Honor 9X Pro: Better specs can't save this smartphone from a barren app store Smartphone manufacturers love to use the word "pro" in their branding. Perhaps at one point it meant something, conveying a level of power you wouldn't get with cheaper kit. That isn't the case in 2020, with the term awkwardly slapped on sub-£250 devices, like the subject of this review: the Honor 9X Pro. The Honor 9X Pro is, …
Thats a lot of pixels... I worked on the 808 and that was 'only' 41MPix... but we had a moving lens system to focus which this looks to thin to have (if you want something to move it has to have space to move!), but you also need a decent size lens and decent size sensor area before that number of pixels becomes really interesting.
We also had the pixel techique you talk about leading to 'lossless zoom' where as you zoom in we swapped from multiple pixel groups to 1 in order to avoid interpolating missing data as you zoomed in ... leaving you with a nice sharp and accurate zoomed in image.
Though if you're not particularly fussed about having access to your apps, or have the technical nous to find them elsewhere,
It's not exactly hard to install another app store with nearly everything you could want and a lot of people do this anyway to get stuff that, due to heinous practice of geo-blocking, they can't get from the Google store either.
Sideloading Apps through APK files is a breeze. As each of my older phones has become slow with bloatware and other cruft, I have unlocked the bootloader and added a custom ROM such as LineageOS. Sideloading apps follows on from there. You don't even have to get rid of the Huawei Android if you are happy with that. Just load the apps There is plenty of info though web search.
All this scaremongering about not having access to the Play Store is just that; something to make you scared. In a way it can be seen as an advantage, the Chocolate Factory doesn't get to control your phone. Bejing may but that is a different matter.
Sideloading is easy. But it might not be enough. Google's APIs may be proprietary, sketchy, prone to crashes, and completely unauditable. However, many apps have decided to use them. If you don't have them, and this doesn't, then you may run into problems after sideloading. For example, I am running Lineage OS which I have decided not to poison with Google's APIs. I've just tried a few apps that need them. In general, they look completely fine until they've finished the first set of loading screens, then they crash repeatedly until the phone decides not to try and start them again. This is not a problem for me--I was running these as a test and I could find replacements anyway. For the general public, they might not know why it's crashing like this, and they probably won't understand how to fix it. For those who understand the former but not the latter, they might find unreliable, crash-prone or malware-laced versions of those APIs instead. Whether this is a problem for the consumer hasn't really been determined, but it's worthwhile to understand that sideloading doesn't by itself fix the problem.
I'd like a Google-free phone for privacy concerns but what I wouldn't want is another even more opaque ecosystem in return.
Huawei would do well to support FOSS like LineageOS and MicroG as Google play replacement. Having a large company backing this and would give them the last boost towards mainstream usability, and a huge selling point (privacy) to boot, which is currently not really available in the mainstream Android market.
But instead they're just trying to become another Google with their own datamining and closed cloud services... No way I'd ever consider buying their stuff.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
