Be Excellent To Each Other

Doesn't seem to be just because when I plug headphones in the notification comes up to say they are plugged in so it's not thinking they are constantly in.

Nvidia Shield update for anyone who cares. Yes, I know, no one.

Anyway it's really good, I do now have a proper metric on battery life and it'll do over four hours running a snazzy 3D game like Summoners War, so I'd expect less intensive tasks to see that life extended out somewhat. (From memory Mrs Hearthly's iPad Air could manage about 4.5 hours running Hearthstone, so not bad for a £150 tablet to pretty much match that. I did spend that long playing Hearthstone at a stretch on the Air in the wake of VASECTOMYMAGEDDON earlier this year.)

I've downloaded a load of other games to the Shield as well, mostly stuff that I've bought in the past and therefore could snag again for free, but also a really good tower defence game called ANOMALY 2 which looks ridiculously pretty for a mobile game.

I was slightly concerned that the 8 inch widescreen format would compare unfavourably with a standard tablet aspect ratio and/or be too small, but very quickly got accustomed to it.

I appreciate that everyone's free to choose what tablets they buy and for how much, so for those who are comfortable with those £300-£400 (or more!) price points then fair enough. Personally though I'm loving the fact that a £150 tablet essentially delivers an identical user experience to a £400 iPad Air, and am looking at other Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy S2 which costs £320, and failing to see the point.

So I did nothing to it at all and now it works. Or maybe plugging the headphones in to check made it realise there weren't any headphones in. Because logic.

We did it, Beex!

Woop! We rule:

Wee Papa rule the dance?

As a vaguely related test I rebooted my Nexus 5 before going to bed last night, which is probably similar to doze mode in that it'll stop any shit that's running in the background and no processes other than those which start automatically will be running after the reboot.

In 9 hours overnight it went from 100% to 98%.

I got a replacement Pixel C (and Googles customer service in that respect was unimpeachable; they shipped the new tablet out as soon as I complained and without even waiting for the old one to come back) and it continues to be a beautiful thing. The screen isn't technically much higher resolution than the N9 but something about it is just much nicer to look at. And the build quality continues to be the sort of thing that makes everyone who touches it exclaim how nice it feels. Yeah, I'm well happy with this. Something I never felt about the Nexus 9.

Not tempted by the keyboard?

viewtopic.php?p=884527#p884527

And then something about fridge magnets.

Also, ONE HUNDRED POUNDS FOR A TABLET KEYBOARD? That's like, 66% of the cost of my entire tablet.

Blimey, some one actually bought an Nvidia shield

It's the new one that doesn't burst into flames!

Yeah, but now he has it and like it, he probably wants to buy new things for it. That's how it works for me.


Sure. It's a complicated bit of kit.

Plenty of desktop keyboards cost that sort of money, even without inductive chargers, built-in batteries, and wireless chipsets.

No, I have no need of it and it's far too expensive to pick up just because.

Yeah but you only pay £100 or more for a desktop keyboard that's really got something going for it (like mechanical switches and extras like programmable macro keys, dedicated extra buttons and wheels for media/volume etc, a decent supporting software suite, and perhaps some funky lighting).

I'm not entirely sure that the Pixel C's £100 keyboard addon will be any nicer to use than the keyboard on my £200 Chromebook.

I appreciate that I'm really not 'the market' for something like the Pixel C and its keyboard, and can't get my head around that combo costing £500 - but each to their own of course.

The lesson I'm getting there is "Apple and Google both overcharge for keyboards", I'm not sure that's what you meant though?

Apple though innit, usual rules do not apply.

This is why all this Android stuff at Apple prices really confuses me. The original excitement around Android devices was, as best I can recall, getting Apple-esque quality products, operating system, organisational support etc without the alarmingly gougy prices.

I'm sure the Pixel C is a fine tablet, but for me, at that pricepoint (plus £100 keyboard), it misses the point of Android in the first place.

I think it's to demonstrate that a 'normal' desktop keyboard can cost in the region of £100.

To which the answer is, 'Apple, because they can'.

You really think the "point of Android" is to chase a competitor's tail-lights? That this meagre goal is the height of its ambition? You are completely wrong. It isn't and it never was. Citation: I know one of the Android engineers who pre-dates the Google acquisition.

I guess I just remember Google from their early days and that whole 'don't be evil' line, I'm probably too generous about their intentions when it comes to newer stuff like Android.

Maybe it's easy to forget that Google is a voracious tax-dodging entity that's entirely answerable to its shareholders just the same as Apple is, and is ultimately concerned with the accumulation of obscene amounts of wealth.

They'd be a far more interesting company if they'd never gone public.

Building the best product you can -- and not a me-too copycat -- is not evil.

More than 50% of Google voting stock is in the hands of two people.

This thread took a sudden turn. But on the bright side the window I read it in was suddenly a lot cleaner too.

Well that escalated quickly. We went from there being a single product you think is too expensive to the entire company is evil via a completely invented reason for Android's entire existence. You're being really weird about this.

I'm not saying everything they do is evil, but that leads onto....



But they do act like any publicly listed company and that means 'maximising the value to shareholders', so if they can dodge taxes via places like Bermuda and The Bahamas, they will do.

Didn't that Schmidt guy basically say 'Fuck you' over it? i.e. We're capitalists and therefore we make money like capitalists and if you don't like it then change the law?

And their VP said, as I recall, that their sales team in the UK didn't actually sell anything so weren't liable for any sales tax.

I'm not saying Google are uniquely bad or 'evil' in this regard, they're just the same as any other corporate behemoth, in that they have as much social conscience as a dog caught short on a croquet lawn* But I always liked to think of them as being a bit better than that.


* TM Ben Elton, Stark.

I know, right? I actually have to live with this brain.

Aaaand I'm out.

Citations for a couple of the above:

Schmidt very proud of tax avoidance scheme

Possibly a bit evil

Google's Tax Avoidance

That's probably wise.

Price points are interesting beasts. Lots of things cost pence or a quids but have very large mark-ups to give an impression of quality and can't be too cheap as to give a perception the other way. Apple are scumbags for their ludicrous pricing on things like the lightning adapters and stuff. No idea if Google do the same with some of their stuff.

I much preferred it when Google only charged £100 for a tablet keyboard, why can't we go back to the good old days?

I do sort of wish they would make a proper Android laptop. Not a convertible or a detachable keyboard, but a proper laptop. There would need to be OS related work done (split screen support, better handling of a mouse, etc).

"They" being Google rather than just "someone", there exist Android laptops but from what I can tell they are all fairly low quality.

Chromebooks are nice enough, but get native support for Android apps in there (and have devs start actually designing their apps to fit to this form factor) and for my uses they would be a far more viable alternative to Windows laptops, where you have to fork out quite a lot to get a nice laptop that performs well, has good battery life, and isn't really heavy (I have a Vaio Pro 13, which is lovely but I had to pay quite a lot for it).

I know you can get Android apps running on a Chromebook, but from what I gather the results are imperfect, and the process is a bit awkward to set up. Anyone had any experience with this?

You can get Android apps running on any laptop if you grab an emulator. They run pretty badly, though.

Yeah, I'm saying I want proper support, with all the tweaks needed to make Android function more like a desktop OS. Obviously this would be significant work, and it's arguable whether or not Laptops (rather than tablet/convertibles etc) are really a growth sector, but I'd certainly like the option. A Nexus/Pixel class laptop running Android would be lovely.

Even when MS announced the Surface Book, I was totally interested until they revealed it was a convertible. I have my iPad for tablety stuff, and am only really interested in laptops that haven't had a range of compromises made at the design stage to make it convert into a tablet. I want a proper hinge, I don't want it to be top heavy because of all the gubbins in the screen, and I don't want the ascociated weight increase.

I understand that these designs aren't in line with the majority of the market, and my usage is probably different to a lot of people (I move around a lot and do work that really needs a laptop every day), but I'm sure there'd be some market for these kind of devices.

Marshallow update for the Nvidia Shield now available OTA, mine has updated and is running on Marshmallow without issue.

Not sure I can see a huge amount of difference (I had the same feeling when my Nexus 5 went from L to M), although apparently you can now do 'Adoptable Storage' so that any SD card you have in place (the Shield supports up to 128GB cards) becomes seamlessly merged with the main system storage.

Not sure how that'd work if you wanted to take the card out to copy films/music/suchlike to it from a PC or other device though, so I probably won't risk finding out the hard way until a few reports are in about it.

Taking out an adopted storage card will make it very unhappy indeed, and the card won't be readable in your PC anyway. (It gets formatted as ext4, IIRC.)

Probably the biggest difference you'll see in M is Doze Mode; standby time should be greatly increased.

Cheers Doc just had a Google around on it and indeed you're basically fusing the card to the tablet/phone.

Probably not something I'll be doing then

http://www.androidcentral.com/inside-ma ... le-storage

Is the Gmail app being flaky for anyone else? Over the last week or so mine seems to refresh only every few hours so I'm suddenly getting notified of loads of email going back hours. It's literally just told me about an email someone sent me at half twelve. I went into the App settings looks to clear the cache as that used to help with weird app issues but it doesn't even have that option in Marshmallow.

App drawer | Gmail | Tap and hold | drag to "app info" at the top of the screen | Storage | Clear Cache

Also check how much free storage you have, although I guess with a new device you've not run out.

That's the same place I was in previously but I didn't realise I needed to tap into the Storage section when previously the button was right there on that root page. Anyway, we'll see if that helps, ta.

It's on my Nexus 6 so not a new device but I've still got 20GB free on it.

So unless I'm missing something here, prior to my Shield updating to Marshmallow, I had the option to move (certain) apps to the SD card.

Post-Marshmallow that option has gone, but of course you now have the option of adopting the SD card as internal storage.

The problem with that is it's an all-or-nothing scenario, on Lollipop you could have a few gigs of movies on the SD card, and a few gig of apps. Now you can either have the card as an SD card for 'stuff' but you can't have apps on it, or you adopt it as internal storage and have it added into the system pool.

The Shield only has 16GB of internal storage and on mine that's mostly used up by system/apps already, and I wanted to have the freedom to have more apps but also media and stuff on there too for when I go away. As such I decided to adopt the card as internal storage, thinking that'd give me a whole load of room to use as internal storage and could copy movies and stuff to it the same as you can the normal internal storage when connected to a PC via USB.

IT DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT.

Before I adopted the card as internal storage, when I connected the Shield to my PC I saw two drives for it, one for internal storage and one for the SD card. As such I could copy media to either drive, but the internal storage has hardly any space and the SD card can't be used for apps whilst configured as portable storage. My thinking was I'd just have one big pool of internal storage after the adoption, or at least maintain the ability to copy media files to the newly adopted storage.

Nope, all that's actually happened is the SD card drive has disappeared, and the internal storage drive has a paltry 1GB free, just like it did before.

In Settings > Storage on the Shield it still sees the SD card as a discrete card so it's not 'pooled' it with the internal storage in that regard, and all I can have on there are Apps. It does now say on the overall Device Storage stats that 10.33GB is used of 69.44GB total, but there's absolutely no way that I can see for me to utilise that storage other than moving apps to it, which is shit because I'll never free up more than a few gig on the internal storage for media.

So for clarity, when you have a Marshmallow device with an SD card in it configured as portable storage and you connect it to your PC, you can copy files to either the internal storage or the SD card.

Once the SD card is adopted as storage, THE OPTION TO COPY FILES/MEDIA TO THE ADOPTED STORAGE SIMPLY DISAPPEARS, yes you gain a load more space for apps, but you're effectively limiting your space for EVERYTHING ELSE to the free space in your internal storage.

So it's shit, basically.

I might just format the card back to portable storage and keep my app footprint within the confines of the internal storage.

Have you tried just copying media over to it until you overflow internal storage and seeing what happens?

I've read a suggestion that you have to go through the migrate data process and this then flags the SD portion of the storage as primary, and the device will then prefer it for apps and media.

Whether or not this is true or it makes any difference to how it's seen when connected to a PC I don't know.

Will try later as at the in-laws now for Chrimbo dinner and I left the Shield at home doing the migrate data process.

Ahhh right OK that actually works. It's not enough to adopt the SD card as internal storage, you have to perform the MIGRATE DATA function as well. (This is a process whereby it appears to dump everything it can onto the SD card, but in doing so does indeed then flag the SD card as 'primary' so you can see it in Windows Explorer.)

It's still not amazing though, in that ALL I can see in Windows Explorer now is the SD card space, it's not added it to the actual internal storage. (i.e. before I performed MIGRATE DATA all I could see was the internal storage, and now after MIGRATE DATA all I can see is the SD card, so either way I have less usable storage than before I adopted the SD card. The only benefit to adopting the card then is if you need more space for apps. If you prefer maximum space for media you're actually better off not adopting the card, as without adoption the space for media is additive, whereas with adoption it's exclusive to internal or card.)

As such if you had a device with 32GB of internal storage, and added a 32GB SD card to it, and then adopted the SD card as internal storage, all you'd have to work with is the 32GB of the SD card, your 32GB of internal storage is effectively lost in terms of putting your stuff there, I guess you can still move apps back to the internal storage if you want to.

So I'm happy enough now in that I have 51.6GB of space I can copy media files to, but it seems a rather imperfect situation TBH.

Anyone know how to move a cursor or a route on Google maps app?