We saw a glimpse of some great mobile awareness in Cortana. Contacts and location reminders were amazing on windows phones.

“Next time I talk to my wife, remind me to ask bout the dogs medication.” Phone call, text, or email, I’d get a reminder.

“Next time I’m at the store, remind me to buy bread.” “Which store?” “Any grocery store.”

Phone assistants have basically been going down hill since windows 10.

Google is using an order of magnitude more electricity to basically copy Siri. Neat.

I really want to try the withings. The new fossil hybrid is more like a Pebble. It’s a solid little notification machine.

Can’t blame them. Google cut mobvoi and fossil off at the knees, while courting Samsung. Why would they stay? I hope they try another hybrid watch.

Direct report from the FTC. ISPs are DIGGING into your web behavior. https://www.ftc.gov/reports/look-what-isps-know-about-you-examining-privacy-practices-six-major-internet-service-providers

4K120 is the most useful “extreme” video mode, and it’s a shame more companies haven’t supported it, just ZTE, OnePlus, and Sony. It’s crazy flexible. Can be easily dropped to 60 or 30 fps, and makes for absolutely stunning slow motion. It’s such an easy edit in something like LumaFusion to time stretch it. Even silly little family videos look so much cooler at that resolution in one quarter time. When done right, at a good bitrate, it looks much better than most phones’ potato quality 1080p slow motion. Sony absolutely chose right offering 4k120 over 8k24.

I have my daughter’s first steps in 4K. That was roughly seven years ago. Shot from an old LG. That little clip is amazing, and it looks so much better than what 1080p at the time would have looked like.

I honestly thought they already had…

More video out support and desktop modes. Mid-ranger phones are more powerful than budget Chromebooks. It’s silly to act like these pocket computers couldn’t replace a LOT of folks home PCs or laptops.

Dang. Those are two rough chips to recommend at the end of 2023. The 8Gen1 isn’t as bad as the 810 that would melt solder, but it’s not gonna age as gracefully as the 865 or the 8Gen2. Sad that Samsung’s own design is still poorer than the 8Gen1.

Oh man. As a little kid I burned a LOT of time on the old DOS trek.exe.

Also still fire up Armada from time to time. With all the new ship classes in Online, I’d love to see an Armada 3.

My editor used to be SO into the Porsche designed Huawei phones. They brought a different look, but outside the Porsche label, I couldn’t say what made them any more stylish or desirable.

The situation has been getting MUCH better. The thing a lot of these articles overlook is just the strange structural difference between Android and iOS. We still seem to be primed to look for the big OTA, that’s “THE Update”, but increasingly more of the bug fixes, security patching, and feature refinement are being delivered by individual app updates and Google Play system updates. I’m OK if the OTAs are a bit more sporadic if I see work from the manufacturer and from Google to push better code throughout the year. I’d rather not wait for a big OTA, when a small component needs to be updated. The situation for Android updates has gotten a LOT better.

We care so much about our users’ privacy and security, we make sure their messages fall back to SMS when chatting with non-iphones. We COULD have dictated the future of messaging in North America, and demanded standards that would have benefited us, but we know we make more money by letting out customers bully the green bubbles.

I worry mediatek might have made the jump one gen too early.

Keeping old tech out of landfills is the right way!

It is 😊

It’s a double edged sword. DO we want Android to be more like Windows? That’s the only way you won’t have OEMs making their own unique hierarchy of menus in settings. It’s all a part of a “familiarity” strategy. Get someone used to the way one phone is organized, then they will complain that another phone isn’t “intuitive”. Either we teach people to lean on search, or we ask for Google to take over more of the “unification” of Android.

I get that some people are annoyed when different phones have settings in slightly different menus, but we should just be teaching people to rely on search in settings rather than memorizing where each phone puts individual settings.

Last I checked .04 per play.