Technology Android

[masta247]

It's just that Google don't need the Android name to stand out because customers are not making the choice of buying the OS themselves. It's not Windows, duh. As simple as that. Android is a free product, it's not commercially available and phone manufacturers don't need marketing for Android anymore. They want to increase their own brand recognition and Google thinks it's okay because more HTC, Samsung, Sony phones sold the more money Google will gain from their services.

If you are not buying an Iphone it means you are buying Android these days and because Android is running on almost every phone obviously you're going to choose between devices - camera, speed, design, battery, sd slot, whatever floats your boat. A lot of people don't know that their Galaxy runs Android, they think it's just Samsung. Samsung chose Android because they know it works best for their phones and there's no need to boast that it runs Android anymore except of just mentioning that for those who care and it doesn't matter for those who don't anyway - they are buying a phone from Samsung that has X features.
At the beginning sure, it was important when Android emerged to push it forward so not only geeks and some early adopters would buy it and it was in everyone's best interest - both OEMs and Google's alike.

Also the significance of updates and versioning kind of dropped with 4.2, which didn't bring anything new to the table. 4.1 added only project butter. The last really big update was 2 years ago. Google make only little tweaks and usability improvements (sometimes not too great). I hope they are working on huge "under the hood" improvements as well because there are still many things that need to be done.

After we'll see a new platform emerging we will see stronger branding from Google again. Now they have the whole OEM market in their hands.

 

[masta247]

As far as the platforms go we're going to see a major release of Samsung Tizen phones this year, Ubuntu Touch looks quite promising (but the process of installing it on existing phones makes it suitable only for geeks so far) and Microsoft will still try hard at making their OS actually work out, which probably will not happen, at least not anytime soon with their current strategy and ridiculous decisions.

I'm not sure if Tizen is going to catch on - it's going to be pretty much what Bada was for Samsung. Ubuntu Touch could work out if they released phones with the OS specifically, or made deals with OEMs to include some sort of easy option of installing it. It's neat:

And there's also Firefox OS, which is even more basic and kind of strange but has Sony's support.

Frankly, I'd rather see one great platform instead of a few similar ones that will get very limited support from developers.

 

[Casey]

You mess with the camera at all?

Yes. It's fucking full of all sorts of features. I thought Samsung had thrown in everything onto the GS3 but HTC just took it to another level. There's like a million different camera modes lol. They're pushing this thing called HTC Zoe, where it like, takes a 3-second video clip with audio instead of a picture and then you scroll through the frames to get the best shot, or you can just save the video. Or you can highlight parts of it to keep that part static whilst everything else is animated, and vice versa. Then you can rewind certain frames to get everyone/everything in the shot at the right moment. Then there's this other thing that merges all the pictures together from the video. So like, there's a video of a dude doing a trick on a mountain bike, it merges like three different pictures all a second apart so you get one picture with the bike guy in three separate parts of the trick. It's hard to describe but I'm sure you'll see a million shots and demonstrations of it soon. There's a ton of inbuilt filters that can be applied to either pics or videos. You can also really easily make little slideshows with audio, and add video filters to them to make them look old school, or oversaturated, or just bring out a single color or two, etc etc etc.

Mostly shit I'd never use TBH, but they've gone all out with it.

Picture quality didn't look any better or worse than most of your standard 8MP cameras like the N4, GS3, etc. BUTTTTT it performes remarkably well in low light. Like, really, really fucking well. There's no phone camera out there that works as well in low light as the HTC One does. I took a photo under a dark desk with my N4, couldn't see shit. Did the same with the HTC One and you can fucking see everything. And that's without doing any manual setup to adjust the shot. So that was pretty damn impressive.

On straight picture quality alone on your average shot, the Sony Xperia Z smokes it. I tested one of those just today in a phone shop as they were released today.

 

[Casey]

Also the significance of updates and versioning kind of dropped with 4.2, which didn't bring anything new to the table. 4.1 added only project butter. The last really big update was 2 years ago. Google make only little tweaks and usability improvements (sometimes not too great). I hope they are working on huge "under the hood" improvements as well because there are still many things that need to be done.

You can hold me to this because I heard it straight from the source - stuff that was roadmapped for 4.0, 4.1 AND 4.2 all got held back for 5.0. When it drops, some of the stuff in it, you'll notice, was rumored on Android blogs like 2 years ago. 5.0 is one helluva release. As it should be, for the 5th anniversary of the platform

IO this year should be pretty spectacular.

 

[masta247]

Honestly, I really do hope they'll release 5.0 during this year's IO and it's really going to be a big release. They could just improve a lot of stuff under the hood and refresh the UI design for stock Android and that'd be awesome.

 

[masta247]

I don't want to be the one to hate on HTC's camera marketing talk again like 4th year in a row but.. now let's just say LG aren't known for the best cameras, and there's a comparison between the two below.
On the positive side the details per pixel look fine and the colors are quite natural. The biggest positive is of course the low-light quality because of huge pixels. The overall detail level and oversharpening are disastrous though, and even with those we can see lots of blurry mess.

 

[ARon]

It's like they were trying to take blurry pictures or something

 

[masta247]

^ That's only because the pixels are huge and the resolution is low. They capture plenty of light and will output natural colors and capture light when other cameras would see blackness but details like object edges will be basically lost. HTC's oversharpening algorithms don't help.

Obviously the quality will be much better once we'll see pics taken under better conditions but anyway I bet it's going to be inferior to this year's competition.

 

[ARon]

I know the logic behind em but something doesn't seem right. HTC isn't going to release something that bad. I bet I can replicate a more still image

 

[masta247]

It was a 100% crop though for HTC One and Optimus G Pro has extra pixels at that zoom level. The camera tests should be up pretty soon. I'm curious myself as I value camera quality. I'm the type of guy who would buy Nokia Pureview 808 if it came with something better than Symbian or WP, the camera on that phone is so far ahead of everything else yet even such innovation can be belittled by terrible business decisions.

Now back to HTC One, I'll post as soon as they upload comparison pics from Gsmarena's camera test labs.

 

[masta247]

Opera browser (not mini or mobile) is available for Android. It's in beta but it's already very cool, personally I like it a little more than Chrome:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.browser.beta&referrer=utm_source=intern_opera_com&utm_medium=fallback&utm_campaign=fallback_via_opera_com

Basically the UI is new. You can easily turn on or off the data compression engine and it loads more complex websites much better than Opera mini. There are some cool new ideas as well, you can easily save websites for offline use etc.
The Discover feature is basically slightly better than those now popular apps that suggest you new pages based on your interests like Flipboard.

It misses the progress bar and I prefer Chrome's card management a little bit. It loads pages in the background without rerendering though, as opposed to Chrome.

 

[ARon]

It's being reported that the Galaxy S IV will have the ability to scroll with your eyesite. Cool as shit. I like the idea a lot but seems like it'd use a lot of battery.

 

[masta247]

It's being reported that the Galaxy S IV will have the ability to scroll with your eyesite. Cool as shit. I like the idea a lot but seems like it'd use a lot of battery.

Yeah, but it's a very huge challenge to make a feature like that work even relatively well.

 

[ARon]

Yeah, that's why I'm in love with the idea. I have a feeling it won't work well for a while

 

[Pittsey]

I hate those ideas. Samsung are trying to come up with spin to sell their phones. It's a very Apple-esque approach to sales.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

They are far too luxurious. there's nothing wrong with using your thumb.

there's also bound to be someone who comes out with a demonstration video saying that Samsung discriminates against those who has visual impairments; just like how HP's webcams were apparently 'racist' towards black people.

Opera mini was particularly good for light browsing and compressing data; but since it was a light version it wasn't a very good browsing experience (no flash or poor loading of objects). I might just give Opera a go; even though Chrome will remain as my default browser.

 

[Pittsey]

Did anyone buy the wireless charging orb?

 

[ARon]

I'm still waiting on you to buy ours, ha

 

[masta247]

http://blog.gsmarena.com/htc-one-arrives-at-the-office-we-snap-some-camera-samples/

*(letterbox pix - Xperia Z, wide screen pics - HTC One)

Just as I worried. The camera on the HTC One is poor. The pics look sort of pretty when you are viewing a thumbnail or even scale the picture to a low-res monitor but just zoom in a little bit and it's really bad. It even flops on low-light shots.

 

[dilla]

I hate those ideas. Samsung are trying to come up with spin to sell their phones. It's a very Apple-esque approach to sales.

But it'll actually work well and be useful.


I just read Google is ending Google Reader on July 1. Why? So many people use it. I've used it about four years now. This is the first time Google has killed of something I actually used. It wasn't even as bad as Google Wave being shut down.

Fuck Google. I hope the Reeder for Mac app I use will just simply take the feeds I have and add those with no hassle.