Be Excellent To Each Other

Having owned it for a year now I've genuinely only just realised that N6 even does Qi, which should give you some idea of the level of my interest. Granted, if it could compete with wired chargers I'd probably pick one up because why the hell not but now I see it doesn't at all I'm content not to even have known all this time.

But the time taken to charge discrepancy can be a total non-issue, as it is in my case where I have two wireless chargers, one at home and one at work - and if not in use or out and about with me, my phone is sat on top of one of them. (Or when I'm in bed, as I don't have a wireless charge pad in the bedroom, but it only loses about 10% charge overnight anyway.)

If I really need to charge the phone quicker than wireless can manage, I plug it into a micro-USB cable powered from a wall socket. Something that I basically need to do, erm, never, now I come to think about it.

For me wireless charging has been one of those things that's really impressed me as a tech, it's something that I find genuinely useful and convenient, to the extent that I can't really see myself taking a backwards step with my next phone and losing wireless charging. 'Faster charging with a wire' is still shitter than 'slow wireless charging' in my book.

Horses for courses and all that.

Wireless charging is like wireless internet. Convenient and it'll do in a pinch, but you wouldn't want to use it for anything important.

You're not comparing apples with apples there. The problem with wireless internet is maintaining a consistent data stream across a distance with shit like walls and floors and interference getting in the way.

With wireless charging it's just, when you get right down to it, a different 'connector' on the end of the wire.

Well, indeed. None of your arguments for wireless and against turbo-charging make any sense to me at all, but there's no point trying to pick them apart because I'd just be using my own use pattern which would be an equally uncompelling argument to you. I will say that if you're going to base you choice of next phone on whether it does wireless charging or not then I think you'll struggle because it does seem like the manufacturers are moving away from it, but we'll see.

It's not wireless anyway as it has a cable from the wall to the pad. So it's a con.

See also: wifi. And mobile phones!

Knowing nothing about wireless charging g, tbis has caused me some measure of relief. I imagined arcs of power cracking through the room.

Faster charging with a wire and a high quality slim metal chassis.

Feex

Right? Having to hold my tablet against the side of my router just to get the internet is ridiculous. And don't get me started on having to tramp up a hill to the nearest antennae every time I want to send a text message.

Just ordered an Nvidia Shield K1 tablet, which appears to be a re-release of the original Shield with some things removed and a lower price, but still very good hardware.

Total cost for the tablet, a charger and cable (it's totally stripped down so you don't even get a charger or cable in the box), and a 64GB MicroSD card was £177 - wouldn't have bothered but I'm over in the UK in January and I must take Hearthstone with me, also some films and stuff (hence the MicroSD card), as I'll be in hotels and airports for a chunk of time. (I fucking hate hotels and airports. I fucking hate leaving the Isle of Man, in fact.)

Even if you're not interested in all the Nvidia gaming stuff the headline facts are a very capable CPU/GPU, a decent 1920x1200 screen, good speakers, and cheaply expandable via MicroSD cards.

It benches very close to an iPad Air2/iPhone 6 - so the gubbins of the thing are fine.

http://www.ebuyer.com/727810-nvidia-shi ... 1-2500-500

I looked at that when it first came out but it's got an eight inch screen so thhhrrrppp.

Is that one of the Nvidia android devices that randomly sets on fire, or one of the ones that doesn't?

This is the revised edition which, handily, doesn't set on fire.

@Bamba - I think I can get on with an eight inch screen, I've had a play with a couple of iPad Minis and found them to be fine.

Ultimately I'm after something I can take across for a single trip to the UK, it probably won't get used a massive amount apart from that, so I don't want to go nuts price-wise. Besides which, in terms of CPU/GPU performance, it really is up there with the highest cost premium tablets, which is pretty impressive for a £150 tablet. Especially one that doesn't spontaneously combust any more.

It's also running pretty much stock Android Lollipop 5.1.1, (the more stock the better IMO), with an upgrade to Marshmallow in the pipeline for Jan/Feb 2016.

It should be just the job I think, I've read and watched plenty of reviews and they all seem pretty positive.

SHIELD GET!

Really nice tablet, and I won't qualify that with 'for £150....', it's just a really nice tablet full stop.

Yeah the packaging is quite basic (no Apple unboxing loveliness here), and it's got quite a plasticy feel in the hand, but not in a cheap sort of way - it feels well put together.

However the main thing is how it works. The eight inch screen is bright and colourful, and has a resolution of 1920x1200 which is pretty much at the limits of what my eyes can make out in terms of individual pixels so I can get by with it not quite being 'retina DPI'. (Although considering the slightly smaller screen it's probably not far off.)

The speakers are of a reasonable quality, delivering decent sound and music considering the form factor.

I'm signed into it with my Google account so it's synced everything up as these Google devices do, which is all very nice.

I'm not going to put much on it, but Hearthstone is on there and it runs at least as well as it does on Mrs Hearthly's iPad Air, which is to say not as lovely and smooth as it does on PC, but entirely playable. The eight inch screen didn't cause me any issues versus the iPad Air's larger screen when it came to playing out complex moves in a short space of time.

Obviously VLC has gone on there and the 64GB MicroSD card has been installed, gave it a test play on a couple of films and it handles 1080p content perfectly. (VLC for Android is free and awesome, by the way.)

The only shitter is the charger I bought for it is limited to 1A (the official Nvidia charger for the device (which it think does 2A or 2.5A) is out of stock everywhere), and I'd be lying if I said it was enthusiastically pumping up the juice levels at a rapid rate of knots, but it does charge it.

Battery life I can't comment on yet, I'll give it an extended Hearthstone session at some point and see how the battery lasts.

The Android Lollipop install on there is indeed almost totally vanilla, just a couple of Nvidia apps on there, but nothing that changes the look and feel of the OS itself (unlike Samsung's abominations, for example), and on the bigger screen there's bags of room for icons and widgets, an extra column and rows compared to my Nexus 5 (I doubt I'll need more than a single screen's worth on the Shield).

I have fired up the Nvidia apps and may explore them in due course, I believe I can stream games to it from my PC or something but I have no idea why I'd want to do that. I may have a go at it just to go 'Cooooo' at the tech of it all.

So yeah, current status is very happy with it, should do the job perfectly for my trip across.

Look nice, but it doesn't do wireless charging. That's just such a step backwards.

That would be quite nice, but doesn't fit in with my budget price point, even if I bought a tablet with wireless charging (which would cost more) I'd then be down at 500mA which is even slower than plugging it into the 1A charger, unless I spent more again on higher powered wireless chargers that take power from the mains. (My current wireless chargers just take power from USB on my work and home PCs.)

On balance I am content with having to plug my Shield in to charge it. Plus a tablet isn't like a phone in that you need it to be ALWAYS ON AND AVAILABLE, it's no biggy just to plug it in and leave it for a few hours to charge up.

I've got a 10" Samsung Tablet. It's very nice (and was super-nice when it was new).

I took it out of my bag before I went to Cotta6e, to make sure it didn't get left behind or broken in a drunken stupor.

I now have no idea where it is.

Good stories man.

Irritatingly I didn't notice until quite a while after I got back, or I could have just had Android Device Manager make it scream at me.

We live in perilous times.

Does it have gps? Can you tell Google to tell you where it was last through that history thingy?

It supports the Location function through the usual settings, but as it's wi-fi only it can only do so when it's connected to a network I suppose, as there's no version of the new Shield that you can put a SIM into. It's properly stripped back to the basics, a single 16GB model, with wi-fi only and no LTE. You don't even get a cable in the box.

Oh, sure. It's in my house.

Seriously? You genuinely thought that question was aimed at you?

I was just answering the question, and had to quickly slot it in between games of Hearthstone, as such I didn't really analyse things much.

No. I didn't.

Having got back into using Android on a daily basis after having been without a phone (but with a Laptop and iPad) for like 6 months, I can confirm that for my tastes Android really is so much better than iOS for daily use.

I mainly got the iPad for games, causal web/twitter use, and youtube. It excels at these tasks, particularly for games, I think if that's all you need your device to do, Apple hardware is quite nice, and iOS has lots of superficial sheen to it that is quite pleasant.

When it actually comes to a device that you rely on, use in short bursts, or want to do any more complex tasks on, I find Android to be far better. I'd never want an iPhone, but chose an iPad over a similar Android tablet.

Android handles multitasking far better. It's smoother, quicker to switch between apps, and doesn't seem to just arbritrarilly forget what I was in the middle of doing and reset me from the start like iOS does. I can get a web page loading up on Chrome, switch to a different app, and when I come back the page has loaded. On iOS the webpage won't load in the background, it'll just give me an error and ask me to reload the page when I come back to it.

The Android keyboard is so much nicer than the iOS keyboard. Even with the minor upgrades in recent iterations of the iOS keyboard, it's still lagging so far behind Android. It's crazy that I'd prefer to type a longer message on a small Android phone than an iPad.

I guess it also helps that I use a lot of google services. Youtube is way better on Android, you get a notification entry telling you how far downloaded videos are that you are saving for offline viewing (something I do fairly often).

I feel like the option menus are so much more intuitive on Android, and it gives you scope enough to customise things to suit your needs even though it's basically fine out of the box. Still getting used to some of the stuff new in Android 6, but I like it so far.

Not saying iOS is all bad, it has far more games I want to actually play, and it is a little bit slicker in (as I said previously) mostly superficial ways, but it's more a thing I tolerate in order to get access to the broad industry support and nice hardware Apple make than it is the thing that attracts me to Apple devices. For actually getting shit done, I prefer android.

SwiftKey is available for both, should you want to stop hating the keyboards.

Can you play a tune through it, like whistling to your keys?

If it wasn't for 'find my iPhone' i would never find my iPhone.

I Mrs so great name.

Not without any charge in it you can't.

Third party keyboards are terrible on iOS.

-edit- omg you're using my terrible ms paint-altered avatar.

I much prefer the default android keyboard to swiftkey, don't really want to pay money for an imperfect solution on iOS.

Google should put their keyboard on iOS.

Huh, that's crappy. How come?

I only tried both Swiftkey and Swype at launch, but they were buggy as shit. And also in some apps it would default to the normal keyboard, so I just couldn't get used to swiping. They're added like other language keyboards are, so you can't get rid of the normal one.

They crash a lot, either stop halfway through or fail to appear when they should. They're slow to load. The main way to change keyboards is by tapping the "next keyboard" button, which all keyboards must include but doesn't have to be in any particular place; this button is easily hit by accident, which means you need to tap back through it N times to get back to the keyboard you wanted. At least one keyboard I know of couldn't use HiDPI textures for the keycaps due to memory pressure.

Fixed...?
https://twitter.com/RDR0b11/status/672127765785612288

The dialer app also now has call blocking.

Yes, Nexus phones did not have on-device call blocking until now.

— David Ruddock (@RDR0b11) December 2, 2015

Good to know, presumably this will be in a subsequent update of some kind.

Ha, the update was waiting for me when I opened Google Play and it works a treat. Nice.

Nexus 5x get!

/mumbles something about wireless charging....

Anyone got any cool Android games on the go at the moment? Obviously HEARTHSTONE has pride of place on my Shield, and I've been trying a game called SUMMONERS WAR which a mate is all over like a cheap suit on his iThing but I can't get really get into it.

The problem I have is all the F2P shit on the Play Store, which you know is going be loaded with horrible game mechanics to try and get you to part with cash.

I'd much rather pay a few quid upfront for an actual game, rather than get something ZOMG FREE and then endure repeated attempts at gouging for cash. (Plants Versus Zombies 2 got the better of me in that way in the end.)

As I have a PREMIUM POWERED tablet it can be as shiny and sparkly as it gets. (The benchmarks/reviews that pitch the Shield somewhere between an iPad Air and iPad Air 2 in terms of performance hold up in the real world in my experience. Not bad for something that costs £150.)

Get Hitman Go or Lara Croft Go. Also The Room or The Room 2 are wonderful as is Monument Valley.

Also: check the entire thread we have for Android apps and games.

I'd forgotten about that thread, cheers. You've even posted a list of 'here are all the games I've liked' sort of thing to it.

I LIKE THE CUT OF YOUR JIB.

The Pixel C has officially gone on sale on the Google store at £400 for the 32GB model and £479 for the 64GB. I'm really tempted because my Nexus 9 annoys the shit out of me and I'm definitely upgrading it to something else soon, but I don't want to repeat the mistake of just buying the thing sight unseen before the dodgy reviews come in. Hmmm...

That's less than the Nexus 6P. I can't make that compute in my head.

Oh, it doesn't come with the keyboard. That's a shame.