“Everything old is new again, whippersnappers.”
The battery is dying, but the reason I need to remove it is to actually reboot the phone. Some of the time I can’t get it to reboot via software, so removing the battery is the only option.
If I don’t do this either my phone is completely frozen, or it won’t make or receive calls anymore while everything else functions more slowly but fine.
It is indeed unfortunate that not everyone likes to use their devices the way you use yours.
Yeah, but not so unfortunate that I feel the need to call their concerns and complaints illegitimate.
(Also, I don’t have a smartphone at the moment.)
If my Nexus 4 refused to boot up this morning, I would probably buy the current unlocked Moto X as well (and hope that the lack of a Google Play edition won’t hurt me down the line). If the Moto G came out in a version with LTE and NFC, that would get my interest too.
Realistically, what I’ll probably wind up doing is nothing until I can eyeball the next round of phones at Mobile World Congress in March.
(That’s a little-known consequence of being a tech journalist: Having a decent idea of what’s coming means I always have a reason to hold off upgrading my current hardware.)
- RP
Thanks, Rob! Yes, I used the word “hobby” with that exact comparison in mind.
I usually jump into the comments thread right after the story posts, but Thursday and Friday were kind of crazy… hence, I am following the BBS’s suggestion that I batch my replies into one longer post.
[quote=“bwv812, post:4, topic:46039”]
I thought this was thoroughly debunked way back when the iPhone 4 was first released and Steve Jobs first made his claims about the limits of human vision. The human eye can discern far more than the iPhone’s 326 ppi at normal using distance, and the Nexus 6’s 493 ppi isn’t more than the human retina can discern.[/quote]
I can’t see the constituent pixels on my Nexus 4, and that has a “mere” 318 ppi, and text on the Nexus 6 doesn’t look any sharper. My eyes are 43 years old, but I had them checked a few months ago and up-close vision is not an issue with me. So, sorry, I have to go with my direct observation over somebody else’s math.
Continuing the discussion from The new Nexus lineup is weak:
Not really. I ran a few benchmark tests of my own, and they showed this phone was not at the top of the rankings as I’d expect. But because in day-to-day use, it doesn’t feel particularly slow to me, I opted not to include those data points.
Yup. I don’t plan on buying a locked phone ever again.
Fair point. But the Nexus 7 isn’t going to stay in stock indefinitely. FWIW, I’m content with my 2012 iPad mini–I’ll upgrade when Apple ships a model with a camera closer to what’s in the iPad Air, but not sooner.
Thanks for the report! My one qualm with Android 5: the Quick Settings menu is slightly less consistent and less useful, in that I can’t tap the WiFi icon to change networks (doing that now shuts off WiFi) even as tapping the wireless-carrier icon still brings up the data-usage meter. But I can live with trading that for quick tethering and flashlight access.
I walk, therefore I often don’t have one hand free. I wrote a post about that and other use cases on my blog last week precisely so I could link to it in this review; please have a look if you haven’t read it yet.
Try comparing your 318ppi display with one that has a higher pixel density. Use each for a couple of days. See if you can see a difference. Lots of people can, and science expects we should.
I don’t remember ever seeing individual “pixels” on a CRT-based TV, yet 1080p sure looks a lot better.
Yet again anecdotes trump science.
But there is a point of diminishing returns. Nobody argues that this difference (an iPhone 3GS / 165 ppi vs an iPhone 4 / 326 ppi) is anything but balls to the wall obvious.
(click it to expand full size)
And I could also notice a difference going from the Nexus 7 (2013 / 216ppi) to the newer Nexus 7 (2014 / 323 ppi).
But going from 323ppi to say … 493ppi of the Nexus 6? It’s probably noticeable, but hardly the same level of improvement as originally going from 165 or 216 to 323…
Yes, there’s a reason why laser printers didn’t stick to the 300dpi levels of a 1980s Laserwriter. 600dpi seems to be the low bounds for a commercial quality printer, and a modern digital printing press is 2400dpi. If the increased resolution wasn’t visible to the eye at normal reading distance, Xerox wouldn’t sell systems that could print that finely. The difference between laser printout and a commercially typeset book on high quality paper is pretty clearly visible. But laser printout is generally good enough, in a way that dot matrix clearly wasn’t.
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First you tell me to compare my current phone’s screen with the Nexus 6’s (as in, exactly what I did for writing this review; as in, guess what phones I have in my pockets as I type this) and then you say my direct observations are “anecdotes.” Your logic is escaping me here.
FWIW, I can easily see constituent pixels on my 1080p TV if I stand close enough to it. But I don’t watch it from two feet away; I watch it from my couch. And from there, the resolution limits of the CRT that preceded it were painfully obvious to me.
Actually, that’s not what I said. I said (and you quoted this, so you should know):
I thought this was thoroughly debunked way back when the iPhone 4 was first released and Steve Jobs first made his claims about the limits of human vision. The human eye can discern far more than the iPhone’s 326 ppi at normal using distance, and the Nexus 6’s 493 ppi isn’t more than the human retina can discern.
That isn’t a suggestion that you compare your phone (which isn’t an iPhone)–or even any phone—to the Nexus 6. It’s a rejection of your blanket statement that the Nexus 6 resolves more pixels than the human eye can perceive, a rejection I supported more than one person’s anecdote.
In my last post I suggested you go back to the lower resolution phone after using the Nexus 6 for a while. I don’t know if you did that, or if you wrote immediately after using the 6, but either way it’s not hugely important. Why? Because number of other reviews have essentially said they didn’t notice that the screens were better than retina-quality screens until after they switched back, and these other reviews that confirm what “math” says we should expect—this is why your personal inability to see a difference wouldn’t make “math” wrong (i.e., “Lots of people can (see a difference), and science expects we should.”)
And that reason is photography–what is continuous color on a computer screen must be dithered into dots of fully saturated cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, or simple combinations of such.
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Well, it’s not really continuous color on a computer screen, either, which is why sub-pixel rendering and anti-aliasing works so well.
Monochrome lasers have also moved well beyond 300 dpi, and I’m guessing the Kindle Voyage will not be the last word in e-ink resolution.
Halftone isn’t really the same as dithering, and current display technologies do not give us continuous color.
Obviously dithering was used on computers in the early years when they had limited bit depths. Dithering is still used on TN monitors, most of which are 6-bit but dither to an apparent 8-bit depth. I take your point that print CMYK is essentially a 4-bit color system with 1-bit per channel, and that the additional resolution is needed to halftone and/or dither to the appearance of continuous color, but it’s also true that something similar happens with subpixels (which are also halftoned together—albeit at greater bit depths—to give the appearance of continuous full-specturm color).
I wasn’t even considering photos. Just black and white text is clearer at 600dpi than at 300dpi.
Apple’s brand of Retina (which, I’ll confess, is the only one I’ve really examined, via an ipad) is nice because it gets rid of the anti-aliasing. Don’t get me wrong-- anti-aliasing is nice for some things-- I remember ditching Carbon apps for Cocoa simply because the anti-aliased text was so much better looking, but you have to admit-- it does make things just bit blurry. That’s a comparatively huge gain–piling pixels on top of pixels is in the diminishing returns.
I may have some TeX books that explain the difference in print resolution a bit more clearly, though.
It doesn’t on Mac OS X. I just checked on my retina MacBook Pro running 10.10. Text is still antialiased, doubtless because Apple understands that retina resolution isn’t enough.
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I believe they eliminated anti-aliasing is because iDevices are used in both portrait and landscape orientations, while traditional subpixel mapping relies on landscape orientation. In the latest Office for Windows, anti-aliasing is turned off by default (and will thus run on tablets without problems), but you can turn it back on if working on a laptop.
