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    Home Unlabelled Android What should I buy Thursday (Mar 05 2020) - Your weekly device inquiry thread!

    Android What should I buy Thursday (Mar 05 2020) - Your weekly device inquiry thread!

    March 05, 2020

    Android What should I buy Thursday (Mar 05 2020) - Your weekly device inquiry thread!

    What should I buy Thursday (Mar 05 2020) - Your weekly device inquiry thread!

    Posted: 05 Mar 2020 03:12 AM PST

    Credits to the team at /r/PickAnAndroidForMe for compiling this information:

    Note 1. Join us at /r/MoronicMondayAndroid, a sub serving as a repository for our retired weekly threads. Just pick any thread and Ctrl-F your way to wisdom!

    Note 2. Join our IRC, and Telegram chat-rooms! Please see our wiki for instructions.

    submitted by /u/AutoModerator
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    Samsung can't justify $1,400 prices w/ few major OS updates

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 11:25 AM PST

    You can now jailbreak an iPhone with an Android phone

    Posted: 05 Mar 2020 12:26 AM PST

    Google March 2020 Pixel Feature Drop Emoji Changelog

    Posted: 05 Mar 2020 03:16 AM PST

    Pixel Launcher now smartly suggests folder names based on which apps you add (APK Download)

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 06:23 AM PST

    Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is now available on Android

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 06:36 AM PST

    Project Sandcastle: Android for the iPhone. Beta release today.

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 09:12 AM PST

    3rd party telemetry found in Nokia smartphones (Nokia 6.2, 7.2)

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 06:54 AM PST

    Why modern phones need so much ram - Video/Image processing

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 11:39 AM PST

    tl;dr; It is because of video/image processing. LPDDR ram is shared across CPU and GPU. It is very fast. Storage (UFS) is very slow. Modern images/videos are huge. People hate slowness / unresponsiveness.

    I'm a Software Engineer and a lot of discussions are coming around with, "Why does xx Android phone need yy ram! This is much more than my PC!"

    The answer is that it has a lot to do with image and video processing and storing these buffers in memory where latency is significantly lower, as well as available bandwidth is significantly higher than standard UFS storage on Android devices.

    Even something as taking a picture actually requires a lot of steps. To give an example, when you press your shutter button on your Android phone it may have already taken up to 4-8 images before and after (possibly on different lenses too), applied some processing across all the images, and then spits out your final image really quick.

    Devices are needing more ram due to handle more data contained in 4k/8k / use of multiple lenses / etc. medias.

    To give some concrete numbers on what that means -- Latency is kind of how fast you can give/receive data. RAM is in the nanoseconds range while UFS is in the microseconds range. 8T UFS at 128kb sequential read/write on most Android phones is near the 50-60+ microsecond mark, while RAM would be in the 20-30 nanosecond mark. 1 nano second = 1000 micro seconds. This means it is over 2000x faster at accessing data. To give a better idea let's say a fast food order takes 4 minutes (ram)... in a slower SSD UFS world that would be 8,000 minutes / 133 hours / 5.5 days.

    An example where you see problems is that Android developers do run into "Out of Memory" issues when handling images through say the Bitmap class, and through the BitmapFactory object. To counteract this there's a few tricks like downsampling and using caches (LruCache / LruDiskCache) etc. Glide for example does a lot of backend work to make images and videos load smoothly and quickly.

    In desktops ram isn't shared across the GPU and the CPU. The CPU accesses those ram slots (DDR4 for example), while the GPU accesses onboard video memory in the form of GDDR. As well as desktops aren't capturing a lot of video/images. Rather most computers decode media and do have specialized hardware for that (i.e. h264/h265/vp9 hardware decoders/encoders).

    Sorry to ramble on a bit... but that's the jist. I can go into more depth if needed :)!

    submitted by /u/SeattleCoffeeRoast
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    GSMArena labs: Introducing our new smartphone speaker test

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 12:02 PM PST

    Realme 6 and 6 Pro announced featuring a 90hz punch hole LCD screen, 64MP camera and fast charging at around 200$

    Posted: 05 Mar 2020 01:09 AM PST

    [TechInsights] Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G Teardown Analysis

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 06:24 PM PST

    Easier access to web pages: Let Assistant read it aloud

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 09:07 AM PST

    9to5Google: Galaxy S20+ First Impressions: Mostly stellar, but w/ the same Samsung frustrations

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 01:11 PM PST

    Opinion: Samsung's software update model shows that the company believes in the two-year contract and trade-for-upgrade model

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 09:30 PM PST

    To me, it appears that they expect customers to purchase their phones on a two-year contract, use it for that period of time during which they'll get guaranteed full updates (security and version), then trade it in at the end for an upgrade on another two-year contract. This would make sense because Samsung is a brand people often buy on contract.

    The remaining year of monthly security updates and however much time of quarterly updates suggests that they only do that to say "look, people who use their phones for more than two years or buy them used, we haven't forgotten about you".

    If we take a look at pixels, they get three years of full updates because it's a less popular contract brand and a lot of pixel users buy them off-contract. A lot of pixel users also tend to be Android enthusiasts while Samsung users are more general.

    And then there's Apple, who are updating their phones for 5+ years because even after they stop selling them on their website or at their own stores after a usual 3-year period, they keep the phones in production for longer for prepaid carriers and some markets like India. There are, of course, also the strong second-hand market for iPhones and people using them for years (noticed this when working for a carrier: I see many customers walk in with iPhone 4/4s they are still using every day while no Androids older than ~2015/16 are still in daily use; older models were always trade-ins).

    submitted by /u/t_a_6847646847646476
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    HEY GOOGLE: Read this webpage to me.

    Posted: 05 Mar 2020 05:25 AM PST

    Just tried this feature on my phone and I love it! It basically turns any web page article into a podcast. I have the ability to skip ahead or go back and it scrolls through the page as it reads, or I can turn off the screen and just listen. Also, I can adjust the speed at which it's reading the page to me. Very cool and useful feature.

    submitted by /u/itim__office
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    Developer Preview 1.1 patch now available!

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 10:36 AM PST

    Nubia Red Magic 5G to have a Special Transparent Edition that shows the fan spinning

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 12:53 PM PST

    Notebookcheck's Top 10 Smartphones under 500 Euros

    Posted: 05 Mar 2020 05:50 AM PST

    Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Review: Brawn Over Brains

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 10:11 AM PST

    Redditors, what are your essential apps?

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 04:59 AM PST

    Hi,

    After using apple phone for last couple of years, I'm switching back to Android (preordered S20+). Can you recommend me the most essential apps that your are using? I mean, best reddit app, 4chan app, music player etc. What are your daily drivers?

    Cheers!

    submitted by /u/Devesto
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    I have an old spare phone, what interesting things can I do with it?

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 02:02 AM PST

    Hello, I have an old phone and I was wondering if there are any useful things I can do with it My daily driver is a Samsung galaxy A5 (2017) And the spare phone is a Sony Xperia Z2 (2014) with an (unfixable) broken SIM card tray.

    I would also say I'm a quite experienced power user

    Thank you :)

    submitted by /u/Rolph133
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    My experience going s9 > s20

    Posted: 04 Mar 2020 12:34 AM PST

    I switched from the Galaxy s9 to the Galaxy s20 today (T-Mobile preorder that delivered a few days early) and so far I'm loving it. However, after watching & reading reviews from tons of places that I trust for tech news and opinions, I have to say I'm a little underwhelmed by this base model.

    Not to complain! It's an excellent phone so far. I just feel like the hype surrounding the s20 Ultra has made me as a base model s20 user expect more than I got, and it's resulted in a few pros and cons.

    Pros:

    • 120Hz is amazing (never used high refresh rate before myself)
    • Screen is vibrant & bright
    • width is manageable coming from a smaller phone
    • ultrawide camera is very useful!
    • selfie camera is Way better, extremely noticeable and, personally, useful

    Cons:

    • Normal shooter/zoom camera seem only about as good as my s9 in low/medium light (dim indoors)
    • speakers honestly sound worse?
    • notification shade is so damn far away
    • lack of curved sides on screen feels "less premium" to me? Very subjective though and not super important
    • no major changes in One UI 2.0 that make it feel different or fresh, no introduction to new system software on first boot/setup

    Any of these ring true for other s20 family users out there? I know I bought the lowest model, so I couldn't expect the camera performance of the Ultra. It just feels like people were lumping this phone in with their observations of the higher models, and I felt maybe a bit mislead. Still love the upgrade, and the almost invisible bezels are a plus (since I bought a case day one). Thoughts/questions?

    Edit: by request, here are some pictures of my cat Avery in motion taken in the default, auto camera mode with the normal 12MP shooter.

    Edit 2: Wrote this post last night after setting up and testing out the phone. Today I went to work and out for a little bit and I still agree with pretty much everything I said. I've made minor edits to my points above, and I think the lower apparent speaker quality is due to my case, which is otherwise very nice and protective.

    submitted by /u/Soulcloset
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