film makers devices because the current set of filming devices that they use aren't inexpensive.
For a lot of the world, a $500 smartphone was a luxury, and a $1500 smartphone (like a $3000+ laptop, or $1000 monitor stand) is an unfunny joke.
While they’re amazing devices, they’re just not replacements for a real computer, being locked down, with no exposed file system, and the imprecision of touch-only input.
This in my opinion is very dangerous and will prevent the country from ever becoming a producer of information and services.
I'm as sure as I agree with this statement that this can be a historic comment about smartphones until the next breakthrough happens :)
If it didn't have the notch it would just have a larger bezel on a side, or some BS like a popup camera.
The "camera behind screen" idea barely works (for obvious reasons), and is hardly what would revolutionize mobile hardware. It's an aesthetic concern, not a functional one.
Things that might do that, larger camera sensors (e.g. 1"), week or more long batteries, total voice control, etc.
I think the point here is that the recent "big" features are all pretty minor things like 60fps screens etcetera, they are really nice but nowhere near as important as the new things we used to have every generation.
Smartphones I’ve owned:
HTC One X: 130 g
Galaxy S5: 145g
Samsung Galaxy S7 edge: 157g
iPhone XS: 177 g
I’m happy with the screen size vs the phone size on the XS, but I didn’t realize I wanted something lighter too. This phone is way too heavy. The new iPhone 11 Pro is 188g. Hopefully next time around they make something lighter.
Headphone jack, sure. But after face ID / full screen, I wouldn't go back to home button and touchID if they'd paid me...
Eye tracking based scrolling would be something that I'd like; for reading long articles/books. Using regular camera is prohibitively power hungry; not sure if there is research for special purpose cameras for this purpose.
I bought my last phone over 4 years ago and it wasn't new back then. The only reason I'm thinking about buying a new one is the software version. But it probably won't cost more than $200, because that's already enough to get better hardware than I got 4 years ago for double the price, and I don't have an issue with performance.
Needless to say, I don't quite get how flagship phones still sell so well considering you can do basically everything for a small fraction of the cost. Is there really a mobile game or other app out there which requires top specs? Would such a game even sell enough quantities?
The point is that the upgraded version ships with less features. I use bluetooth-headphones so I don't care, but I can easily see why this is infuriating to others.
Google is hot with the ML train, they develop and release new state-of-the-art algorithms and improve all aspects of smartphone (videos, pictures, batteries, actions, gestures, keyboards, biometry, security, ...).
On the Asia side, companies are the first to release foldable phones. They are already acquiring user feedbacks and cost insights for the next generation of foldable phone, and Google is a supporting partner, with Android 10 embracing those new phones with new APIs.
I'm looking forward for foldable phones improvements and more Google magic
Apple is rarely first to put certain component or piece of technology into their products, but is usually first one to do it properly and create first actually usable product. That’s why pretty much every actual innovation only takes off after Apple has implemented it.
Improvement in camera could be enticing, but the platforms to which the photos, videos are shared would compress them anyways making them all nearly identical. Better frame rates is the only thing which makes a difference. Case in point : MKBHD made a blind test last year and low cost smartphone Mi Pocophone which scored pathetic camera performance in individual reviews came out top in the blind test.
So, the subscription services are the new lifeline for the hardware manufacturers; included free subscription should add some value to the new customers and if the SW services work; may be compensate for diminishing hardware sales.