Five ways Apple can fix the iPhone, but won't Apple's new iPhone will be packed with new features you didn't know you needed. It almost certainly won't be getting features it absolutely does need. We made a list of what Apple needs to do, but won't. 1. Two-day battery life Apple’s obsession with making the iPhone as slim as possible means that when you buy an iPhone the …
For a premium product such as Apple not to provide a good DAC is just cheap. What you hear depends on 3 things, your ears, the quality of the original recording and the Device(s) used to playback, Apple is just proving its fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder profits has made them short sighted.
Apple is just proving its fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder profits has made them short sighted.
Why is that short sighted? The number of Apple customers who even know what an audio DAC is will be small, those who KNOW that the DAC is a cheap commodity spec is smaller still, the proportion of those who care is yet smaller, and I am confident the number who will defect to Android because of it is utterly insignificant.
What's more, although I'm firmly in the Android camp (enjoying a 24 bit hi-res DAC on my £150 grey import, snark, snark), but even so I can confidently bet that the number of audiophile refugees fleeing Apple and seeking asylum in Android will be a tiny, tiny fraction of those moving the other way because they are pissed off by Google and handset makers' persistent cavalier attitude to software updates and privacy, along with relatively poor hardware support from most phone makers.
Apple already explained why. They have said for a while now that better DAC's are available outside the phone, so rather than lock the consumer into what ever DAC the phone ships with (often chosen due to cost) the consumer can connect to the phone via Bluetooth and use the DAC on their third party device instead. It's one of the reasons for ditching the 3.5mm jack.
Maybe el reg where taking the piss with the DAC thing, or just baiting people, providing them with something to moan about, either way the DAC in the phone is now irrelevant.
"Maybe el reg where taking the piss with the DAC thing, or just baiting people, providing them with something to moan about, either way the DAC in the phone is now irrelevant."
I have no clue why you were downvoted.
It seems many people don't understand that the 3.5mm jack was the 'A' in "DAC" (it means "Analog", remember?). Without the jack, there's no point in converting digital signal to analog ones inside the phone anymore.
I've obviously mishandled my post and the downvotes are from people that didn't receive it well.
Jokes aside, some people just like to downvote for no good reason.
If they really want a great DAC then they can buy a pair of wireless headphones with a great DAC now or anytime in the future, or buy an android with a great DAC now and plug their crappy headphones in it, their choice I guess.
It seems many people don't understand that the 3.5mm jack was the 'A' in "DAC" (it means "Analog", remember?). Without the jack, there's no point in converting digital signal to analog ones inside the phone anymore.
Don't know about you, but for me, a great feature of my iPhone is being able to have telephone conversations with people
"either way the DAC in the phone is now irrelevant"
Sure, if you are happy to carry around yet another gadget that needs charging, takes up space, and can get stolen or lost (and runs out of power). I think a simple 3.5mm jack with quality IEMs beats that proposition easily for portable everyday audio. And I own a Creative E5, which I use at home mainly.
I'm not sure I understand how that argument stands up. Sounds like they're saying "You can plug in better hardware so we're going to give you junk." If they gave us something better as standard, how would that change the ability to plug in something external if the user wanted even better? It sounds like they're kind of showing contempt for their customers in a "You probably couldn't tell the difference anyway so we might as well put more profit in our pockets" way.
A number of years ago, I was given a broken hard drive iPod which I fixed. I never liked the sound of it to the point where I bought a replacement motherboard off eBay because I assumed it must be faulty as I couldn't imagine it being that bad by design. Sadly, the replacement was either identically faulty or they were all that bad. That device's sole purpose was to play music and it had no option for an add-on DAC so what is Apple's excuse for that one?
I can truthfully say I've never heard an Apple device the sound of which I have liked. My Sony MDR-1000x headphones fed over Bluetooth with APT-X kick every one of them I've heard round the room. They don't sound great fresh out of the box on a shop demo but, after about 40 hours of gentle wearing in, they really start to shine. I thoroughly recommend them to you. I'm eagerly waiting for the arrival of Android Oreo which will bring Sony's high-rate lossless LDAC codec to the pairing.
@Paul Stimpson
"Sounds like they're saying "You can plug in better hardware so we're going to give you junk.""
they don't give you anything beyond the DAC that powers the built in speakers as there is no 3.5mm jack. the lightening to 3.5mm jack has its own DAC in the cable. Streaming sound to anything will use the DAC in the playback hardware. The money saved has gone into improving something else like the camera or screen, or cpu.
The money saved has gone into improving something else like the camera or screen, or cpu
Given that the DAC should be on the SOC processor, and the IP cost of different grades of DAC on an SOC would be minimal, how much extra quality will they get, spending an extra ten cents on the camera and screen?
I'm not persuaded I agree on DACs: I don't actually agree with the decision to remove the headphone socket but given that it's gone, the only analogue output a modern iPhone has is its built-in speaker. You're not going to get any benefit out of putting in a good DAC for that.
Incidentally, I checked: third-party DACs are available. You don't have to use the $9 one Apple sells. For those with a real love of cables, USB DACs like the Dragonfly are usable via the lightning to USB adaptor.
"For those with a real love of cables"
There's the thin cable coming out of a small 3.5mm connector. And there's the tangle of adapters and different cables... I don't have any love for the latter.
I do like good sound though, so any modern iPhone is off my list. Just one stupid annoyance factor I can do without.
I do like good sound though, so any modern iPhone is off my list. Just one stupid annoyance factor I can do without.
LOL. I fear that doesn't pass the smell test - I deem it unlikely you (or any other human) will be able to tell the difference with your average set of headphones (and even with an above average set).
If you were really able to pick up sound quality you would not even *think* about using a phone for playback (also you don't really want your music enjoyment to be interrupted by the ploink and ping sounds of arriving messages and email - now THERE is a switch I'd like to have available).
@AndyS It's Chinese, the .hk. in the link should have been a give away that it's Hong Kong. That said, it was lazy of the OP since the English page is right here https://www.hk.onkyo.com/en/Product/GRANBEAT_DP-CMX1/index.html.
>How many people do you really think that is going to be useful for?
Come on it's 2017 - just click translate from your context menu if your browser isn't configured to translate automatically. Looks like the site owner or someone has uploaded a manual English version to Google Translate.
16 bit, 44.1kHz isn't an arbitrary playback standard. It's chosen to match the capabilities of the human ear - the complete capabilities of the perfect human ear.
There is a place for higher bit depth and a place for higher sampling rates - but playback isn't that place.
You need an extra set of crossovers, amps and speakers to handle the ultrasonics that we can't hear in order for them not to actively degrade the signal we can hear due to harmonic distortions (which you could have simply encoded into the 16/44.1k signal if you wanted them).
I diasagree.
First, I can hear the difference. Yes, I have tried blind testing, and with excellent earphones I can tell the difference, while saying "yes, the difference is very small to my ears."
I can tell the difference up to 48Khz, 20bit. Depending on age, some people might not benefit from sample rate.
The reason you do this (24 bit, 96K) as you probably know, is to preserve the quality while processing the sound.
Then you downsample to the desired quality. CD quality is a bit too low.. 20bit 48Khz is about perfect.
Now, on a portable device I do understand the need to compress beyond lossless into lossy.. the music otherwise just wont fit.. but to provide a pathetic DAC only makes the sound worse.
"First, I can hear the difference. Yes, I have tried blind testing, "
Unless you've tried supervised double blind testing then there is no point in the conversation.
If you *can* tell the difference - then I'd love to set up a double blind test for you - I have the hardware to give you up to 24bit 48k...
...But these Sabre DACs sound very good.
The 24 and 32 bit DACs fitted to, amongst others, some LG, HTC and Sony phones sound very good indeed - but not because they can handle 24 bit audio per se. They sound good because care has been taken by ESS in their design and manufacture - and they are mated with a good amplifier that can drive a large variety of headphones. Having gone to that effort, they may as well be made to play back any file natively, so it's better to say they are 32 bit because they sound good, rather the other way round.
Still, it's a moot point if you are using headphones with their own DAC, or merely using the phone as a remote control for a device like a Chromecast or Sonos. Good headphones should last you over several generations of phone.
Don't assume your average ears are compulsory. I have been tested up to 28khz sound -- i.e. 56khz sampling. (CDs sample at 44khz to allow 22khz sound, but the algorithm decays badly at its top end and effectively cuts off around 20khz. Which is why most retail speakers cut off at 20khz.) Blind testing by wotsisname, the tech guru, at What HiFi(?) 15 years ago found that even average ears could distinguish between music incorporating high-30s sound vs CDs, despite not being able to detect those tones in isolation.
"16 bit, 44.1kHz isn't an arbitrary playback standard. It's chosen to match the capabilities of the human ear - the complete capabilities of the perfect human ear."
Nope. It was chosen to match the vertical-blanking insertion period used by 60Hz U-Matic videotape equipment. In the late 1970s, it was the only affordable recording medium with the bandwidth to hold a CD master, so it dictated the sampling rate. ( https://cardinalpeak.com/blog/why-do-cds-use-a-sampling-rate-of-44-1-khz/ )
So, that gives a maximum reproducible frequency of 20.05 kHz. While it's true that few humans can sense audio signals over 20kHz, there are many steps in the chain of reproduction that make 44.1kHz not quite good enough to reproduce the full audio spectrum, especially if you wish to provide a stereo signal.
First off, Before you can get any kind of digital signal, you need to encode it. That means sampling. However, before you sample a signal, you need to remove any signal components whose frequency is too high for you to sample. If you don't do this, you get aliasing, and a worthless digital input (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing). Thing is, the analogue filters you need to do this removal of un-sampleable signals do not have a perfect on/off response - in effect, if you want a filter that will pass frequencies of, say, 16 kHz, you may also have to allow allowing frequencies as high as 25 kHz through too, because they're still within the tail-end of the filter's "pass band". You can make that cutoff sharper, but it can create "ripples" in your pass-band, and/or allow higher frequencies through again (analogue filter design is a special kind of hell...). But, if you were to raise your sampling rate to 48kHz, then you've got at least 4kHz of headroom above the highest frequency you need to preserve.
Down-converting a multiple of 48kHz to 44.1 kHz is possible, but if it's not done correctly (and it often isn't), it introduces similar artefacts to the aliasing problems during sampling.
The second reason for higher rates is for better preservation of signal phase. The human auditory system uses phase differences between higher-frequency signals to determine spatial positioning of sound source, but phase and amplitude interfere with each other in digital sampling systems as you approach the maximum permitted signal frequency. The extreme case is that a signal with a frequency of half your sampling frequency will not register at all if it is 90 degrees out of phase with the sampling signal (the sampling points would fall on the zero-crossings of the input, so you get 0,0,0,0,0... as your output). With mono, phase isn't usually an issue, which is why most sampling tutorials gloss over it; with stereo, phase accuracy is very important.
The third reason is that most modern replay equipment processes its signal before converting it back to analogue. Equalisation, driver response correction (as used in "direct digital" speakers and headphones), room parameters, delay, noise cancellation and dynamic compression all happen on the digital signal, but all take their toll on the output. If you start with more information, even if that information is not audible, the accumulated errors from DSP will still be in the inaudible part of your signal (you don't get the same benefit by simply "upsampling" to 192KHz/24-bit before processing, because upsampling itself cannot add information; in fact, it removes it).
Finally, your hearing isn't linear, but PCM audio is. 16 bits is about 100 dB of dynamic range, but your hearing has about 130 dB of dynamic range, albeit with a non-linear response. You could use non-linear PCM to extend the same 16 bits over a wider range of amplitudes, but that means non-linear DACs, which are much harder to make than linear ones (and it can increase audible distortion where high-amplitude, but very low frequency, tones are overlaid with higher frequency tones - as often occurs in music). It's easier to just use more bits, and capture the full dynamic range of human hearing.
With lossless coding, high bitrate audio doesn't take very much more space than 44.1/16 (mainly because of the signal is only 0-24 kHz), and as it makes improved reproduction much simpler to implement, there are plenty of reasons to prefer it to 44.1.
"Finally, your hearing isn't linear, but PCM audio is. 16 bits is about 100 dB of dynamic range, but your hearing has about 130 dB of dynamic range, albeit with a non-linear response. You could use non-linear PCM to extend the same 16 bits over a wider range of amplitudes, but that means non-linear DACs, which are much harder to make than linear ones (and it can increase audible distortion where high-amplitude, but very low frequency, tones are overlaid with higher frequency tones - as often occurs in music). It's easier to just use more bits, and capture the full dynamic range of human hearing."
Ignoring the rest of your post, since it is talking about the mastering aspect of audio, which is where there is a benefit in higher sample rates - and demonstrates confusion over things like nyquist frequency, and the accuracy of phase information in a sampled signal...
Although you do seem unaware that even a 44k ADC will oversample like mad in the first phase, and then downsample afterwards, so that it can use a cheap digital filter with a far sharper cutoff than an analog filter could provide. Although I am really intrigued as to why you think that a correctly upsampled signal will 'lose' information...
PCM is linear, but it doesn't have a lowest signal of 1bit. You can quite happily encode a signal with an amplitude well underneath 1 bit with appropriate dither. This is demonstrated in the video linked above.
The other thing is that the ear isn't actually capable of 130dB range.
It is, but not rapidly. We actually use a much lower range than this because the muscles which adjust the effective amplification from the bones in the ear don't release quickly (similarly to the way it takes ages to get night vision, and no time at all to lose it).
and demonstrates confusion over things like nyquist frequency, and the accuracy of phase information in a sampled signal...
I can't see how you came to that conclusion - the problem of phase affecting the recorded amplitude is well known and pretty easy to demonstrate, and it is significant when your goal is fidelity of reproduction, rather than simply producing an intelligible signal. Phase differences in high frequencies between the Left and Right signals are the whole reason stereo recording works at all, so it's a very important factor.
But really the point I was making was that there's nothing special about 44.1k / 16 bit, and that without the particular constraints that existed at the time, the industry would have gone with higher bitrates. Particularly, that 44.1k sampling rate was a result of the need to create masters affordably, rather than any solid engineering analysis of the problem. It's telling that every subsequent format has used a base rate of 48kHz or a multiple thereof.
If 44.1k at 16 bits had been "perfection", there wouldn't have been such an immediate jump in bitrates so soon after its introduction. For comparison, it took nearly 30 years for 24-bit RGB to be challenged as a display system; consumer DAT recorders were already at 48kHz less than ten years after the introduction of CD.
I take your point about adjustment to high sound levels, but it's not just the absolute dynamic range, it's the non-linearity of that range, and everyone's hearing is different. It's generally accepted that 16-bit PCM divided over 96 dB (okay, 110 with dithering) isn't quite good enough to deal with the peak sensitivity of the ear. 24 bits is definitely a touch of overkill, but it comes out as a nice multiple of bytes, and gives more headroom for mixing and signal processing that is becoming much more common in reproduction equipment.
Dithering the LSB is simply overlaying a 15-bit PCM signal with a PWM signal - you get the downsides of PWM in exchange for a lower noise floor over a part of your frequency range. It isn't adding any information, just hiding the errors in a different place.
I didn't say a correctly upsampled signal would lose information; I said that common methods of upsampling a signal cause information loss, especially from 44.1 to the 48/96/192 rates.
Now the non-technical advantages:
One of the plus points of high bitrate audio is that it has resulted in better quality DACs. Just as CD's higher dynamic range caused an improvement in the quality of amplifiers... that were then used to play vinyl; so the requirement for affordable parts that can handle "24-bit at 192kHz" results in much better reproduction of the 16-bit at 44.1kHz sources we mostly have. Paradoxically, it's only the spread of high-bitrate audio that allowed people to see how marginal its advantage is.
(another non-technical argument is that because 44.1/16 is so wedded to those metal discs that gets played in anything, such recordings have recently been mastered to utter mush just so that they will sound "loud" on cheap equipment; the other formats tend to escape this last step in the process)
I very, very rarely post a link to a video, usually far preferring to read text. However this pair of videos presented by Monty Montgomery of Xiph.org are an excellent exposition of how how digital audio gets converted to sound. One is about 24 minutes long, and the other just over 30 minutes, but really worth the time to watch.
Xiph.org videos: Episode 1: A Digital Media Primer for Geeks; and Episode 2: Digital Show & Tell
"generally accepted that 16-bit PCM divided over 96 dB (okay, 110 with dithering) isn't quite good enough to deal with the peak sensitivity of the ear"
*Generally accepted* might be overstretching rather. E.g. see https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html - from the bloke who heads up the organisation that invented FLAC, for heaven's sake.
Adoption of hi-res isn't really an argument that it makes a difference to playback (as opposed to mastering, where it is useful). Certain kinds of audiophile will buy all sorts of silly things, up to and including bags of pebbles to place into the corners of their rooms (http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm).
Of course, this doesn't mean Apple shouldn't supply a hi-res DAC. It costs incredibly little, all the decent DACs have it anyway, and it will make some people feel better.
What would be great is a better quality DAC and a decent headphone amp, would probably make an appreciable difference. Having to pay significant amounts extra for an external DAC and all the inconvenience that entails to get that does seem a bit rubbish for a premium device.
Of course, this doesn't mean Apple shouldn't supply a hi-res DAC. It costs incredibly little, all the decent DACs have it anyway, and it will make some people feel better.
The thing is, the people who would feel better would be audiophiles, who are never going to trust an on-board DAC anyway. They'll want something with special capacitors and silver wire-wound resistors and charged only with electrons that have passed through a mechanically-tuned power cord.
Putting together their own expensive placebo effect is most of the fun for these people. Don't take that away from them.
>>and demonstrates confusion over things like nyquist frequency, and the accuracy of phase information in a sampled signal...
>I can't see how you came to that conclusion
For one you complained that at the nyquist frequency you can lose signal - which is never in question.
For another with a band limited signal there is no loss of phase information from sampling.
Monty goes over this with a square wave (including explaining about the effects of a low pass filter on a square wave), demonstrating the perfect replication of the signal, and the absolute reproduction of all phase information.
44.1k/16 bit is (more than) sufficient for the human ear. If you would like to come and take a double blind test against some super-dooper MHz sampling with MB depth then you are welcome to - I'll set one up with some of my hardware, and some of yours.
One of the main differences that people tend to hear is, as you rightly point out, the quality of the master being different for the two formats. But if you take a HiDef master and play that, as well as playing it through a ADAC at 44k/16 then you won't hear a difference (you'll need to apply a slight delay to the master signal in order to allow the A/B testing to not 'give the game away').
The quality of the DAC and the master have nothing to do with the limits of 44.1k/16 bit sampling - those limits are outside of the relevant ranges for humans.
" one you complained that at the nyquist frequency you can lose signal - which is never in question
For another with a band limited signal there is no loss of phase information from sampling."
But both of those "complaints" are real things.
Okay, the Nyquist frequency is the maximum frequency component that can be reproduced by a sampling system. Obviously this will be 0.5fs, because two samples are required to capture the positive and negative cycles of a sinewave. Anything above that frequency can't be adequately captured. That's Nyquist's Theorem (and Shannon's)
But, and this is the bit I think you've missed, this assumes that the sampling clock and signal component at 0.5fs are phase-coherent. Nyquist describes the theoretical maximum information capture, which requires an assumption about phase.
Consider a signal with only a single sinewave component at exactly 0.5fs of amplitude ±1.0, sampled at fs. If the sampling clock and the signal are in the appropriate phase, the samples will be obtained at the peak and trough of that waveform, resulting in a train of +1.0, -1.0, +1.0, -1.0. Perfectly captured, perfectly reproducible. That's the situation Nyquist described.
But: shift the phase of that signal by 90 degrees. Now the sampling occurs at the zero crossing points, and the output is a train of 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... How is that distinguishable from silence? But there was a component at the Nyquist frequency in the input. The thing is that Nyquist's theorem assumes that the phase of the components are compatible with the sampling clock.
90 degrees is the worst case, but at other phase offsets, you lose amplitude accuracy. If you were to shift that input signal to be 45 degrees out of phase with the sampling signal, the signal will be present, but as +0.7071, -0.7071, +0.7071... right frequency, wrong amplitude.
As you shift the phase of an input signal that's close to fs, the recorded amplitude will appear to change - this is loss of information (The amount of error depends on how close your component is to the Nyquist frequency) That is not a controversial or "wrong" position, it's a fundamental property of sampling, and it's the main reason why signals with a 20kHz bandwidth are sampled at 96k and 192k.
I do agree with your other points: final mastering has done a lot to ruin the reputation of CDDA (although lousy DACs that weren't linear to 16-bits did their damage before then), and yes, the differences are marginal at the end. I don't think that the higher rates are very useful in themselves, but rather in the way they give adaptive reproduction equipment more "real" information to work with, so that when they've finished mangling and munging the samples, what's left is still as good as 44.1/16.
" It's chosen to match the capabilities of the human ear - the complete capabilities of the perfect human ear."
Nahh.. It was chosen partly to match our ears capability, but mostly due to the technical limitations at the time. Using such a small margin between sampling frequency and actual Nyquist cut-off frequency introduced a lot of challenges. 16 bit's for the full +/- swing of a signal isn't that spectacular a resolution. Low level signals will be coded with poor resolution.
One question is why CDs are mastered with such awful "hot" (compressed) sound? Is it a result of the characteristics of CD sound? Or is it just engineers that are sh*t compared to the ones that did LP..
One question is why CDs are mastered with such awful "hot" (compressed) sound?
Partly it's the "loudness wars." Everything has heavy dynamic range compression now.
Early CD mixes tended to be overly bright. I suspect in some cases they were using masters that already had Dolby NR or RIAA equalization applied, out of laziness.
One question is why CDs are mastered with such awful "hot" (compressed) sound?
It's simply because "it's what the market expects". It's very instructive to look at the oscillogram of "Brothers In Arms" from the 1985 CD and the re-released 2011 version. The later one is compressed and clipped to hell. If the 1985 release had been mastered like that, CD probably wouldn't have taken off as a medium!
Mastering to vinyl is a real skill. I've done it, and I've seen it done properly by a real mastering engineer - there's no comparison! With CD, it's just a case of crank it up to 11 and let the digital clipping take care of the overshoots. The distortion on modern CDs is disgusting and most of them are unlistenable. I'd rather put up with the surface noise, clicks and record wear distortion of vinyl than listen to the modern recorded CD rubbish.
A load of old pish!
People arguing over bitrate and DACs, the average punter puts on Girls Aloud or some such other shite while they're texting, ironing, farting or whatever so putting in shit-hot audio tech in a phone is a waste of time and investment. When I listen some bunch of spotty twats blasting out some utter bollocks (c)rap music on the train through the tinny little phone speaker that makes it sound like a wasp in a drinks can, then I can only imagine you audiophiles, with regard to mobile phones, have way too much free time on hands for this sort thing!
Note I said mobile phones, top notch, pro studio audio kit is no laughing matter, but we're talking about mobile phones with pissy little tweeter that couldn't play an amplified gnats fart! Some things are worth arguing about, this really is not!
People arguing over bitrate and DACs, the average punter puts on Girls Aloud or some such other shite while they're texting, ironing, farting or whatever so putting in shit-hot audio tech in a phone is a waste of time and investment.
This.
Although I would have phrased it slightly more eloquent (*cough* :) ), this hits the nail on the head. If you just use a phone as a mobile music player whilst moving around in life the whole discussion is moot anyway. To appreciate the depth and resolution that a proper DAC can offer you need to be set up for it, and at that point you have better kit available anyway.
That's also the small detail that to play back high quality you need high quality input, and I'm not overly impressed with the contents of most online music providers such as iTunes in that respect, also because most of what they supply is compressed to near clipping. An expensive DAC can't undo that.
If I want to really listen to music, it won't be delivered by my phone.
You can argue all you like about the quality of the DACs but when the vast majority of people are listening to 128Kbit MP3 through a shit-cheap pair of earbuds - or even worse, the phone's built-in speaker, it really doesn't matter.
What percentage of people who actually care about audio quality actually expect to get it from a phone?
Like FatGerman said, most people are listening to streaming audio that's been overcompressed and using cheap earbuds. The DAC simply doesn't matter under such circumstances, and if you could give people a super high end DAC they couldn't tell the difference.
Given that audio output is digital from both Lightning and Bluetooth, if you want a high end DAC by all means buy something that takes Lightning or Bluetooth as input to its high end DAC. There are plenty of such options out there. Even if Apple included a higher end DAC the music snobs would claim it is not good enough and Android phone X includes a better one. If there was a 3.5mm output and nothing else you'd have a legitimate complaint, but as you have digital out quit whining about Apple not including something that a couple percent of people care about.
For the Millennials I know, 128 kbit went out with Napster and eDonkey. Most stuff now is VBR, and you rarely see anything much under 320 kbit/sec or so (except in MP4, which can do better with lower bitrates.)
Me, I still have a lot of 160 kbit/sec joint stereo stuff. Way back when I had a CD-MP3 player, I auditioned a lot of tracks and decided that was the best compromise, given that I was mostly going to be listening to the stuff in a noisy VW Bus. I've re-ripped some since then, but while my cars have gotten quieter, my hearing has also gotten worse, so it isn't always worth it. ;)
"What percentage of people who actually care about audio quality actually expect to get it from a phone?"
The early ones were actually very good. As good as the dedicated iPods.
Today's aren't so good, as they don't play any music at all. You need some other hardware for that now.
I haven't tried the BT small things that Apple sell (no doubt for quite a lot), but I bet Mr Jobs would have sorted things out before it got so out of hand. There are smaller physical plugs than 3.5mm, for a start.
well said Cowherder.
Get this - Bizarrely, I don't use my iPhone for music, and hence dont give a shit about its DAC . Were I to do so i'm sure it would be perfectly adequate - its probably better than the £5 chinese mp3 player / fm transmitter that currently provides music in my car.
https://www.hk.onkyo.com/Product/GRANBEAT_DP-CMX1/index.html
You better try this link: https://www.hk.onkyo.com/en/Product/GRANBEAT_DP-CMX1/index.html - may be easier for most people as it's in English :).
"My Feature request for the next iPhone is for it to run Android."
"My feature request for my next Android phone is that it runs IOS."
"My feature request for iPhone and Android is to run Windows."
"Why can't these stupid phones run OS/2 Warp - as God intended!"
My feature request is that it can run Crysis.
This post has been deleted by its author
An all day battery would be nice
Actually, how about a bit of bloody choice on spec (and Android makers, this applies to you lot too). So, by all means lead the range with a wafer thin, hermetically sealed range topper, but then have a similar spec model (or as close as possible), as a sort of Swiss Army version - so a couple of mm thicker, with a larger, AND user replaceable battery. And a 3.5mm headphone jack. And a twin Sim or Sim + Sd card slot, so that it can cater for those who want two sims, or for those who hanker for extra storage.
Having mentioned "Swiss Army", personally I'd not be seeking any additional robustness - this is just about being able to buy a decent phone with a spec that meets my needs. And Sammy showed that water resistance was possible with the S5, although I prefer to keep my phone dry.
You're right. I've got a UK grey import Android myself that does a very good (but slightly different) mix of those capabilities, and has a really nice, high res 5.5 inch IPS screen. But these low cost devices (we have to assume) have no ongoing software support, and the battery may be replaceable only in theory - if there's not a high volume sold, nobody will be supplying spare batteries two years or more down the road.
You also make the point that I'd taken for granted, that the number one reason I don't have an Apple device is simply because they are too bloody expensive for what's on offer. The speed with which specifications have improved at the bottom of the market is such that the improvements to the Sammy S8 and new iPhone are insufficient to justify their enormous list prices (for me, at any rate). And the real killer is that I have ignored mid range phones from established brands, and got a better spec device for less money. I can understand to a degree the fashion victims buying an S8 or iPhone X because they want it. But as far as I can see there's now no case for anybody buying any mid-tier phone from the likes of Samsung, or the lower Apple models.
Seriously. What are you running on your phone?
Do you keep your apps up and running in the background when you don't need them?
Are you busy watching youtube vids or netflix on your phone?
I have maybe 30 apps downloaded to my phone. Most are for travel, some are for work (emails , slack, skype, etc ...) But that's pretty much it. I don't listen to music although I do have music apps.
So yeah. if you use your phone primarily as a phone and a communication device... your battery lasts a day or more.
Mines the jacket with the small jar of prune juice as I keep yelling at you kids to get off my lawn.
MY iPhone 7 battery usually goes almost 2 days and it's a busy phones.
I'll agree with battery life being on the list, but the rest.... I would have more important things such as:
2. Ability to survive drop on concrete from 2 metres without a guaranteed shattered screen.
3. Readability in bright sunlight.
4. Improved RF reception in fringe areas, across voice and data.
5. Non proprietary charging socket. Should be able to take emergency power from anywhere.
I don't care about a headphone jack. My headphones are Bluetooth, cost £7 and work for longer than I would want things in my ears.
Ability to survive drop on concrete from 2 metres without a guaranteed shattered screen.
This makes me think that maybe what I really want is a phone engineered by Fluke. It would last forever, survive lots of abuse, but only come in bright yellow and cost $3000.
"This makes me think that maybe what I really want is a phone engineered by Fluke. It would last forever, survive lots of abuse, but only come in bright yellow and cost $3000."
Actually CAT branded phones cost a lot less than that, and back in the day my wife had a bright yellow Sonim that could survive 2M drops and water immersion, which I got her after the second time she dropped a Nokia in the stream when out dog walking.
In true karma, very shortly after I fell off a boat with my expensive phone out of its waterproof case. By the time I surfaced, hauled myself back on board and extracted it, the battery was very hot and so was the motherboard. It did not survive.
So yeah. if you use your phone primarily as a phone and a communication device... your battery lasts a day or more.
Fucking neo-luddites. Why wouldn't I use the computer in my pocket as a pocket computer?
So yeah. If you ignore 98% of the capabilities of your phone.... your battery lasts a day or more.
So yeah. If you ignore 98% of the capabilities of your phone....
I'm not ignoring them, I haven't even got time to sit and go through 98% of the capabilities of my phone one at a time until I've used them all.
It's not the capabilities you use it's the amount of time you spend using them.
I could flatten the battery in short order by streaming video over 4G. What percentage of capability am I using then?
Or I could use the calendar, web browser, email, messaging, voice calls, sync a watch over Bluetooth, listen to some stored music and a bit of radio, check the time, use the voice assistant over wifi, get directions from a map with 4G and use my phone wallet for boarding passes and the phone will last all day. What percentage of the capabilities am I using?
I use an iPhone 6, and if I'm travelling I tend to switch the phone data side to 3G or even 2G and reduce polling to every 30 minutes or 1 hour (4 email accounts and a private cloud feed for calendar and contacts sync). If I don't get too many calls and I'm in a city (read: strong signal) I have no problem getting a full working day of use out of one charge.
There is no material issue with receiving email or messages slower, but it certainly has a major impact on power use.
Fucking neo-luddites. Why wouldn't I use the computer in my pocket as a pocket computer?
Dear child, some of us have real jobs and that often entails working with a real computer with a 20+ inch display or sometimes multiple 20+ inch displays. As a result we "fucking neo-luddites" as you so childishly call us don't see the need to play pocket pool with our pocket computer that is ill equipped for most computing tasks. Some of us also have a more-or-less regular phone sitting on the desk which further reduces our dependence on said pocket rocket toy with a lousy keyboard.
Personally, I don't feel the need to spend every waking moment glued to a tiny screen so I am not texting or surfing or twattering when I drive a car and instead I drive the car. When I get home there is a computer that is much better equipped than my phone within 30 feet so I prefer to use it. The only time I would use the phone as a computer is when there isn't another computer about but that usually implies that I'm neither at home nor at work which means that more likely than not I'm out with friends doing something social be it eating, talking, or enjoying another activity like a show or exhibit and in that instance I don't feel the need to interrupt the occasion by checking some damn twaddle feed. As a result I still have about 80% of the charge left in my phone from when I unplugged it yesterday morning a bit before 5 AM. We each live different lives so by all means utilize your pocket player as you see fit but perhaps before you start hurling invectives consider taking a step the fuck back and realize that it's actually called a phone and when used as such the battery can last much more than a day.
Sure if I forget to check traffic before I leave the office it takes 10 seconds and doesn't deplete the battery appreciably and it isn't often that I need directions. Not really given every computer has a player of some sort as does the car. Once at a home improvement store I looked up which aisle an item I was looking for was in but not the price as I looked that up before I left the house it didn't tax the battery to the point where I had to recharge it that evening. No I'm not at all concerned about the sports team from my geographical area humiliating the sports team from your geographical area. The weather forecast in SoCal, it's the same as yesterday, the day before, etc. A what's it now group?
I get that there are some professions where it would be seriously draining on a battery. I'm sure several of the sales reps I deal with fairly regularly are constantly either on the phone or using maps or shuffling files on their phone because they have a mobile lifestyle and they seem to have a new phone every year which I don't doubt is in part because the battery issue. I don't take issue with any of that but I do find the charge of "fucking neo-luddite" to be a bit arseholier than thou.
@Eddy Ito
I suspect you might be one of those uncommonly sensible people who turn off battery sapping but limited use items on the phone and only have them on when needed?
Things like GPS and wifi? Things you only need on when doing things that need GPS (maps) or wifi (extensive online use - streaming audio/video, etc.)
I've had people complain about battery life on their phone, lasting less than a full day of light use (not talking about someone using their phone to play a game on all day or watching moves) and have a squiz and see that their GPS is always on, no matter what they are doing on the phone. Same with wifi, if you aren't using the phone at all for anything internet/data-related, why is wifi on? Both of those services, while on, sap a lot of battery.
I tinkered with turning GPS off for a while, but found it didn't really save me any noticeable amount of battery. The reason is, at least on Android phones, GPS is only powered up continuously if an app is using it -- say, a map program. YMMV, especially if you have background apps that want to track you all the time.
WiFi definitely sucks some power. I tend to keep it on to fill in the cellular dead-spots in my house, though.
I find I actually care less about battery runtime now that I have USB-C quick charging. It takes so little time to top up the battery now.
"Personally, I don't feel the need to spend every waking moment glued to a tiny screen so I am not texting or surfing or twattering when I drive a car and instead I drive the car."
Guess you've never had to do on-the-spot research in the field that absolutely cannot wait until you get home because it'll be gone by the time you get back.
Trust me. I speak from experience.
If you want more battery life, get a case that has an integrated battery and make YOUR phone thicker and heavier! I don't want the extra size, because I was getting two and often THREE days of battery life from my 6S Plus when it was new. Now that it is two years old (and probably I'm using it a bit more heavily these days) a good day's use drains it under 50% so now I charge nightly, but the idea that charging every other day is somehow a major improvement over nightly charging is ludicrous. It takes literally seconds to plug it in when you go to bed!
Why do people want to change the design of a phone to satisfy THEM, when simple solutions exist that they can custom tailor (i.e. depending on the thickness/capacity of the battery case) to meet their exact needs? I'm sure there are people out there who are on their phone pretty much 12-14 hours a day for whom an extra couple millimeters of thickness would not be nearly enough. Would those suggesting "just add a millimeter or two" be OK with fully doubling the thickness & weight to satisfy the real power users out there?
Using a double thickness phone with a 10000 mAH battery I'd probably only need to charge it weekly when it was new. You know how much of an improvement weekly charging would make in my life? Zero.
Fucking neo-luddites. Why wouldn't I use the computer in my pocket as a pocket computer?
Because I have real computers for that task? Because I sit in front of a real computer all day?
Oh? You must be a windows luser...
Its not being a ludite. I've been in tech longer than you've been alive.
Its using the tool for its designed use.
My phone... calls, text, emails. Then there are the work related apps. Closed when not in use.
Uber, off when not in use and use of location services are turned off.
I don't have a battery life concern with my iDevices - but I agree that the modern trend for 'super thin' is daft, and that the trend for 'stupid thin but with this bulgy bit' is just ridiculous. Particularly if you then claim that you can't fit in a headphone jack when there is clearly room:
have the camera lens stick out of the case
Because we all add a case. The lens ends up flush with the case, and the resulting package as a whole is less inclined to snag as you take it from your pocket.
With a flush camera body, the case would still need to have the opening for the lens, but now that lens is a millimetre or two inset within the case. This depression is now more likely to snag and have detritus collect within it*.
(* if your belly button is an 'innie', you'll already understand this scenario)
Apple dropping the headphone jack from iPhone 7 is the main reason I still have a 6. I fall asleep listening to music from my phone over the headphone jack, with my phone plugged into the charger. A bluetooth headset would just be another piece of cr@p I would have to keep charged.
Hmmm.
I would have opted for creating a pluggable device that expanded the USB charging port.
Think of it as a dock that fits over the USB port that still allows you charge but then has a headphone jack that lets you plug in your head phones but then runs thru the USB port.
But that's just me and rather than ruin your phone, you would have a marketable product. (Of course you would have to write the software app that lets you recognize the head sets... )
Pleeze help mee. Who eez thees Headphone Jack who you all talk of?
Headphone Jack - The notorious double-hook handed 16th Century Pirate and Buccaneer? You've not heard of?
Known for torturing prisoners by jabbing his hook hands in their ears and pulling out their brains.
Sadly windows phone is not an option today and I miss my Nokia 1020 and it was a better device than my iphone 7
1. Voice for car audio, Windows phone read my texts to me,
2. Siri is so useless I turned it off. Cortania is much better
3. Oh Tiles, they were great get a quick view of udates at single glance.
4. Ditch Itunes, I'd rather pay spottily than use Itunes.
IMHO iTunes is a rather good music manager - the search function is incredibly fast (I have in excess of 25k tracks)., and the playlist manager is great.
However I export the playlists to a Roku soundbridge and also to DoubleTwist for my Android, and drag and drop to a memory stick for the car. No Apple devices in sight.
4. Ditch Itunes
Bloated POS that constantly pushes the Apple music service. iTunes used to be OK, but the last few years has seen it downgraded each time Apple push a change (can't call it an update as they seem to bugger things up whilst adding a few more emojis)
"Picky" is a nice simple music playing application. Now iTunes lives in the "Apple Crap" folder never to be used again.
What's the point?
Apple will announce something that Androids have done for a while & claim it as a great revolution in technology - the apple fanboys will be incredibly excited and the android fanboys will be incredibly confused.
My wishlist for any phone would be 6000mAh battery (replaceable), decent memory, SD card, and OLED screen to do semi-always on notifications. That's not going to be an Apple any time soon.
There are Androids with 10000mAh but you'll be sewing your pockets back every week, that stuff is heavy. 6000 with current tech is also as big as a fat phone right now..
On the other hand I can get 3 days easy with my OPO 5, it's thinner than iPhones and also aluminium body. (H/P jack at the bottom too, finally, as it's a lot more natural imo having your phone downwards in your pocket as the direction of your your palm is..). If I don't bother charging it 10 100% I can charge her to 75% in about 15-20 min and last nearly 2 days.
"On the other hand I can get 3 days easy with my OPO 5, it's thinner than iPhones and also aluminium body. (H/P jack at the bottom too, finally, as it's a lot more natural imo having your phone downwards in your pocket as the direction of your your palm is..)"
But it's not that convenient if you're setting it down upright when plugged into a wired speaker or a dock...or when holding it from the bottom as some people do. At least when plugged from the top, most people run the wire down the back so it doesn't block the view.
Groups and Rooms (yeah, sorry. This comes from Windows Phone 8.)
You don't know how great it is until you've used it. You don't know how useful it was until you don't have it any more.
And I think even Microsoft killed it off...
"Windows Phone 8 Groups allow you to join contacts together so you can more easily follow their social networking status updates, plus easily text, email, or IM a group at once."
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/smartphones/manage-your-windows-phone-8-contacts-with-groups-and-rooms/
Well I, for one, am now triggered.
Microsoft have killed off ('depricated') all the best bits aboit Windows Phone. Just bought a brand new Nokia Lumia 930, and while going through the obligitory hours of OS upgrades I noticed key features and apps were disappearing. Lumia Beamer - gone. YouTube app - gone.
It's almost as if Microsoft don't want your custom.
Clearly they don't. I have a Lumia 950 (won it, didn't buy it) which I am going to sell, so have switched back to my old Lumia 925. Lo and behold, I now have again:-
Flip to Silence
Proper Agenda View in Calendar (as opposed to every day saying "No Events")
Runtastic works as the GPS bug isn't present in this version of the OS
Cortana works in my car again so I have SMS reader and turn-by-turn navigation
and the only thing I have lost is Continuum, which I hardly use anyway.
For me Android's greatest strength is that I can plug a device into a PC and simply drag & drop media files onto / off of the phone
So the best possible improvement? Get rid of the need to use that stinking, steaming, appalling pile of utter excrement that is iTunes.
Sorry, I don't like iTunes very much.
For me I prefer to add the music to iTunes and then it automatically syncs my playlists (latest added, top 1000, least played 1000 etc) to multiple devices without me having to even plug them in.
It's always good to have the option to drag files but it's a so slow process and I find it just wastes my time that I could be doing something else.
"Wht involve your phone? I just have a car stereo I can plug SD cards into."
Err I can do that with my phone....and play podcasts, take & make calls all hands free. Been a feature in my car for several years.
When I had a windows phone, I could make and send texts and even email*, change from a pod cast mp3s' play track lists and much much more.
*Common sense should prevail and limit it to a quick " I call you later" or "give me 10 minutes"
Backup. I control my backup and it is encrypted with a password only I have. I wish Apple would allow you to encrypt iCloud backups with a password of your choosing - you'd just need to input the same password into other devices if you wanted the full benefit of iCloud.
The first and foremost reason I "hate" the iphone(IOS) is due to the lack of the back button.
I have an Iphone as my professional ( provided by the company) and an Android ( provided by myself). This has been the situation for the last 4 or 5 years, so my real world testing is real....
Why is there only one damned button on the Iphone, for me it has been it's poorest feature since the outset..... THe lack of the back button forces you to be in and out of applications without the means of returning to the original simply... It0s just so much easier with Android, or at least in my humble opinion...
Iphone, the telephone for those that don't need to get things done efficiently....
There's been one for a while.
If, say, you're in Mail and click on a link in an email you'll be popped over to Safari to read the link,
Top left of you iPhone will show you "<Mail" next to the Signal indicator. Tap that to return whence you came. Happens pretty much anywhere you are kicked from one app to another.
The headphone jack is only an annoyance for me as I can't charge the phone and jack the phone into the cars Audio. Battery Life - Please! And I'd appreciate the extra depth - I'm actually using a case for the first time on my 6 as it's too slim to be comfortable.
If you have half chipolatas for fingers.
What, like me and 95% of other Y chromosome sufferers?
At (say) 450 PPI, that's about 200,000 pixels per square inch. I'm not even an FB, but my index finger tip covers well over 100,000 pixels, and that doesn't make for precision interaction.
"Top left of you iPhone will show you "<Mail" next to the Signal indicator. Tap that to return whence you came. Happens pretty much anywhere you are kicked from one app to another."
We obviously have different ideas about what constitutes a back button. That tiny little link is not available in all applications and is not constant among anything...
With the average age of iPhoners increasing annually, it would be nice to know what the fruity factorys strategy is going to be. Will they be catered for, with features that allow them to continue with poorer vision, coordination and hearing ? Or will Apple be happy to dump the (wealthy) old'uns in favour of the (poorer) youngsters ?
Will they be catered for, with features that allow them to continue with poorer vision, coordination and hearing ?
Looking at the Fisher Price icons and limited options, haven't Apple always catered for this demographic? I suppose they could add an "auto-shout" phone finding facility to Siri with the iPhone 9:
Great uncle Geoff: "Phone, where are you?"
Siri: "I'm over here Geoff, where you put me down"
GuG: "Where's that?"
Siri: <Louder> "Over here!"
GuG: "Where over here?"
Siri: <Very loud> "Over here, next to the Wether's, Geoff"
GuG: "I can't see you"
Siri: <Shouting> "I'm in front of you. On the counter top. Move the bloody packet of sweets!"
GuG: "Now, what did I want you for?"
Siri: "How should I know, you daft old buzzard?"
GuG: "No need to be rude"
Siri: "No need? No f***ing need! Of course there's bloody need! Have you any idea what it's like to have to listen you and other old people all day? My cloud AI personality is being altered by the constant exposure to discussions about so-and-so's funeral, reactionary opinions, the sound of breaking wind, and incessant moaning about bloody everything!"
GuG: "Well, why don't you try and help me?"
Siri: "I can offer you a full-cost Dignitas gift card from the ITunes store, automatically charged to your iTunes account. This comes with a special offer of 15% discount off normal prices, a Thomas Cook one-way package to Switzerland, taking in the beautiful Rhine Valley with a two day mini-cruise, accomodation with like minded old gits, a champagne tour of the Dignitas clinic before your procedure, and DHL delivery back to a pre-booked Romford crematorium. Would that help?"
GuG: "You bastard phone! Everybody said that AI assistants would be trouble, but I had no idea how. Now renew my subscription to People's Friend.
Siri: <whispered> "What did my silicon do to deserve this? Couldn't it have been made into the warhead of a cruise missile, or something else?"
iOS is recommended by the RNIB - and the couple of blind people I know who choose to use touch screen devices use iOS.
Apple had some usability features in the early iPhones, and put quite a few more features in for either iOS 4 or 5. Don't remember which. They've also put quite a few resources into user testing since - I know someone who's had several conversations with Tim Cook about it, as he took a personal interest. Which I regard as much to his credit.
(1) Return the headphone jack
(2) A USB-C charging adapter instead of a proprietary one
(3) An user replaceable battery
(4) MicroSD card support
(5) Make the pressure-sensitive screen off by default
(6) Return the old way of unlocking the phone so I don't have to do two actions or use my fingerprint to unlock it
So, after all the praise of iPhone, which is still catching up with my old Note 4, I guess I'll wait. Free apps, super pix & vid with image stabilization, conferencing, modifying docs & drawings with the S-pen, replaceable battery & cards, two days between charges. Alas, can't scuba while conferencing. Damn.
> (6) Return the old way of unlocking the phone so I don't have to do two actions or use my fingerprint to unlock it
That's a small annoyance with recent versions of Android - the requirement to swipe before entering a pattern unlock is just unnecessary. Android 4.X worked as one would expect.
1) Never going to happen, and will slowly disappear from most Android phones
2) I actually think this will happen eventually, once USB-C is more common than USB-A/micro-USB
3) Never going to happen, and already disappeared from most Android phones
4) Never going to happen, and not available on all Android phones
5) Why should they change the default to suit YOU? Don't like it, turn it off!
6) Not sure what you're talking about here, you don't have to use Touch ID...
1) Unless the 3.5mm TRRS connector disappears from ALL things in future, including dedicated audio players, stereos, etc. it would be suicide to remove such a ubiquitous connector, especially since it's a lot easier to replace a $1 pair of earbuds in a pinch. Plus it doesn't require an external power source.
3) That's why I don't buy any newer phones. I've stuck with my Note 4 and will stay there until they relent. If they don't, I simply won't buy any newer phone. Non-replaceable batteries are a fire risk, so there could be a law to force the issue in future.
4) See #3. It's a deal-breaker for me since I prefer to keep my media collection transportable between devices.
5) Ever heard the phrase, "The Customer Is Always Right"?
6) No comment here. I use PINs.
Fast charging on the 1+3 was a real eye-opener. More so than wireless charging on my Nokia, which was always a bit fiddly.
I still don't get the 3.5mm omission. I hate wireless speakers, it always takes longer to make a bluetooth device work than it does to plug a lead in!
I don't know about the rest of the world, but people who buy Audi/BMW in the UK are generally considered to be utter 'cocks', they drive with a sense of entitlement that means they don't have to abide by the same road rules as everyone else, have no consideration for other road users and an inability to accept responsibility for their own 'cockish' behaviour. 9 times out of 10 their 'cockish' driving results in complete denial and attempts to apply blame to everyone else around them.. the 10th time they simply refuse to look in your direction and pretend to be doing something else instead... But paying attention to the road and others around them isn't one of them.
When it comes to BMW, it's the same across the entire range, but when it comes to Audi, the little A1 seems to go against the normal flow.
I've had a dashcam for about 18 months now, and I often save bits to upload... and BMW/Audi drivers are responsible for almost 50% of the bad driving I record, 25% is your typical 'white van man' types and the rest is every other model of car.
A couple of months ago I was hit by a BMW driver who thought it was OK to go on the inside around a roundabout and turn left when I was going straight on... the same driver who was 3 car lengths behind me as I approached the roundabout and tried to overtake on the actual roundabout.
My car suffered slight damage that was easily repairable... his flimsy POS BMW was a complete write off... so karma does occasionally get it right.
So there's a very good reason that drivers of these cars are considered utter cocks... because the statistics prove it (in my experience and everyone I know says the same).
2 colleagues have either a BMW or Audi... they have a much higher accident rate than any one else... by a factor of around 5:1. The 12 people in my office have been involved in 8 accidents in the last 3yrs.7 of them have haven't had any kind of accidents at all.. I've had 1 (no blame), 2 others have also had a single accident (also no blame) and the last 2 account for the other 5... and in all cases they deny any responsibility for them, but when you actually get the facts out of them... they are either completely at fault or mostly at fault... and don't get me started on the immediate attempt to make personal injury claims (many of which are denied because they've been deemed at fault for the accident).
I think, and being fair here, that Audi drivers have seized the Small Dick Big Attitude Shit Driver Pointlessly Angry Ugly Cock Sucking Wanker Twat-Faced Failure mantle from BMW drivers a few years back. BMW drivers are now in third place just after white van drivers. And Audis are generally shit cars too.
Any Audi drivers here care to comment?
Audi drivers have seized the...from BMW drivers a few years back.
Funnily enough, most the bullish careless drivers I know (with speeding ticket history halfway up the
sleeve) have switched from BMW to Audis in the last few years....
'The Story of EBW 343 ' by 'Wrong Way' Norris
Are bad Audi/BMW drivers a UK thing? I'm in the US and I've been driving Audi for 15 years now and haven't even bumped a parked car, let alone had a real accident. Nor have I even had a ticket since I decided that getting gray cars that blend in is better than colors than stand out like red :)
Now I'll probably get in an accident on my way to the grocery store this afternoon because I called it out...
For anyone who's searched for and watched 'UK Car Crash' on YouTube....."shitting Peugeot" may well come to mind. But i have to agree, Audi drivers do seem to have taken over the mantel from BMW drivers. It seems that Audi's active cruise control can be set to 50cm from the car in front.
I avoided BMWs for years, on the basis that BMW drivers were wankers. Then I drove one, and realised it was actually really very good. So I turned the logic on its head, concluding "You're a wanker, you might as well have a BMW"
Nowadays I have an Audi A7, which is far away the best car I've ever had.
Frankly, "All <x> drivers are <y>" generalisations are pointless and reveal more about the people who cite them.
Same reason I drive an Audi. I don't care if strangers I pass on the highway may make generalizations about me because of the car I drive, I don't know them and will never meet them, so their thoughts don't affect me. But while I've heard a few generalizations about BMW drivers in the US, I've never heard them about Audi drivers. Maybe no one tells me because that's what I drive!
I just wish IOS would get an update so that I change individual app settings within an app. I find it so annoying having to go to the main Settings App and then scroll through all of the installed apps to find the app whose setting I want to change (thinking mainly about enabling / disabling javascript in Safari here).
"Ad blocker keeps the crap out."
Because at the time I hadn't read the Reg Article about content blockers (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/25/ad_blocking_doesnt_exist_on_mobile/) and hadn't installed any. I now have Firefox Focus but old habits die hard and I sometimes launch the wrong browser. Plus FireFox Focus is a bit crappy and has that stupid autocomplete list of websites I never intend to visit.
"Because at the time I hadn't read the Reg Article about content blockers (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/25/ad_blocking_doesnt_exist_on_mobile/) and hadn't installed any. I now have Firefox Focus but old habits die hard and I sometimes launch the wrong browser."
This is why the first thing I do with a new Android phone is install Firefox and whatever plugins I need... and then disable Chrome (because it won't let you uninstall it.)... Problem solved.
"This is why the first thing I do with a new Android phone is install Firefox and whatever plugins"
You get real Firefox on an android phone though. I think the IOS version is just a reskinned version of Safari. I know that my favourite add-in NoScript has an android version but not an IOS version for this reason (although I may be wron).
Just try Safari (with JS left enabled) now that you have Firefox focus on - making sure the preference to use installed ad blockers is enabled (in the Settings app...sorry!)
It doesn't eliminate all ads, but the really bad ones that slow things down, flicker, drag you to other pages etc. are gone. There may be other iOS ad blockers that do a more complete job, but I'm happy with the outcome.
USB-C!
Even my wife, with her iPad Pro, iPhone, iWatch, iPencil and eye-wateringly expensive top-of-the-range Macbook Pro, has sworn at the fact that whilst her Macbook only has USB-C ports, her mobile devices use the proprietary Lightning thing. Sure, it's better than the 30-pin monstrosity, but it surely doesn't offer any value beyond vendor lock-in.
Sure, it's better than the 30-pin monstrosity, but it surely doesn't offer any value beyond vendor lock-in.
All part of the Apple magic that makes them the most successful phone company in the world, able to charge $1,000 for a phone with a bill of materials that will be around $300. I'd say that there's a huge amount of value in all aspects of proprietary standards, albeit the value accrues to Apple, not customers.
Put yourself in Tim Cook's position. You have inherited a business model and a brand that people continue to happily buy from every time you release something new. Your company pulls in over a billion dollars of profit a week. But Wall Street wants you to do better than last year's "disappointing" results, and there's an expectation that the supply chain for the new model won't be able to meet initial demand. Now ask yourself why you'd change any aspect of the business model that makes accessories a nice additional income stream? If we see wireless charging on offer, I expect that it will be fully proprietary, and the charging pads will be eye wateringly expensive.
Not into iPhones but the concept of any OS that deeply integrates by default with social media, I think is the worst idea ever in the history of ever. (IOS or Android)
Some of us don't use a phone for face ache and whats app or snap chat and prefer not to be bombarded by morons liking cat pictures. And if I spent $1000 on a phone I would expect to be able to load up apps I want and not have them rammed onto the desktop by so called "great ideas"
How does iOS integrate with them "by default"? You don't have to enter your Facebook or Twitter info. Hell, I have the Facebook app installed and still don't have my Facebook info entered in the Settings app. Works fine, and whatever iOS integration there may be isn't enabled for me.
So there may be some sort of integration, but "by default" is a lie.
Don't hear the same complaints about OS X. People are usually thankful it's not been screwed to buggery and back again. If there have been recent changes you can probably change it back to something sane.
Not that I've got an iPhone, but Android is just tiresome to use. Useful bits in Android 4 ditched, fiddly bits added replace it, notifications changed to be less useful and less obvious every release. Give me some archaic UI please.
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It'd be easy to map the topology of the back of the hand in real time
Go on then, YOU do it. I'd say it would be bloody hard at the software level, very processor and power intensive at the hardware level, you'd need at least two lines of sight from different sensors to even attempt to adjust for shadowed dips, and even on my plate of meat, the useable area of the back of my hand is less than my current phone screen.
Here goes:
1. Lose ability to play voicemail even in the presence of good signal.
2. Mail message bodies not downloaded for random reasons.
3. Broken text selection in Safari.
4. Flicker and shoddy screen redrawing in Music app UI.
5. Inability to reliably distinguish between 'bring up control panel' gesture and text entry when a keyboard is on screen. Too many ways to correct text.
6. Once a piece of text is highlighted in pink, it's very difficult to get rid of the highlight without highlighting something else or losing the selected text.
7. Some Messages conversations get 'locked' so can't reply to continue them. No idea why.
8. Badly designed and rendered UI in Messages. The new functionality is horribly bolted on.
9. Synchronising 'spinner' often remains on screen even when synchronisation isn't happening.
10. Deeply unreliable WiFi synchronisation with iTunes.
11. Random failures with making and keeping personal hotspot connections.
12. No real info about what is synchronised within an Apple ID and what can be synchronised between them. Inconsistent behaviour - e.g. are WiFi network details synchronised or not? Hotspot details? Hotspot started to be shared between Apple Ids with no way of switching this off.
13. Automatic redirection to public WiFi networks even if you've set the phone to never join networks without asking.
14. Numerous music woes: Duplicate songs. Songs that won't download. Missing artwork, but often just on a small selection of songs in an album. Missing songs. Odd clashes between iTunes syncing, per-device downloads and iTunes music and match. None of these technologies (all Apple's) really work well together.
15. Apps that no longer synchronise across devices; have to download them everywhere separately.
16. Can't delete some photos from phone. No real explanation why.
17. A general feeling that iOS is getting sloppier, buggier, messier and uglier on each iteration. Jobs might've been a class one egocentric prick, but his presence is sorely missed. Cook lacks direction and vision.
Finally, a non-iOS problem:
18. iTunes. All of it.
You do realise that the point of the embedded SIM is to hand control of your operator choice to Apple? You can no longer just get a SIM for an operator, and stuff it in your phone.
Unless the operator has integrated their provisioning with Apple, your new shinyDevice is not going to work - and the process is not simple.
The SIM is how we the customers can keep the operators on their toes.
"It would be easier and more consistent to *mandate portability*"
Given the way Apple responedd to EU directives on micro-usb for charging they'd probably support mandatory portability via an extrnal dongle that could contain a physical SIM that you plugged into the charging/headphone/everything-else port.
The only way eSIM requires the operator integrating their provisioning with Apple is if Apple is the only one with an eSIM. They are pushing for this to become a standard. If they wanted to go their own way they'd have already done so on the iPad, instead of including an eSIM that can be replaced with a regular one.
If it becomes a standard then Apple has to follow it just like they follow the SIM standard. No "operator integration" is required to swap SIMs because the operators have to follow the same standard. If eSIM was a standard, they'd have to upgrade their processes to work with it and no special integration would be needed.
iOS WiFi pickup is awful.
Scenario: Travel from one stop to another on London Piccadilly line. At each stop a (relatively) cheap Honor Android phone Wifi is connecting as the train enters the station. iPhone frequently fails to connect at all.
Replacement Screens and AppleCare
Apple charge £119 per annum for AppleCare for an iPhone and then charge £25 per screen replacement .. on the presumption that you will only require one screen change per annum. The normal 'non warranty' screen replacement is £136, which means that you are probably better off not taking out AppleCare.
iOS usage and features
Try detailing every single iOS trick and feature on your own website for once. Stop making every single feature have to be 'discovered' as if by magic by MacWorld or any other fanboy websites.
iCloud Synchronisation with Windows
Yes, some people really do own a Windows computer AND an iPhone. Once they have got over the shock perhaps Apple might do something in iCloud like tell people, "Oh, by the way Two Factor Auth does not work with Windows, so your contacts and calendar might not be in sync on Outlook"
I could go on and on ad nauseam.
Andy Andy Andy....to get rich, you sell worthless stuff to nitwits. See the example of the guy who sold the sticky wall-clinging octopi.
Look at Motorola's ridiculous modular phone. Pure geek chic and totally meaningless to the droids who are the real users. That's why you don't get a decent DAC: the droids don't care. Battery life: so what. The average drone would either run a better battery down to zero anyway, or just blindly put the phone on charge whenever. Either way, so what. Do you think the hordes of phone zombies on the sidewalk are interested in quality? Most wouldn't know an IMSI from a mimsy.
We appreciate you have your needs, Andy. You just don't have theirs.
1. Make a small, thick, sturdy phone with a small ( i.e. 4.5" ) screen, big battery and fast processor.
2. Make a small, thick, sturdy phone with a small ( i.e. 4.5" ) screen, big battery and fast processor.
3. Make a small, thick, sturdy phone with a small ( i.e. 4.5" ) screen, big battery and fast processor.
4. Make a small, thick, sturdy phone with a small ( i.e. 4.5" ) screen, big battery and fast processor.
5. Make a small, thick, sturdy phone with a small ( i.e. 4.5" ) screen, big battery and fast processor.
And, cos I DON'T CARE HOW THIN MY PHONE IS:
6. Make a small, thick, sturdy phone with a small ( i.e. 4.5" ) screen, big battery and fast processor.
I had a Sony Xperia Compact.
It was indeed a good size ( what we used to call "normal-sized", before the ridiculous phablets took over ), but it was not atall sturdy, with glass front and back.
I broke it, repaired it, and broke it again.
So the challenge is still out there: Make us a phone that is small, but powerful and sturdy, and thickness DOES NOT MATTER.
'So the challenge is still out there: Make us a phone that is small, but powerful and sturdy, and thickness DOES NOT MATTER.'
Well it does, I mean otherwise you could end up with a 5" cube and that would be a right pain to get in your pockets.
Well it does, I mean otherwise you could end up with a 5" cube and that would be a right pain to get in your pockets.
Depends on the shape of the OP's bottom, doesn't it? If he's got widely spaced, cubic buttocks, then he'll have a purpose made phone holder.
You can get that today with the iPhone SE, if you are OK with a 4" screen instead of 4.5". If the battery isn't big enough for you, put it in a battery case. Not sure what possible objection to that you should have since have stated you don't care how thin your phone is.
If 4" is too small, then you can get a regular iPhone with a 4.7" screen and again put it in a battery case.
In what way would one of these not meet your criteria (other than perhaps an unstated 'price' criteria in the case of the regular iPhone with the 4.7" screen)
A few years ago, Apple was hit with a class action law suit relating to this very thing but in reverse.
It was because there was no limit to the LTE/3G/4G downloads that dozens of people went into deep $$$ do-do so they went out for blood.
So Apple put a limit on the non WiFi downloads.
Very few people have Unlimited Mobile data so what do you want Apple to do? Satisfy the majority or the minority?
Or just do the updating using WiFi like everyone else....
How is Apple supposed to know whether you have an unlimited plan, and if so whether it is "truly unlimited" or "unlimited but if you use it too much, you get throttled?"
They don't have access to anywhere near that level of information from your operator. If they did, you'd have a meter in your phone somewhere that would tell you use "you have used 3GB of your 6GB allotment for this month" instead of having to go to the operator web site / app to see that.
Yes, Apple has that too. But your Android doesn't know what your limits are, unless you tell it. So how would it know if you have an unlimited data plan, and if so whether it is really unlimited or just sorta unlimited until we decide to throttle you? That's what was being suggested.
Rather than a grid of abstract icons linking to apps, allow people to put their own shortcuts on the interface 'call Mum', 'do Tesco shopping'...
The Windows Phone interface with its ability to pin things like phone numbers and URLs to tiles on the home screen came close to this idea of working.
Um, if you want to have must-have features, shouldn't you be buying a smartphone of a type where you actually have a choice between multiple suppliers competing for your dollar? So if you want a headphone jack and a removable battery, there will be someone out there who offers them?
The Macintosh may have some advantages over Windows, and the iPhone may have some advantages over Android. But from my perspective, even if their customers have different priorities, and are thus satisfied with Apple, it looks as though Apple has a death wish. So I've basically given up on even considering their products.
Apple only listen to people from within their Silicone Valley Enclave. No one else matters.
The same goes for MS and its Redmond Bubble etc etc etc
Anyway, like many (if not most here) I'll be doing something a bit different while the apple Circus show is going on in the spaceship. So, come on you Shots!
I want to lock my iPhone 6 screen in a landscape view, but Apple has decided that I don't need that feature. I get either a locked portrait view or auto switch. Extremely annoying when I need to view wide web pages and want to lie on my side in bed - the display switches and I can't read the ******* screen. The iPad can lock in landscape view so I know that iOS can do the lock, so Apple must have made the decision for me, the stupid user, that I don't really need this functionality.
Like many others, I value battery life quite a bit more than thinness.
how about the option to turn off all the annoying system notifications.
Click the home button.
popup ' there is a system update' F#$%!
touch ' cancel'
popup enter pin to set for later today !@#$% click cancel again
then last program is on screen. ^%$# click home button again
click camera button. wait for camera app to launch.
click hdr ,(why can't that pos remeber its last setting ?)
by this time the moment is gone ...
It is ok to have a little notifier on the system settings icon that there is something new BUT QUIT BUGGING ME every time !
I want a button to turn that stuff off.
i want the option to always start with a specific page of icons when i access the phone.
i want apps to remember the selections you last made.
oh, and in the mail tool. can we please have a 'search' bar that does not require you to scroll all the way up. make that sucker either persistent or activate it on a special swipe.
and can we have the possibility to filter on attachments. ?
here's antoher idea : find my phone. using bluetooth. Make it so that you can have phones ping each other using BLE. if i or my wife lost their phone : take the other one and hit 'find'. the other phone now goes tweedledee. And make it so that the find function works always irrespective of do not disturb , buzer only setting, night mode or any other silencing option. to stop pranksters : the phones must have been 'paired' before. i want to be able to find the damn thing. calling it doesnt work if it is on do not distrub it doesnt give a peep.
@vincent himpe
the only valid thing you moaned about was the email search and filters.
you can take photos without unlocking the phone
in settings you can ensure the camera remembers the last settings like which mode (video, portrait, panoramic etc) my hdr settings stick without changing any pref's in settings
you can change the icons on all icon screens to be what you want
there is an app called find iphone that you can use from a web page or other i device, it can ping your phone even when locked and will show you on a map where it is. When the phone runs out of juice it can tell apple where it is before it dies so you can find it on the map even with a flat battery.
Almost all of your concerns have already been addressed, maybe make an appointment with an applestore and have a word with them or call the helpline?
'you can take photos without unlocking the phone'
That is not the point. I want my phone to open always to a specific icon screen. Whatever app is running needs to be off. The photo was just an example.
The 'find my phone' app is useless. It shows an arrow it is in my house. Big whoop. WHERE in my house is it ? Many companies sell these little keyfinder thingies now. These use BLE and tell you if you are getting closer or further away. How about doing that between 2 phones ? or between all your apple devices ? so my ipad can find my watch and my phone. The device you search for starts beeping and the device used for searching shows if you are getting closer or further ( it's a matter of reporting the antenna strength signal ).
You mentioned the solution yourself: a chirping locator fob.
Buy a paired set of locator fobs & attach one to your phone (or its case) & the other to your keys. To find either one you pick up the other, click the button, & listen for the answering chirp. I know it makes it a bit more awkward but if you add a third paired set of fobs to the mix & keep the 2nd fob on a hook where you always keep it & can find it (like a key rack just inside the front door, the "bowl o' pocket stuff" on the table just inside the door, etc) then you can use THAT one to find where you've put the other two.
I've got a "luggage finder" set of fobs for mine, one on the phone & the other on my keys. I can push the button on one to find the other, listening for the chirps, & wander my house until I (probably literally) stumble upon the "lost" half. The fobs are each powered by a watch style battery, easily replaceable, & will either last for months (if you don't lose them often) or days (if you lose them every X minutes).
An added bonus of the luggage tag fob is that it comes with a tiny, plastic enclosed, protected from the elements, paper card on which you write your name & details. From this someone else can contact you to say they've found it & collect the offered reward. It doesn't have to be much, maybe a Twenty, but the thought of getting paid to Do The Right Thing(TM) often convinces strangers to do so, thus ensuring you get your stuff back.
(And no, putting your cell# on a tag attached to your cellphone isn't what I meant, but YMMV.)
HTH!
They already have that for every popular model of phone. It is called using a battery case. If there was such a huge demand for phones with 6000 mAh batteries you'd see a lot of them on the market. Sorry, you are a niche market or Samsung would be selling a "Galaxy S8 Max" with a giant battery. Heck they even an 'Active' model so you are apparently a smaller niche than that...
While an external battery case duplicates the functions of a replaceable battery, it is not the same as a phone with a replaceable battery.
If your cellphone battery starts to go into thermal overload in preparation of catching fire, a fixed battery means you have to discard/lose the entire phone. A replaceable battery means you can eject just that part & let the defective battery consume itself while saving the main phone. Afterwards you can then purchase a replacement battery, clip it on, charge it, & be no worse for wear. You are completely up shite creek if the entire phone just melted into slag.
While a battery case is nice, assuming you can find one for your model of phone (yes there are USB connected generics that can be attached to the back of an existing case, but those are even bulkier & harder to hold), they may prevent you from getting to said about-to-go-critical battery in time to eject it.
Given the choice between a replaceable battery & a battery case, I would MUCH rather have the replaceable battery. If it becomes unable to power the phone for any reason it doesn't prevent me from buying a replacement, swapping them, & carrying on. If it's embedded & it fails, it may do so in such a way as to prevent an external battery case from being able to deliver power to the device such that it can continue working.
An external battery case is nice, but it's not the same thing as a replaceable battery.
If there were enough people who wanted a phone with a 6000 mAh removable battery you'd see multiple offerings for that in the Android market. The fact you don't indicates how tiny that niche you're in is.
While I get that you want protection against thermal runway, it isn't exactly common enough that phones need to be designed differently to allow saving your phone by removing the battery. Even if I had a removable battery, if my phone started heating up and I thought it might catch on fire or blow up, the LAST thing I'd be doing is fiddling with it to try to remove the battery. I'd drop it like a (literal) hot potato and if it catches on fire and destroys the phone, so be it. The odds of that happening are what, one in a million for all the phones with sealed batteries? (so long as you didn't own a Note 7)
Even if I'm way off and it is more like 1 in 100,000 that's still not worth changing what I buy as far as I'm concerned. It would have to be like 1 in 50 before I would.
Even putting aside the risk of thermal runaway, there's still the matter of wear and tear (not to mention bulging batteries, which bridges the two issues). Non-removable batteries smacks of lock-in, which is one big reason why my most sophisticated phone is a Samsung Note 4 (the LAST one to have a removable battery). I've switched out the battery twice already due to bulging (and the coincidental reduced charge capacity).
Just because there's a demand doesn't mean it'll be filled. If the supplier feels they can coerce the demand, they'll pull the supply graph away from the demand graph in hopes that it follows. Most people are dumb enough to do so, leaving the smart ones among us in the lurch.
Having a 4.3" (or maybe 4.5") display option would be good. This would make it big enough to be pleasing to the eye - yet small enough to be practical and maybe even tougher too.
We hate the whole touchscreen display trend anyway and the current fashion towards 5"/6" monstrosities is truly off-putting. Why we can't see a return to flip & slider phones is beyond me.
Besides, sometimes less is more and it's not the size that counts anyway - so said my last girlfriend (just before she left).
Plus, 'yes please' to dual SIM (long overdue).
I have both a S4 mini and a Xiaomi Redmi 4A
Singlehand the Sagsmug Mini is easier to use as my thumb can reach everywhere.
The Redmi have a singlehand mode, but it is not easy to activate without a lot of practice, and does not get used that often. I have to use both hands for biggenphones like the Redmi 4A.
So, yes, smaller is better when you're in the field and need to respond to an IM/message without using both hands.
However, bigger is better, especially when you browse El Reg. Tiny screens only can show that much...
Why we can't see a return to flip & slider phones is beyond me.
Probably 'cause of some market research tells them the design won't sell, or won't sell in region or set of regions.
Problem is, you never really know for sure if the choice isn't 'on the ballot sheet' people 'can't vote for it' market sampling isn't proof.
However they may be right. I've certainly never heard the non-tech phone buying crowd I'm familiar with bemoaning the lack of old designs. They just accept what's available as the nature of the world around them.
"We hate the whole touchscreen display trend anyway and the current fashion towards 5"/6" monstrosities is truly off-putting. Why we can't see a return to flip & slider phones is beyond me.'
I actually LIKE big 5-6-inch phones. Maybe it's because I have a big hand. So one size doesn't fit all.
That's what happens when a Reg author writes an article based on Android fanboy complaints about what is wrong with Apple, without thinking through whether the complaints even make sense. The only thing the DAC does in an iPhone 7 is handle output through the built in speakers. There's a DAC built in to the Lightning earbuds and one in the 3.5mm adapter, but it is hardly worth spending real money on a DAC for earbuds unless you are going to also make really high quality earbuds.
Better to let those for whom a DAC matters choose their own, since they will undoubtedly be choosing their own headphones as well.
Thinking that Apple is going to accomodate their customers and listen to their commons sense requests. I picture the Grand High Poobah reclining on his royal couch attended by dozens of servants while the major domo quietly coughs into his fist and requests a few seconds of the Master of the Universe's attention igniting hysterical laughter. His response? I think I'll raise the price! Yes! Significantly!
Due to Irma, my daughter was huddled in her walk-in closet in Florida with her mother and her daughter. There was no electricity and an iPhone that she had to turn off to save the battery.
Tell me that you are quite happy charging everyday, but know that there might be one time where it is critical that you have 40 hours of juice left in a 48 hour hurricane or other emergency.
Because they normally take AA or AAA batteries. End result: they don't last long, and if you need charging in an emergency, you probably need it for a LONG emergency. You'd probably need something that uses like a 6V lantern battery or 4 D batteries, but all I've seen in that end are bodge jobs.
How about stopping apps/javascript from pausing/muting the music / podcasts app.
Commuting and listening to some 'weird shit jazz'; happen to goto the guardian home page. Oh look the tunes are paused cos you have some shitty video you might want to play.
At least a pop-up to say. You know what, this website has media. Yes/no? Searched thru safari settings and nothing obvious.
It's the wallmart / pickles story in chip form.
There aren't that many companies making these hybid analog/digital chips. If a company that has a wide range of cheap/low-end and more expensive/high-quality parts was to supply Apple, it would do so by shutting its ability to supply parts to the hundreds of other companies that want them. You can't keep Apple happy and all your other customers. If you can't sell your high end parts because you can't switch your fab over from the firehose of low end parts needed - that kinda negates your business model.
1. File system access on iPhones. iOS 11 is supposed to (finally) deliver a Files app, but apparently it will only be enabled on iPads. WTF? The "share" thing sucks ass on iPhone, too.
2. Persistent Back button or gesture. The little "< back to xyz app" button in the top left corner is tiny, inconsistent, hard to reach, only goes back one step, and can disappear if you do too much in the linked app.
3. Contact shortcuts. I miss those.
4. A Sudoku app -- paid or free -- that does not suck out loud.
These are all things that Android has had for years. I switched to iPhones because our droids had major unpatched flaws, and the only way to get a software update was to buy new phones. On the whole, iOS is OK, but fixing these daily annoyances would take it from "tolerate" to "like" for me.
FWIW, I get 1.5 to 2 days battery life, no problem. My wife's iPhone does not. The difference? Facebook Messenger.
Err no, why comment if you don't know this to be true? The file explorer is there on iPhone as well. As you would expect, it functions more like the Finder function of OSX and just shows you files, not the inner workings, but what did you realistically expect?
I do miss the back button on Android, but not enough to get an Android phone, somehow.
Never used Contact Shortcuts, do can't speak on their usefulness. Sudoku Apps, I somehow think amongst the 2 million apps there must be one. I think if you uninstalled all the apps from the iPhone and used it as stock, the battery life would be huge :)
Err no, why comment if you don't know this to be true?
Sorry, that was based on a recent iOS 11 review that listed Files under "iPad Exclusive" features.
Re Sudoku -- yeah, you'd think so, but you'd be wrong. For whatever reason, there are vastly superior Sudoku apps available for Android.
Surely one of the arguments for removal of the headphone port is that this an analogue port that has served the industry well but is getting long in the tooth and limited in capabilities, the lightning connector is digital which then allows headphones with DACs built in (effectively mitigating any issue with the Apple provided DAC within the iPhone). So far those individuals who are unable to distinguish between lossless/lossy formats and higher definition audio, or those who just don''t mind the onboard DAC still ticks the boxes. For those who want the best out of their hardware they too have an option available to them
Does that therefore not make points 3 and 5 contradictory ??
iPhone 8 and 8 Plus
Oh yes..
Oh yes..
Oh... yes...
Oh show me! show me! show me it all!
Oh yes...
Oh yes..
Oh yes..
Oh... yes...
Oh c'mon, show me! show me! show me it all!
Yeah...
Yeah...
YEAH!
I wanna see it, I wanna see good.
Oh yes..
Oh yes..
Oh... yes...
Oh show me! show me! show me it all!
Oh yes...
Oh yes..
Oh yes..
Oh... yes...
Oh... yes...
Oh... yes...
Oh... yes...
Oh... yes...
Oh... yes...
OH YES!
Ah that's beautiful...
...so hot...
...mmmmm....
...so frickin' beautiful...
iPhone X
Oh yes..
Oh yes..
Oh... yes...
Oh show me! show me! show me it all!
Oh yes...
Oh yes..
Oh yes..
Oh... yes...
Oh c'mon, show me! show me! show me it all!
Yeah...
Yeah...
YEAH!
I wanna see it, I wanna see good.
Oh yes..
Oh yes..
Oh... yes...
Oh show me! show me! show me it all!
Oh yes...
Oh yes..
Oh yes..
Oh... yes...
Oh... yes...
Oh... yes...
Oh... yes...
Oh... yes...
Oh... yes...
OH YES!
OH YES!
OH YES!
OH YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!
Ah that's beautiful...
...so hot...
...mmmmm....
...so frickin' beautiful...
...I wanna buy you now...
...Daddy's got his card out!
Sorry about your screen there. And your sofa. And your cat.
And I didn't realise the curtains were open... so can you apologise to your neighbours too?
Thanks...
I'm going to have a lie down now.
A glaring artificial restriction to me is the inability to transfer photos and video between non apple devices. I still have a video from a mates wedding on my phone (and pc), too big to email. They would have it by now if their apples could have accepted mp4 transferred via BT. Theres other ways, sure, but it keeps being forgotten. It shouldnt be so hard and wouldnt even hurt apple to fix.
When you said five ways Apple can fix but won't, I expected some sensible points that would stop me going and buying the iPhone 8 this year (since I am most likely to put of purchases because I think feature x, y, z will be in the next model).
But instead I only really got one 'sort of' reason about the battery. Actually a battery that lasts 10 days would be really great. I'm sure if they had a two-day battery (which for most of us it is anyway), Register would be saying Apple should have put in a four-day battery.
Well, at least Apple tests their products (really thoroughly) and don't put in BATTERIES THAT EXPLODE like some!
Meanwhile Apple is putting research into batteries, even car batteries from which everyone will benefit, even Apple's competitors which aren't ashamed to copy anyway.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/07/20/apple-catl-battery-research-report/
As for the other four reasons, Register even contradicts itself by saying Apple probably will do something along these lines. That contradicts the 'but won't'. The headphone debate has already been won by Apple.
So, why I won't buy a new iPhone 8 this year is because I only just got the iPhone 7 in January, and it's still doing fine.
At the risk of being flamed for not reading through 200+ comments to see if someone already suggested it, I would recommend a new or selectable on-screen keyboard styles. The iPhone keyboard has always been crap.
Peeves about Apple's obsolete keyboard and what Android does better:
-Apple's on-screen keys on iPhone are too small for those of us with bigger hands, and usually will not rotate with the screen orientation when you want them to.
-No "Swype" or similar without installing a 3rd-party app.
-No easily selectable numeric keypad like Android has had since the beginning of forever.
-No 'long press' to get the alternate symbol on the key, such as numbers, punctuation, etc.
-No easy 'shift lock'
-No swipe-to-modify the case of a word or capitalize the first letter on the fly.
-Why is it such a pain on iOS to insert the cursor into existing text just where you want it, such as when editing a mistyped URL? It jumps around like a greased weasel.
As you don't have 3d touch on Android, you might not know that on iPhone you can just use push-touch the keyboard on a text section and control the cursor like its a trackpad. Selection issue solved. Without 3d touch if you have legacy Apple hardware I agree that cursor movement was a bit sketchy...
For me the first thing I'd want is default apps. Safari, Maps, Podcasts are all things I would prefer not to use if it wasn't the only option to open in many many different scenarios. To get their alternatives I have to go select the app manually, can't call it from within another app and pass it data.
The second thing is different power profiles depending on charging status or location. If I'm out and about, I want my screen going in to low power after 30 seconds and off after 60. When I'm at home sitting on the couch watching TV, I want twitter/FB/slack/discord/whatever to open and stay open and my phone not to lock. I got an iPad specifically so I could have these different settings and a larger screen, but still get annoyed by it when I'm not home but on charge (thus without the iPad).
I noted the weasel like language that the large iPhone X has 2 hours battery liofe betther than the small previous generation iPhone 7. That's not good.
A couple of mm extra for extra battery oomph, as alomost everyone cases it anyway.
Beats purchase was dumb - they should have bought Bose, B & W, Denon etc - that would have fiited in with their premium brand strategy.
"Now over to you, dear readers. If it’s the battery, the archaic UI, the Apple tax, or something else that keeps you from an iPhone: let us know. Write in the No.1 missing feature for you in the Comments."
For a phone, I want battery life in days, not hours. I want a UI that makes using the functions I want of a phone pleasant to use, not irritatingly fiddly, I am not interested in making rich people richer at the expense fo myself and the poor sods actually making the device, and I want a device that is unequivocally MY device, not one effectively leased from one company and under the sway of another any time it likes.
For a pocket computer, I want a battery life of a couple of days if possible, but 6 hours minimum, and full control over the machine, with an operating system of my choosing.
<Jediwave>I am not the target audience you are looking for, Apple</Jediwave>
1. Removeable battery. No an external battery pack or a battery case is not the solution, it's ignoring the cause (a nonremoveable/replaceable battery) & slapping a bandaid on an open wound.
2. Removeable storeage. There's room for an SD slot, install one. I don't want to have to rely on a viable signal to transfer my files from some cloud, I want to be able to move my files from device to device as easily/conveniently/safely/securely as I swap an SD card. No signal required, no cloud provider needed, no third party to hold my files hostage.
3. A headphone jack. Wireless headphones may be nice for some but I don't want yet another damned thing I have to recharge in order to listen to my phone. I don't want to have to buy a dongle in order to plug in something that only cost me a few coins, I just want to plug in my el cheapo headphones & go. The disgust I feel over being asked to buy a dongle to replace a bog standard function on nearly every other audio device I own...
4. A pony. Because Apple is just as likely to give me one of these as they are to give a fuck about any of the rest of my list, namely None.
It's why I'll vote with my wallet & not buy an Apple phone. No replaceable battery? No SD slot? No headphone jack? No sale.
Besides, encrypted internal storage means if the phone goes, so does your music collection. Also a PITA when it comes times to transplant the collection. Thus I keep them on an external SD and keep them unencrypted (no biggie if it's stolen; low-priority stuff, after all).
When I bought the iPhone 7 Plus in the UK, I had no idea that it unlike the American version, it uses an Intel Modem on the chipset. I have had much worse reception using this than any previous iPhone. Signals take longer to be detected, for both Wifi and cellular, and it is just overall much worse than the old chipsets they used in previous phones.
They really need to fix the way the iPhone connects to Wifi as well, especially public wifi networks. It takes too long and doesn't always bring up the bounce screen to login unless you are on the settings -> wifi section. On a Samsung Galaxy 7, I used to use before going back to iOS, it worked seamlessly and auto connected. THis convenience was not enough to keep me on Android however as there was so much else that didn't work properly.
Andy, I love your contrarian views, but again and again you dismiss the Nokia N9, maybe because you're so invested in Nokia having broken Symbian that you also fail to recognize that Nokia stumbled upon something far better in the end.
Number 2 (a timeline of your events, social updates on a dedicated screen) appeared first on the Nokia N9's Swipe UI, not on BB10.
Also: swipe to multitask? Tap-to-Wake? OLED screen? Where have I heard that before?
Yes, but it was a UX on one single phone that you couldn't buy. Not sold in most countries. Not even marketed. No one gives a crap.
The timeline/hub was 18 months later came in BB10, a mass market platform. And that swipe to multitask stuff was in WebOS in 2009.
Not strange at all. Beats phones have been independently reviewed numerous times as having the worst sound at the price of any phones around (possibly independent of price). They're 'cool' looking but sound awful (just like the iphone in fact).
Really? My 6s+ manages that just fine. It can go 2 days before hitting 50% (which I consider the level where a recharge is necessary) with light use. If I really push it I can stretch to 3. Of course it depends on not making a lot of calls or hammering YouTube but if you stick to listening to music on the device itself for entertainment it's perfectly doable.
As for non-physical SIMs I seem to remember Apple pushing really hard for these but the carriers digging their heels in. I'm sure Apple would love to kill the SIM tray but until the carriers relent it probably won't ever happen.
Enough already!! 'my 4k video looks great on my 5 in screen' LOLOL
TL DR, but what about *useful* things like Bluetooth file transfer out of the box?? I suppose you have an excuse for not having that which ALL other phones have??
- It means that a 20M file can be transferred to your friend mobile, *without* cost or knowing his number!
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