Be Excellent To Each Other

For shame I had to connect my phone to a wire this morning to charge it.

Following an extended afternoon/evening of beers and Chinese food in Peel yesterday, my battery was on its arse this morning and I had to go out, 55 minutes on Luddite Charge got it from 25% to 100%, which is rather impressive I suppose.

Battery life on modern phones is shit though, when I left the house at 1:30pm yesterday it was full, by 8am this morning it was down at 25% and it's not like I'd been hammering it or anything, although I did fuck around with apps for the bus ride back to Ramsey because my travelling companion had pretty much fallen asleep.

Battery life on modern phones is incredible when you consider what we're asking them to do.

Yes you did, every time you went out and upgraded to the latest super pixel density screen and corresponding gpu and cpu.

There's a lot of battery draining stuff I've explicitly stated I don't want over the years, but you get them whether you want them or not. (The obvious one that springs to mind here I've always been very consistent on is ridiculously high resolution screens, 1440p is a pointless resolution for such a small device, 1080p was over the top, and 720p was just about right IMO - to the naked eye I'm not sure my S7 (1440) looks any higher definition than my HTC One X (720) did.)

The fact is that most smartphones have non-replaceable batteries these days so you're basically on a two year timer with a phone as that's about the useful life of the battery, plus of course phones have a limited support cycle in terms of OS upgrades (whether you go Apple or Android), and I'm not sure I'd still want to be using (for example) my One X considering HTC abandoned the device whilst I still owned it for Android upgrades, let alone several years down the line. (And the battery was noticeably in a bad way when my two year contract came up.)

Also, specifically in my scenario with Manx Telecom's pricing model, there's basically no reason not to get a new handset every two years as the difference between their SIM-only tariffs and 'with handset' tariffs are negligible when you consume as much data as I do. (i.e. I need a pretty expensive tariff so I only need to spend an extra £8 per month to get a free/subsidised phone as well.)

Still, we may well be very close to 'peak tech' now in terms of extra stuff that they can make phones do or improve on them, so maybe battery life and/or battery technology will get a bit of loving from here onwards.

Honestly, if the Galaxy S8 was the S7 again in every regard but the battery lasted twice as long, I'd choose that as my next phone.

http://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00047799/

Just turn that on and leave it on.

Or if you really want to walk the walk then
http://www.samsung.com/ca/support/skp/faq/1102455

You could just keep your phone turned off, then the battery will last for ages.

Complaining that your pocket computer that's more powerful than a PS3 loses battery in under a day when you hammer it is the funniest thing I've read on here in ages. Cheers!

I specifically said I wasn't hammering it, it spent the vast majority of the time sat in my pocket so it's not even as if the amazing ALWAYS ON screen was doing its thing.

My Moto G that I have for work lasts a week on full charge. Get one of those and then don't use it apart from the occasional voice call.

You find the oddest things hilarious.

Things that didn't even happen, at that.

Like when Alyson Hannigan came round to my house earlier today and sexually propositioned me. I turned her down because I was busy making lunch.

Lunch is important.

Yeah, I'd take lunch too. I do love a good sandwich.

That's a good perspective, they do a lot that is now easily taken for granted (it doesn't seem like long ago that I had a Nokia 7110 which was all amazeballs at the time - but really didn't do that much, in hindsight)



is it really more powerful than a PS3? If so, I'm staggered. Amazing progress.

I'd happily take a little bit chunkier a phone (not lumpy like an add-on power pack though) for more battery life. The 5X feels really thin to me.

Comparing phones to consoles is a little silly when all developers target devices from a generation or two ago.

The PS4 would feel a lot less powerful if it only had high resolution PS2 games on it.

I've been very pleasantly surprised with how quickly the 5X charges. Very different from anything I've had before.

So apparently the messenger app installed with the phone doesn't want to send my texts. Any recommendations for a third party one?

Hangouts.

Stupid question, will that work if the other person has an iPhone?

Yup.

It doesn't look like everybody has it though. I've reinstalled it, I used to like it. I've gone back to my old messaging one which seems to work okay for now. Thank you though.

Hangouts can manage your SMS messages, though.

The recipient doesn't need it.

Huh, it said that I needed to invite the person I was texting.

Did you go to settings | SMS and turn it on?

Not before you'd said that.

So I got the new android version and.... apart from the look of the notification cards (I preferred it when they had a slight gap between them rather than looking like one contiguous list) there isn't really a particularly noticeable difference so far.

Oh, being able to pause a video recording is quite nice.

Double tapping the recents button to switch back to the app you were using before the current one is the most immediately useful thing in Nougat.

Also, tapping and holding the recents button for multi window is a pretty neat thing.

Gotta be honest, I didn't know about the split screen. Very cool

New member? Come to the cottage!

Because I'm super cautious and careful, not to mention lazy and skint, I have only just set up android pay on my phone. It's awesome. And paying for you Tesco meal deal with a casual flick of your phone makes all surrounding panties damp and other men cower in inferiority.

Probably. It felt like that anyway.

We pay for things with our watches now

The new Pixel phone is priced the same as an iPhone 7

I wonder if Apple can sue for infringement of business model?

I'd imagine they're too busy laughing.

What, "selling things for money?" I think there's some prior art.

Google fanboy lulz

Everyone I work with thinks I'm an Apple fanboy, so...

Those are people I imagine wearing Google underwear though.

You can be both. You have a beard.

I imagine a lot of people in their underwear.

Feeling lucky?

Actually -- kidding aside, now -- not at all. We spend literally our entire working lives identifying and fixing the broken stuff, right? So we have exactly zero fanboyish illusions about how perfect everything is.

Oh good as googlephotos appears to ve broken on my phone

They would help but they're all too busy bouncing around on space hoppers and playing table football and not wearing proper shirts and ties.

I love the colour options for the new Pixel phone

https://madeby.google.com/phone/?pageId ... 8995912175

Very Black
Quite Silver
Really Blue

You can't get the Really Blue one in the UK, which is clearly the best one

Apparently you will be able to one day, though.

Feex