Be Excellent To Each Other

More importantly, the latest Chrome update has fucked the address bar on whatever lollipop is on my oneplus one (5.0.2?). No topping feedback at all. The pull-down-to-refresh spinny thing is gone too.

What's topping feedback?

Mis-swiped typing feedback. Keyboard pops up, text enters, but no letters on-screen, no history list.

Sounds like it's crashed. Kill it off from the recent apps thing and see if that helps.

The hudl2 just updated to lollipop. It's about time!

New round of Google stuff announced yesterday:

• The Nexus 6P made by Huawei. Generally flagship level stuff with an allegedly massively improved camera and a fingerprint reader on the back. I wasn't at all bothered when I heard about it initially but the body of the thing looks very nice being all aluminium and a genuinely decent camera would be nice. Not convinced I'll upgrade though as I'm pretty happy with my N6.
• The LG made Nexus 5X. Made to satisfy the market that was pissed off with the N6 last year as they wanted a more normal sized and typically cheaper Nexus device.
• They've also came out with a new tablet, the Pixel C which came as a surprise to me as I hadn't heard any rumours of it. Also surprisingly is that this time Google haven't partnered with anyone and it's apparently a fully Google made device. It's a very high spec 10.2 inch thing aimed at power users by the look of it and the design of it's genuinely lovely. I've made my peace with the flawed Nexus 9 but it still annoys me at times so if this reviews well I might consider it, especially with the bigger screen which I would prefer.
• As a response to Apple Care there's now the Nexus Protect programme. I don't know much about Apple Care so I don't know how this stacks up in terms of price and features.
• Finally, a new iteration of the Chromecast and a new version that does audio specifically, but I don't give a shit about any of that so find your own links.

ETA: UK pricing details for everything except the Pixel C here.

The 5X will be my next phone, I'm currently on a 5 and it's the best phone I've ever had.

The 6 just doesn't interest me at all (Too. Fucking. Big. and too expensive), but a 'better 5'? Yes, I'll have that.

Contract up next July, which is probably how long it'll take Manx Telecom to get the bastard things in stock.

Getting the standard Google UI is a massive plus as well, why the likes of Samsung continue to deface their own products as they do is a total mystery to me. (And with a Nexus you're not relying on the manufacturer for OS updates, and don't run the risk of the phone becoming abandonware after 18 months either - YES I'M LOOKING AT YOU HTC.)

6P sample shots:
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipP ... VzTFlEUXlB

6ap slow-moron video:
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipP ... ZRWUtEYV93

DxOmark gave the N6P its joint-highest rating of any phone it's tested: http://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles/Google-N ... hotography

My ears are burning

There was some chat that they'd only be available to buy online and not via the telcos but that might just be in the US as a quick Google throws up confirmation that EE at least will be offering them on contract.

As for the size, the difference is a bit less this time round as the 5X is 5.2" and the 6P is only 5.7".

That's all good to hear as the camera on the N6 is crap enough to bug me a bit.

I'm going to leave that typo uncorrected

The price will probably still be far too high for my taste though, I just can't get my head around paying £400-500 for a phone.

Yeah, in the UK you'll be able to get them from O2, EE and Carphone Warehouse, at least.

Oh, and:



Yeah, that happened.

You've certainly snagged a bargain there.

For comparison the smallest storage model they both have in common is 32GB for which the prices are £379 vs £449. An extra £70 for a faster CPU, an extra GB of RAM and a bigger high res screen (plus the high end design of the 6P) seems like a reasonable deal to me, though obviously that's personal thing.

I'm really tempted, but given that I'm eyeing up the Pixel C I think I'll wait for reviews of everything to come in and then see where to send my money. Annoyingly, I don't think I can really justify the best part of a grand upgrading both.

Yes but I'll be going for the 16GB model so it'll be cheaper than that (for reference, I keep my entire app collection on one screen, and I don't do media on my phone), plus thanks to MT's perverse pricing structure the new Nexus5 will probably be in their sweet spot (if you can call it that) whereby I'll get the phone for 'free' on a two-year £35 per month contract. (This was the case with the Nexus 5, anything that cost more than that and they wanted a wedge of cash upfront as well.)

This is, for example, a company that wants £35 per month for two years, and £349 cash, for a 16GB iPhone6.

(For mega-lols, for the 6Plus 64GB, they want £35 per month and £679 upfront. You can buy the phone direct from Apple for £619.)

AMUSE YOURSELF

Why aren't you just buying unlocked handsets if Manx is such a poor deal?

Because they're cynical arseholes with their pricing structure. I need a decent monthly data allowance - (I'm currently on 3GB and most months I've got maybe 100-200MB left by the end of the month, occasionally I use it all at which point my phone turns off its mobile data to save me the exorbitant charges that MT impose when you go past your limit) - which puts me on their SMARTPHONE 300 tariff.

http://www.manxtelecom.com/mobile/tarif ... nthly.aspx

As you can see it's £35 with a 'free'/reduced phone, or £28 SIM only.

Therefore by purchasing an unlocked handset from elsewhere, I'm still spending £28 per month on my tariff, only saving £8 per month, so over the course of 24 months I save £192.

So for example with the Nexus 5, this was a £349 phone at their prices (IIRC it was around £279 elsewhere), but was available 'free' on the £35 per month tariff over two years, so I was still better off getting the phone from them on that tariff, than buying the phone for £280 from Amazon or whatever, and paying £28 per month SIM only for the tariff I needed.

We do now have competition over here in the form of a company called 'Sure' (C&W offshoot), but their coverage and data are notoriously bad.

Up for renewal in January. As much as I love my Moto G, I'm itching for some higher end goodness. That 5x looks up my Avenue

The 3rd Gen Moto G is supposed to be very good, and it's pleasantly inexpensive. The gubbins of it would have been a high end phone a couple of years ago, and personally I think anything more than 720p on a phone is a bit daft, 1080p I can sort of get on with at a push, but anything beyond that, pointless number wanking that fucks your battery.

It reviewed very well in the most recent PC Pro.

£160! - http://www.ebuyer.com/719926-motorola-m ... m4179ae7b1

Get your belts changed instead.

Yes, that is generally how things works.

Point is that when people talk about 'high end' it's easy to forget that a high end phone of a couple of years ago felt absolutely fine to use. The PC Pro review of the 3rd Gen Moto G makes the specific point that in a lot of ways it has a flagship phone feel to it in terms of speed and slickness, to the extent that folks should really think twice before they lash out £500 or so on the latest top-end handset.

Mrs Hearthly has a 2nd Gen Moto G and it's a cracking little phone, only thing that's a bit sub-par is the camera but apparently that's fixed on the 3rd Gen.

If it weren't for MT's nonsensical pricing structure (see previous post) that almost 'forces' you into getting a new phone every two years, I'd be on a 2nd Gen Moto G myself, with an eye on an upgrade to a 3rd Gen.

I don't think that icon means what you think it means.



I think folk should spend their money on whatever they want personally. This is one of those things where because you don't do something you're mystified about why other people do and then you bang on about it for ages rather than just accepting it.

It says BIG STAMPY BOOTS.



This is where I mention something a couple of times and you insist I'm 'banging on for ages' about it.

Also, I was reporting what PC Pro said, and not even presenting it as my own opinion.

EDIT - Wow, totally fucked up the quotes there.

Yes, but what do you think it means? I'm not being a dick here, I'm genuinely asking as it's more than possible I've picked up the wrong meaning from context myself. Whenever I've seen it used it's specifically because someone's made a joke and someone else has wrongly taken it as a serious post and explained it away.



Pretty much every post you've made here today has talked about it. Also, this isn't the first time you've lectured on this specific theme so you'll need to forgive me for seeing it as a favourite of yours.

I think I coined this. Here's the first usage I could find: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2512&p=195359&hilit=boots+joke#p195359

Glad to be your punching bag as ever. I think my follow up is still relevant.

I think it's "pointing out the obvious". It's certainly normally used for jokes.

I was just using it as a sort of 'YES I KNOW THAT' kind of stampy boot.

Weirdly, that fixed itself over a.couple of weeks. Occasionally it worked, mostly it didn't, then at some point it mostly worked and sometimes didn't, noe it works. Didn't seem to correspond to a specific chrome update or network event.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ ... _with_the/

Q: Is the rear facing camera on the 6P and 5X identical?
A: Yes. Both devices have the same camera - a 12.3MP camera, with a large 1.55um pixels, which works great in all conditions - especially low light. And both have LDAF for fast auto-focus. Yea, same sensor (IMX377) and F/2.0 optics. But 6P has more CPU/GPU horsepower so has a few additional features like 240fps slomo (vs 120fps on 5X), Smartburst, and EIS.

Ooohh my Nexus 5 just pulled down the Marshmallow update (over 400MB!), like a total divvy I've decided to install it immediately.

Hopefully nothing will break.

My Nexuses 6 and 9 have both had an update in the last few days and neither of them were Marshmallow!

Ha, and just as I posted that the update notification for my Nexus 9 came in.

Oh, the hypocrisy

I don't care about my phone a fraction as much as I do my PC, unless it's the one week in four when I'm on-call for work and need to be contactable 24/7 (I have postponed previous Android updates for exactly that reason, even if the update goes fine there's still inevitable downtime for the reboots and suchlike, so I simply don't take that risk).

As it is I'm not on-call this week, I don't really 'do' much with my phone anyway (there's only one app I regularly use which is a fruit machine emulator), everything else is the baked-in Google stuff or apps that I'm pretty confident will work anyway (Facebook and FB Messenger for example, and even then it's not the end of the world if they break for a bit).

So yeah, I'll jump in with Android updates as and when they appear (unless I'm on-call), whereas my PC is still on Windows 7 and I fully intend to sit out Windows 10 for a while yet

UPDATE COMPLETED AND PHONE WORKING AGAIN - The font for the clock has changed a bit (or it's just bold now, I'm not sure), other than that it all looks the same.

Installed the Marshmallow update on my Nexus 9 last night and it doesn't seem to look or behave any differently really. I mention this though because there's a predictable gotcha around the new permissioning system and my experience might serve as a lesson to others.

After the install I fired up my comic reading app and the bookshelf was completely empty. I checked using a file explorer and there were definitely files there so it was an issue with the comic app not seeing them for some reason. After an uninstall and reinstall didn't sort it I went a-Googling and came across someone talking about a similar issue with, ironically, the G+ app. It turns out that, for some reason, some apps don't get granted the permissions they need during the upgrade and if they haven't been rewritten to handle the new stuff they're left with no way to ask you for them at run time. So the solution is to go into the Apps control panel and the properties of the app in question. There's a new Permissions 'tab' in there where you can grant everything it needs and you're sorted.

It's not a massive problem for someone like me who's happy to dig around a bit but I can see this causing carnage for your normal user who just installs the upgrade and wants everything to work.

That doesn't sound right, ie. it's really not supposed to work that way. Apps that don't target API level 23 shouldn't see any changes in permissions. Apps that do should trigger the new flow. What was the app in question?

It was Perfect Viewer. I admit I didn't pay much attention to the issue past the point when my Googling threw up a solution so I'm not sure if the page I stumbled across explained at all why this had happened in the past with G+ app. I'll see if I can find that same page again.

v2.7.1.3 (latest prod) of that app targets SDK 23 (the latest version), so it's enabled for the new permissions. I think your issues are likely to be a bug in the app, something like it doesn't request the permission but as it's declared to the system as supporting permissions it gets stuck in a loop with the permissions denied and no way to turn them on. As you've found, you can manually dig into settings and fix this yourself.

I think this is the post I came across last night:

http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/10/07 ... they-need/

El Khoury came to the same conclusion I did;

Fair enough. I admit I had assumed that the OS itself would take care of all that i.e. at runtime your app tries to do <something>; Android checks and sees it's never been granted the required permission so throws up a dialogue to the user. The idea that each app would need to craft it's own dialogue and handle the permission requests itself never occurred to me. Assuming I've correctly understood everything you're saying here.

The app doesn't craft the dialog, but it does have to check if the required permission is missing and invoke the "grant permissions" flow if it isn't, as described here. It's a few lines of code.

Interesting. Is there a particular reason it's done that way and not the way I'd imagined? Obviously in the new world order apps needs to be written to be able to actually run with any dangerous permission not being granted but couldn't the OS handle the requesting/granting automatically in the background whenever the app attempts to do something and just return a 'not granted' response if something isn't available? It would seem easier to handle that in a central place (i.e. the OS itself, which is presumably doing that check itself anyway whenever an app tries to access any dangerous functions) rather than have it be implemented at all required points of individual apps. I'm sure there's a reason why not that I don't know enough to understand like.