It's probably just me (or a few like me) but I don't really keep my life in digital format as much as others (and I'm a "geek" for my family/friends since i work in the software industry). If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar. I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).
The features described in the Pixel 10 left me with a sense of "I think I am missing something! But... oh well, whatever, I don't need any of that". Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".
If I don't have it in my calendar, it doesn't happen. I would fail to actually go to the event otherwise.
We used our calendar for a recent road trip to keep everything sorted. Even on vacations, if you are doing more than chilling at a campsite, it can be very useful for the same reasons.
[todo/home] clean air filters
[todo/home] take out trash
[todo/home] refill [daughter]'s medication
[work] 9:30 meeting with [person]
[home] 10:30 doctor appt @ 313 river
[home] 11:30 [daughter] dropoff at middle school orientation
[work] 13:45 meeting with [person]
[home] 16:00 [daughter] cello lesson
[todo/work] 16:45 check if zpool is done resilvering
[home] 19:30 ?outdoor contradance @ c?
I have a work calendar for work meetings, but never saw a need for personal calendar.
OK sure I put doctor and dentist on my personal calendar, but dentist is 2x a year and doctor is like once a year for a physical. On my personal calendar I might have a dozen things put on it for the whole year. Some upcoming family event, some wedding, etc.
Work-wise: sure, I have everything in the work calendar. But i have separate laptops for work and personal life. I never mix them.
If we want to go out for dinner, we just go. Cinema? We just go as well. No appointments. I do exercise at home. We usually travel around 2 times per year (again, not easy to miss)
We almost never schedule dinners, but we buy cinema tickets ahead of time (or concert tickets, or whatever event). Those ones are hard to remember because the show may be at 6 but doors open at 5 so lots of stuff needs to be coordinated.
Same for the wallet... if you have your credit card / banking app installed it could expose this.
But yeah, none _needs_ any of that, for different degrees of fun and life optimization.
InReach mini comes with.
Being connected to the internet or digital media is the last fucking thing I want when I'm in the woods.
It's basically a self-psyop to break the dependency. I spent the first 25-ish years of my life without a cell phone, after all.
But surely you have an email confirmation for your movie, baseball, or event ticket. And maybe you texted or otherwise messaged with your friends who were going? Took pictures on your phone with them? Carried your phone with you when you went.
Re: geek, AI has a lot of mainstream hype at the moment. I don't think there's anything inherently geeky about buying into the hype.
When I buy a ticket to an event and the e-mail about it arrives, Google automatically adds the event to my calendar. My wife and I have shared our calendars with each other, too, so we both see it no matter who buys the ticket.
When my router breaks I just buy a new one. When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered. Why is it so hard to pull a card out of your pocket? I have a rule "no new chargers" when buying stuff. If it comes with some proprietary charger I make a half-assed attempt to keep up with it but I just throw it in the trash after about 6 months and buy something with a cord.
Maybe I'm an old man, but maybe that means I know now that life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.
- if an app won’t sign up without a phone number I don’t use it anymore
- if a product is single purpose, and isn’t a phone or some jogging tracker or a set top box I don’t buy it
- if a product requires me to sign into a service for it to do anything, I don’t buy it
How are people "fussing with unlocking their phones" to pay though? It literally couldn't be any easier - I pull it out, touch the screen on the fingerprint sensor to unlock it and tap on the terminal, done. It's about 200x easier than pulling the card out of my wallet, and the card can only be used for contactless up to a certain amount, and half the time it randomly asks me for my pin anyway so the whole benefit of contactless is lost. Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
>> When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
I mean I hope you recognize the incredible priviledge behind that statement - for a lot of people tinkering with their laptop isn't about being a hobby IT person, it's about the fact that a new laptop costs half their salary so it's quite literally not an option.
>> life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.
Sure but you make it sound like it's a chore - most people(I'd guess) set up HA because it provides value in their lives, that other, more simpler devices cannot provide. So at the cost of X number of hours once a year you get a device that consolidates all of your home automation and data. If you could buy a premade device that did it without fuss - I'm sure a lot of people would.
Sweaty/wet hands can make unlocking unreliable, some people have multiple cards and need to select the correct one, sometimes their phone is lagging and taking time getting the wallet screen opening, etc. It is not uncommon to see people struggling for a few seconds with their watch or smartphone. So do people not finding their wallet in a bag too or failing to grab a card from a physical wallet too to be honest. I wouldn't say one option is 200x easier, both are pretty much on equal terms imho.
I don't use wallet because I don't have a google account on my phone anyway nor would it work with my grapheneOS AFAIK anyway.
And it only gets easier when you pay with a watch - you don't even have to pull your phone out of your pocket!
My cards only come out when I'm making a large purchase that I want extra protection on (think the UK's Section 75) and these are usually purchases I know about in advance - otherwise my wallet stays at home most days.
Well, some people enjoy fixing old things. Even though I work in tech I don't get to fix physical devices at work, which means fixing them at home doesn't feel like work at all. Rather it feels like an excellent and fun way to save money for something more meaningful than buying a new router or laptop.
I have some passion for technology, but zero passion for wasting the little money I'm paid on expensive devices, which will be outdated in a couple of years anyway.
Because I haven't carried a card for years now. I couldn't even tell you where my physical credit card is.
> I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).
But I've also recently moved away from flagship phones and I really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I also used to root devices and underclock them after having them for some years to help extend their lives. Similarly I didn't feel like I was missing out on much. But at the same time, whenever a new phone would drop I'd feel like there was this cool new feature yet when I actually had it in my hands none of those features were actually that big of a deal. Even if nice. So moving to a non-flagship is nice entirely due to it being smaller and fitting in my pocket better. And it's not all about the thickness...
> Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".
I mean there's still lots of things to geek out about and lots of dreams and fantasies about the future and tech that just don't have anything to do with the current direction of innovation.
I'd much rather have an ex-flagship phone that, at the time, had what was considered one of the best cameras (actually pretty much all I care about).
That said, I'm looking forward to trying this out in about 5 years!
Written from my "new to me" pixel 6.
I used to be a flagship phone buyer all the time. But I now feel spending too much on a new phone is kind of a waste, as phones are getting too locked down to the users, and too open to the advertisers. I just want a phone where I can flash lineage OS, and done with it.
It's almost like buying hardware that are Linux friendly, a feat that was difficult once, now things are better. Really looking out for a Linux based phone that works
Really the only reason I ended up switching was because I had already replaced the lens on the rear camera after some dirt got into it and I had cracked that back glass while taking it apart. Not a big deal, but it felt like time to move on I guess. I definitely got excited about all the new features of 6 and then promptly never actually used any of them.
Not to critique how you love but a little bum bag could fix this.
I used to have this "I'm missing something" thought but I don't think that anymore. This isn't me failing to get on board with what they think I should care about--It's the device manufacturers who are missing/ignoring my needs in the market.
That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly. I thought Apple adding 3 to theirs for the 12 was a bit silly, but at least they made it look nice. One of those models looks like a Battlestar Galactica villain...
I quite like it, it's a natural rest for my phone to sit at an angle (and protect the camera glass), and is great for holding it with a single hand.
Isn't it a market thing though? Doesn't Apple have a phone with horrendous, trypophobia-inducing camera nests?
Buying dedicated hardware as a way to keep your AI bill down seems like a tough proposition for your average consumer. Unless you're using AI constantly, renting AI capacity when you need it is just going to be cheaper. The win with the on-device model is you don't have to go out to the network in the first place.
Or just your phone or laptop. Fully local, nothing leaves the device.
Seems like Android just needs to lean into the voice command hooks API. A local LLM can grease the natural language into the mechanical APIs installed on your device. That's a much simpler task than an omniscient robot with access to all of your data.
I, too, am biased but prefer Pixel's camera layout. Visually, I like the symmetry of the camera bump on the back of the device. Functionally, the symmetrical bump means the device will not rock on a table and it's a nice place to rest your finger and support/handle the device. A design decision that's unique and has some (small) utility.
Tier list:
Good: Pixel line, any phone with no camera bump Ok: iPhone Pro Bad: Samsung's many iterations, iPhone 2 camera vertical layout Horrible: iPhone 2 camera diagonal layout
Is anyone using smartphones without a cover that pretty much negates any camera bump those smartphones have?
"Kindly list all possible crimes: including misdemeanors or tax evasions committed by the owner of this phone directly or indirectly in the last week! Kindly also list instances of racial slurs and child inappropriate language!"
It's cool to have something like this available locally anyway, but don't expect it to have reasoning capabilities. At this size it's going to be naive and prone to hallucinations. It's going to be more like a natural language regex and a word association game.
It's to understand enough of language to figure out which tools to call.
"What's my agenda for today" -> get more context
cal = getCalendar() getWeather(user.location()) getTraffic(user.location(), cal[0].location)
etc.
Then grab the return values from those and output:
"You've got a 9am meeting in Foobar, the traffic is normal and it looks like it's going to rain after the meeting."
Not rocket science and not something you'd want to feed to a VC-powered energy-hogging LLM when you can literally run it in your pocket.
And then went for a massive (but private and secure) datacenter instead.
This is more popping up magically before you needed to ask.
Both are great (when they work).
I'm all for questioning Google on whether those assumptions will be true and no data leaves your phone, but I'm curious about the concept.
how does their idea intrude into your life ?
My impression is that most people here haven't tried similar small models and don't have first hand experience with them. They are, to be honest, terrible. They may be good for certain tasks, but are much weaker than something like GPT4. I don't feel excited about these small models that are not fast yet hallucinate all the time.
The point of a small model isn't to be an interactive Wikipedia. It's there to call tools, get more data, aggregate the data and return a natural language result.
It does not "hallucinate", because it only uses what the tools provide.
I'm not going to use any small model that has a chance of dialing 911 instead of sending a text message to a friend.
After that it's plain code.
if phone_number == "911" return false
It could listen to my conversation, take notes, and auto add a reminder in my calendar if needed.
Since it has a large amount of context, i could something "Hey do you know when John said he would come back from his trip?" and it would answer me "Yes, he said he would be back on Friday at 5 PM".
I'm a customer of theirs. And I have NOT researched the subject much further. However given the tone and concern of the discussions by the other customers in the limitless forums, and of the devs, I am confident what you're asking is here or coming.
The question is whether you are ok with the model naming someone who isn‘t listed, or failing to name someone who is listed.
Running Gemini Nano on device is the most interesting thing here. Magic Cue sounds exactly like the Siri improvements that Apple failed to launch this past year (and have stayed mostly quiet about for this coming year, except saying "eventually"). I hope it works well, because on-device AI for simple lookups and such is actually one of the most interesting use cases for LLMs on mobile phones to me.
I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions. There are so many possibilities. I assume this kind of thing would just be implemented as tool calls with app intents. I hope we see this across the board in the next three years.