Pixel 3, 3XL, Slate tab launch: Google emits swanky iPad botherer while tarting up mobes The day after Google confessed to almost exposing the private data of hundreds of thousands of Google+ accounts to app developers, the ad giant unveiled perhaps the most-leaked phone in recent memory. The Pixel 3 and 3XL was actually available for purchase, in a way, before its launch event in New York today. First prototype …
How to kill that which is already dead involves a wood chipper, a barge pole, & not barfing all over the place when the ichor starts to fly.
Remember, skeletons can't play wind instruments & zombies can't sing worth a damn. That will help you weed them out of the crowd of supposedly still living.
Possibly could do a bit of it, however it would require quite significant set-up and a fair amount of programming, possibly lots of cabling and maybe some risky electric work (if you are intending the relays to directly switch the mains voltage).
That project would be exciting to some, for sure and you'd have a lot more control over your privacy.
However it would be a hard sell to pretty everyone else and if IoT, voice assistants etc are your thing and you are happy with the potential privacy concerns I would be tempted to just aim you towards the Amazon/Google route.
Never heard of this before, but from what I see, it's an x86_64 "computer". How the hell could it possibly break? Even if you're tampering with firmware, you can always hardware-level reflash the chip holding that.
It seems that all you need is to image a USB stick with Android-x86 and boot the thing
The _base model_ is $599. That gives 32 or 64 GB SSD (https://store.google.com/product/pixel_slate_specs isn't clear). The base iPad 6th generation is $329. $559 ($40 less than the base Pixel Slate) gets you 128 GB storage and both wifi and cellular. Yes, the Pixel Slate has an Intel processor instead of an ARM processor, but it's a _Celeron_. If I want a portable device with a Celeron, Dell has swarms of them in the $250-350 range. (No, I don't want a portable device with a Celeron...) And it doesn't have cellular connections, or at least the product specs page doesn't show it if it does. I use my iPad with a cellular connection (T-Mobile) a lot more than I use the wifi connection. My iPad has 128 GB storage. The Slate with 128 costs $999, or $450 more than my iPad, also known as enough to buy one of those Dell laptops. And have change. One of the things I use my iPad for is to tether my (elderly) laptop, which has a (older) i7 and which cost $700 when it was new. To get an i7 I'd need to spend $1599 on a Slate, and would still need something to connect to a cellular net, or be forced to use 3rd-party, untrustworthy, wifi. And a i7 Slate would have 256 GB storage, where my laptop has 1 TB. Why on Earth would I be interested in buying a Slate?
And one more thing: to ask the question posed in El Reg's comments section about certain Microsoft products: can I reformat it and put a Linux distro of my choice on it? I can't do that with my iPad, of course, but I can do it with my laptop. After certain recent revelations about Google, I am quite reluctant to use either Android or Chrome OS.
There is AltOS Mode, and there is GalliumOS (Ubuntu derivative with Chromebook drivers), and 'chrx' (a dual boot utility with support for Ubuntu et al)
But bear in mind that touchscreen support on Linux is, to say the least, absolute horseshit.
Could be alleviated using a tiling WM (I used i3), but it's not really awesome.
But why dual-boot? On my touchscreen laptop/tablet, I resorted to running Android-x86 with Ubuntu in a chroot, available on demand. The only issues are the potential slurp (maybe lessened if you nuke Google Play Services) and the older (4.9) as opposed to bleeding-edge kernel (4.18 or newer).
"Why on Earth would I be interested in buying a Slate?"
Think I have the answer - You're not interested in buying a slate, because Google aren't looking at you as a customer.
Your perspective of value seems to be determined by individual hardware components - Not the complete solution.
I'd expect Google are targeting this at people who are already on the Google ecosystem & those looking to tether their mobile phone. I also don't think they are targeting anyone interested in running Linux distros - As you've already pointed out there are cheaper alternatives so anyone buying a slate for this purpose would be crazy.
As I suspected, Google has decided that Chrome OS (with Android support) is the future for tablets and Android will be limited to phones. I recently bought an Acer Chromebook to replace my tablet since I couldn't really find much to replace my old tablet (and certainly couldn't find anything larger than 10 inches that didn't require a second mortgage). It does run all the Android apps I want to run but it can be quirky about how it runs them and I'd really like to smack someone upside the head about their "shelf" implementation.
certainly couldn't find anything larger than 10 inches that didn't require a second mortgage
Aren't {corporate off-lease,used} viable in this case?
And is an ARM chip a necessity?
If you really need new, you can go for an x86_64 Atom or Core M tablet. Chinese ones cost around $250, and you can tinker to your heart's content.
Things are going in the other direction. The only way you can upgrade or swap the RAM or SSD on Apple laptops is by soldering chips.
And of course Microsoft (Surface) and Lenovo (Yoga) followed thinking they'd achieve Apple success by copying the shittiest aspects.
Really, given what we currently know about the environment, that kind of shit should be illegal.
The problem is that this kind of modularity goes directly against consumers' luxury wishes for sleeker designs/no bezels/watertight. It's like asking Ferrari cars to have a trailer hook.
That said, there's a lot of Android models with expandable storage.
I looked at them when my Nexus 6P died the other weekend, but they share a fault with Motorola's top end devices.
No headphone jack equalled no sale.
I went with a Moto G6 Play, which has a 4Ah battery that lasted over 6 days on a single charge, AND has a headphone jack, AND an SD card slot.
That ought to tick all the commentard's boxes except for the removable battery.
I do have to say as a guy still on Windows 7, and seriously hating OS upgrades, Oreo is a vast improvement over Marshmallow. That was a huge surprise for me.
Oreo is a vast improvement over Marshmallow
You didn't try Nougat.
Oreo is totally FUBAR compared to Nougat. And the latter *is* where the vast improvement over Marshmallow came from.
No headphone jack equalled no sale.
In the future, the headphone jack is going to be a feature to be noted in reviews as an "exclusive/audiophile/..." feature, not as a basic human right.
The LG phones have very respectable Sabre DACs and amps. But yeah, for home listening why use the phone's output?
For out and about use, such specs are usually overkill. 3.5mm socket is a convenience that lets me use cheap expendable earphones to listen to podcasts. If I were to spend the money I'd use some active noise cancelling headphones from Sony with the LDAC codec they contributed to Android. If I were being silly I'd investigate some USB-C headphones with their own tubed DAC and amp.
Recently I've dug out some old Bluetooth earphones, love being divorced from the cable, hate the design flaws (which explains why they were dirt cheap)
I really don't think that a slight haloing (I can hardly notice it) is an issue for the use case of that photo.
I'd want to see real world tests, but the photo is meant to show that it can do a low light capture and make it look like almost daylight, using a tiny sensor and middling pixel count. Not suitable for a magazine shoot, but good enough for a friends and family photo album.
To me it looks pretty impressive, I'd like to see it compared to the Huawei P20 pro for low light.
"the photo is meant to show that it can do a low light capture and make it look like almost daylight"
So can any camera with a high enough iso speed and low enough shutter speed, which is exactly what this looks like.
A family photo album might suffice for the quality, but forget 8x10. I have to agree that even this staged best case example looks pretty ugly. Of course people looking for SLR+ quality out of such a small sensor are delusional, but gimmicks like this don't help the reputation of phone cameras either. Expecting one thing on a 6" screen to only find out it looks very different on a 27" screen might make you feel cheated.
It disappoints. Looks like Google have sacrificed the processor, in the base model, in favour of other high end components (e.g. the screen). Both the base iPad and Surface Go offer a better balance of performance and function. Then there's the photos of the slate with its keyboard. No kickstand? I expect to see more useful devices from Google's partners. Android on tablet is dead, so Google needs to make this work if they want to stay in the tablet market.
This seals the deal for me. The Apple deal, that is. Google have looked at the prices of the latest Apple phones and thought "we'll have some of that". I've been buying Nexus and Pixel devices off-contract for ten years (Nexus one - two, Galaxy Nexus - three, Nexus 6, 7, 8 and 9). I've bought my last Pixel. Glitchy hardware and OS issues that are never truly resolved...
My most recent business phone - an iPhone 8 bought in September for £750 with 256Gb storage. Eyeing up an 8+ for personal use at £850 with 256Gb. Why would I buy a Pixel 3XL with half the storage for £970? Or a Pixel 2XL with half the storage for £700 (down from £900)?
The keynote was amusing - especially during the Home Hub video demo - the 'requested' video was announced by the home hub before the presenter was halfway through his request!
And similar threats of boycott over the last few years have really had an impact on the market.
Since the default choice of Android phone in this price bracket is traditionally a Galaxy S or Note, just go with that. SD card, headphone slot, no notched screen, ability to sideload Pixel camera (G- cam) etc plus all the other bells and whistles Samsung throw in.
I was talking about hardware bells and whistles, as was inferred by the preceding items being hardware-based. IR iris scanner, Qi charging, mag strip emulator, grip detector, certified HDR compatability, pulse sensor, waterproofing... kitchen sink possibly, as is the Galaxy S tradition.
TouchWiz is easily ignorable these days, and I say that coming from a Nexus to a Galaxy. I was very pleasantly surprised. Check out Andrew Orlowski's articles if you don't believe me.
And Project Treble isn't AOSP as you put it. It's a modular framework that as a side effect has made AOSP-based ROMs far easier to use (and Android less dependant on ODMs releasing updated binary blobs) - though on Galaxy phones such faffing will kill features such as Knox and Pay. A normal person would just install a different launcher if they felt that much. It won't help you escape Google as a crippled AOSP build might, but that's not an issue exclusive to Samsung is it?
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