HTC Unveils Revamped HTC One 152
adeelarshad82 writes "Earlier today, HTC unveiled a revamped version of its One smartphone. The new HTC One has a 4.7-inch full HD 1080p display which is powered by a 1.7-GHz, quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor and a customized version of Android. The new phone includes support for NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, and DLNA for wireless streaming to a TV or computer. Measuring 5.4 by 2.7 by 0.36 inches, the phone weighs around 5 ounces. According to the specs, the phone will come with either 32 or 64GB of storage and 2GB of RAM, and it's backed by a non-removable 2300mAh battery. Unfortunately the phone doesn't include a memory card slot and has just two ports: a headphone jack and a MicroUSB that doubles as an MHL output for HDMI TVs. HTC One's 'UltraPixel' camera is nothing to sniff at either. HTC is trying to replace megapixels with 'ultrapixels,' cutting down the size of photos but using much larger individual pixels to sharply reduce noise and improve low-light performance. In a quick comparison with iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3, One's images were far clearer and brighter. The HTC One runs Android 4.1.2 with HTC's new Sense 5."
HTC will need to prove themselves. (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting one phone out on a lot of carriers is a good move, but lets see if they can keep up with updates. So far HTC phones have been some of the worst at getting updated.
Is the bootloader unlocked? Is S-off easy to obtain?
Customers Satisfied (Score:4, Interesting)
Getting one phone out on a lot of carriers is a good move, but lets see if they can keep up with updates. So far HTC phones have been some of the worst at getting updated.
Is the bootloader unlocked? Is S-off easy to obtain?
http://ondeviceresearch.com/blog/iphone-5-ranked-fifth-in-user-satisfaction%2C-behind-four-android-powered-devices#sthash.uPvDqYTk.O4PYwW2L.dpbs [ondeviceresearch.com] in the UK the HTC X is rated No 1 in smartphone satisfaction, so clearly they are doing something right. If you have concerns [ignoring you should provide the answers] perhaps your asking the wrong questions.
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Seeing your survey results doesn't surprise me. I bought the Droid Razr Maxx HD a month ago and I absolutely love this thing! It's amazing how much difference never having to worry about battery life is.
I mean literally never. With generous settings (Wifi left on, GPS off, 4G data on) I can go two full days without a recharge and still have about 10-20% battery at the end of day two. Getting through a single day has never been a problem.
Given that it's plenty fast (GTA III Vicy City plays well) big screen (
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Two days isn't never. My old pre-smart phone would go well over a week without a charge. It was something you didn't worry about. My phone has a decent charge life (htc one x), but I still have to remember to charge it. If I go over two or three days and forget to charge it, I can't use it. That is bad. The goal for all phone makers should be one week rather than just accept diminished expectations.
Re:Customers Satisfied (Score:4, Insightful)
Your pre-smartphone didn't do high speed data (requires more power), work as a mini-computer (power), have a high res display (power), had a processor that was a fraction of the speed (power). Its like complaining your car needs more gas than the old bicycle you used to ride. A week would be awesome, but we need major improvements in battery tech to get that. Until then, we live with what we have, and 2 days is a nice improvement over what we had a year or so ago.
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Actually the phone part of the deal is the part I use *least* frequently. I use it as a mobile web browser at least an order of magnitude more- I use that daily where I may have an actual call one a week or less. There's definitely a set of people out there who don't really want or use the smartphone features, but there's a lot more of us who do.
And guess what- there's plenty of dumbphones still out there. So buy one. The rest of us like having computers in our pockets.
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I use the phone part the most actually. And I would have gotten a dumb phone but they were all really really bad. Nokia essentially stopped making their normal high quality dumb phones (or at least AT&T wasn't selling them), and the ones that were almost bearable were flip phones. I figured that occasional web use using wifi only would be useful so I decided to go with smart phone.
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I am waiting for this phone to come to Sprint; I replaced my Zio with an EVO with an extended battery but my wife doesn't want to trade her Zio for a phone as thick as mine even with the long battery life I get.
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*shrug* I'll take rare updates over the crashfest I had with the Samsung phones I used. I'm 3-for-3 in buggy unstable garbage models with them (some dumbphone, Transform, and whatever the replacement for the Transform was).
Still, HTC has moved to 'no keyboards', which, like the crashfest, kills my interest in purchasing. I wonder how long till they make cases with keyboards?
Two powerful reasons for removable bits (Score:4, Informative)
I have a Samsung Galaxy S3. The damn thing only last a day and that means NOT using turn by turn navigation or 3D gaming. It would not make it through the day otherwise. For my holiday I purchased a dirt cheap battery with replacement back that more then doubles the battery capacity although it makes the phone twice as thick. I thought I'd use it only for the holiday but the fact I no longer need to turn the screen light to minimum and I can use whatever app I want made me continue to use this big battery. The thicker phone is easier to hold as well.
As for SD cards. As people that dropped their phone in the water how they recovered their data. It if is an SD card it can be dried and it will work. Build in memory required the rest of the phone circuitry to work in order to get the data off.
To me a closed phone (Fixed battery, fixed memory and customized (raped) android) is a lesser phone. My next phone will be from the Google Nexus line.
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If you drop your phone in water, pull the battery or turn it off. Let it rest in some kind of desiccant for a few days. It will survive.
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Ok, I think you missed the point. New example. A truck drives over your lovely HTC One and leaves a crushed circuit board behind. SD cards are very hardy and likely to survive the assault. either way, chances of a part (SD card) of the phone surviving are much greater.
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The SD card likely will not survive what you describe. In any case, backups are the answer not a removable drive. You do backup any important data one way or another right?
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No idea what that is and no idea where or how to turn it off. That is half the problem with all the "customized" Android applications. Things get far too complicated.
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Dude I think that is a known software bug, have you searched on XDA for your specific issue? I recall having a similar issue with battery life on my S3 and there was some kind of hack to fix it. Something to do with the 3g radio cycling between H+ and H and 3g radio....I forget, its been a while since I fixed it...
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Not to burst your bubble, but one of the big drawbacks of the Nexus line is the consistent the lack of removable storage -- the last three Nexus phones haven't had a micro-SD slot. Other than that, Nexuses (Nexii?) are wonderful things because they're open by design; but if you really like removable storage you're probably not going to be so happy. I completely agree with you about SD cards, incidentally; it's one of the things I miss in my current phone (a Nexus S -- over two years old, but still going s
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You have to log on to HTC's site, punch in the IMEI code, and they will send you a file you can use for a fastboot unlock.
Infrared Remote Control (Score:4, Interesting)
The revamped one includes a Infrared remote control...and its not mentioned in the summary. I know those who had the n900 had this functionality, but Nokia hardware seems to have taken any advantages they have, and sacrificed it for Microsoft. So its nice to see this feature come back. Hopefully we are going to see some nice software to back this up.
A lesson for HTC (Score:5, Informative)
Dear HTC,
I love the hardware on my HTC Amaze 4G but I'm sorry to say that I cannot buy another HTC phone.
I'm telling you why so you can reverse the decline you've been suffering.
1) Allow users to remove / not load HTC Sense and opt for the pure Android experience. Sense is lovely, but sometimes I don't want to use up resources on it.
2) Make your phones (more) hacker friendly. There is no CyanogenMod available for this phone because the drivers weren't released in a timely manner (if I understand the issue correctly), therefore the development community moved on to other phones and it isn't supported.
3) Stop it with the non-removable batteries and lack of external SD card slots.
4) UPDATES for Android! My phone updated from 2.3.4 to 4.0.3, but I'm still waiting for 4.1 (and doubt I'll see 4.2). Unacceptable. If you make it easier for CyanogenMod, etc. to run on your older phones, IMHO it will raise your presence in the dev community and increase your exposure / perceived value. You need the dev community to support your phones. With the ability to run CM, you then won't need to issue support for older phones if you don't desire to, as we can update our phones ourselves.
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1. Go Launcher EX. It's super-effective :)
2. No. There's no need for an Average Joe to hack and put some (officially) unsupported software release on a phone. If you really need CyanogenMod, there's a plethora of products which can be hacked as such. One of the main reasons my (very large) company uses HTC smartphones is exactly that: they are far more difficult to root. It's something Global Security was looking for.
3a: yes, that's a deal-breaker for me. My HTC Desire S with Androind 2.3.5 had an issue whe
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Sense is much deeper than the launcher. It's like a cancer that spreads into all the menus and built in systems. I absolutely despise it and I just returned a One X because of it.
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Yes, there is a reason that the owner needs to be able to put on any hack he wants- he owns it. It's his. He has every right to install any software he wishes on that device. Even though I've never installed an android image, not allowing me to is why I would never buy an HTC phone or suggest one to either friends family or as an IT purchase.
As for updates- you're worried about security and you don't think updates are important? Wow.
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That's something other groups are to be worried about in my company. I'm a mere user who receives patch notifications when they come to me and follows directions. It's not my personal phone and I treat it as such. Oh and I don't own it, not for the first two years, at least. Te company owns it. And when the company says "here, you can choose between a Blackberry, an iPhone and a HTC" I took the HTC because the other options sucked more, to me, at least.
By this time next year I will fully own it, and then I
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Agreed about the batteries and MicroSD card. This is 2013. There's no excuse for lacking these features. All my cell phones have had removable batteries back to my original Nokia candybar. On Android a single battery can't get you through a full day of use if you're a serious user, and not everyone can get to a charging source constantly. Keeping spare charged batteries is critical. Plus not everyone wants to replace their whole phone just because the original battery (a $5 part) only holds 50% of its origi
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For your particular phone, the latest stable Cyanogen Mod will get it to 4.1.1.
My understanding is that they've been much better with the One series. Both the One X and the S can be updated to 4.2.2 using a Cyanogen nightly. HTC is not the fastest at pushing out OS updates, but they seem to be fine when it comes to supporting community projects. I don't really know too much though, as I'm not a part of that community.
By far the largest problem (IMHO) with HTC's phones is the ten different models that are al
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Yeah, much better with for example the Samsung Galaxy, Blackberry, LG, Sony... Oh wait...
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Re:A lesson for HTC (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll give you HTC's responses. Note I'm not endorsing them, just telling what they will say. My personal comments are included.
1) Allow users to remove / not load HTC Sense and opt for the pure Android experience. Sense is lovely, but sometimes I don't want to use up resources on it.
Sense is what differentiates our phones, all our apps are designed for it and would need modifications to fit in with the vanilla Android theme, our phones have industry leading performance etc.
Comment: Apparently future versions of Android (Key Lime Pie?) will allow manufacturers to more easily skin the OS and optionally allow users to turn the skin off.
2) Make your phones (more) hacker friendly.
Lots of work for 0.00001% of our users, and lots of headaches from the people who think they know what they are doing but don't and brick their phones instead. Seriously, Samsung went to the trouble of introducing a counter that tracks how many times you installed an unofficial ROM because people kept bricking their phones and returning them.
Comment: We are a niche market, but well served by Google and some really rather good Chinese phones.
3) Stop it with the non-removable batteries and lack of external SD card slots.
We make lots of money on battery replacement and charging £50 for an extra 8GB of storage.
Comment: Okay, they wouldn't use those words, but that's what it boils down to. The only option is to boycott I'm afraid. Speak through your wallet.
4) UPDATES for Android!
It does what it does when you buy it. If you want new stuff buy a new phone.
Comment: Again future versions of Android are supposed to improve this situation, and again the only solution is unfortunately to vote with your wallet.
You need the dev community to support your phones.
Those guys are a support nightmare for us. We really want them to leave us alone.
No Removable stiorage or battery (Score:2)
2 Deal killers in 1 deal? Impressive!
I have a Nexus 7 tablet which has no removable storage. This is a pain. I keep all my music in Google play but that is not all I want storage for..
I have a Galaxy GS2 and put a high capacity battery in it after a few months. Yes, it made it thicker. No, that did not make it any less excellent in any way. In fact, it made it easier to hold!
I will now call on the power of the free market and buy something else instead.
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I have a nexus 7 and was annoyed that it doesn't automatically show up as a USB drive when connected to my computer. Bugged me for a long time -- there are apps to transfer files over your network but they seem slow. I resorted to scp more than once. Till I finally stumbled across http://www.android.com/filetransfer/ [android.com] . Now when I plug in the tablet, I get a file browser to move things around. It's great.
As an aside, Airdroid http://www.airdroid.com/ [airdroid.com] is an awesome over the network method. Still kind of
HTC should stop competing with Apple and Samsung (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were HTC, I would *let* Samsung take the flat-slab, single-button, iPhone clone handset market...and then concentrate on the niches. For example:
--HTC Universal: Every possible cellular frequency is supported, and shipped SIM unlocked. One handset that can roam freely between Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T, plus European and Asian cellular systems, at full data speed.
--HTC Marathon: Twice as thick as an iPhone...with a 5,000mAh battery that can last two full days on a charge.
--HTC Pure: From Google's Github to your phone in 72 hours. Those pining for a Sense-free, timely update situation can have it in the Pure.
--HTC Click: My HTC Touch Pro2 had, hands down, the best keyboard on a mobile phone I've ever used. The Click is that handset with a new processor, more RAM and storage, and capacitive screen.
--HTC Tower: If you live or work too far away from a tower for a normal handset to get a signal, the Tower will ensure your call gets there.
--HTC Vault: For users with far too much data, this handset has 256GB of internal storage, and uses the same technology as a desktop SSD to ensure that data gets in and out as fast as possible.
--HTC Flick: Glass lenses and optical zoom increase the thickness of this handset that has a camera that outperforms even most dedicated point-and-shoot cameras from Canon and Nikon.
--HTC Simplicity: There's still a small dumbphone market, and the Jitterbug caters to users who want a phone that reliably makes phone calls and is easy to read. The Jitterbug can withstand a little competition.
--HTC Tinker: This handset is born to be hacked. No locked bootloader, no rooting required, and images for Android, Windows Phone 8, and Ubuntu are all available direct from the manufacturer.
There are plenty of niches where HTC can compete. They just have to stop trying to play the "lowest common denominator" card and trying to convince users to choose them over the Galaxy S3.
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I like your ideas, but the final question in the marketing meeting is: How many people will buy this? And while your ideas are great and all...there is not so much market for those. Because the consumer (or their employer) selects the one which is the latest fad or most cost-efficient. An example: Nokia has tried for years to be "the manufacturer" in quality (I know personally how they test they their stuff and compare it to competitors, and it is quite thorough) and in cameras. So far the results...not so
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Nice, but you forgot one:
--HTC Pony: Designed exclusively for a hypothetical user base (probably doesn't exist) that will cost millions in development and, if lucky, will sell 10s if not 100s to easily disoriented consumers. At least two Reddit subforums will absolutely love it. The subsequent bankruptcy filing by HTC will ensure the highly collectible status of the phone.
Re:HTC should stop competing with Apple and Samsun (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting ideas, but to play devils advocate, there are many problems with what you propose.
Primarily, this many SKU's is completely uneconomical for a company that's already seeing declining sales and profit margin. It's not just the number of models, it's the fact that they'll have to make multiple versions of each one for each country and carrier, and storage capacity.
-- HTC Universal: In addition to all the flavours of 3G/H+, you want support for all LTE frequencies? Good luck with that. Even assuming that it's technologically and financially feesible to cram that many different radios into one handset, it's still not useful. Many CDMA providers will not let you bring a phone to their network that has not been purchased through their stores. Even some GSM providers that can't block it will make it as difficult as they can. Even then, how many people really need access to more than 2 networks at most? The market would be incredibly small, and the cost of the phone would be enormous.
-- HTC Marathon: Interesting. But it's probably more reasonable to just sell one phone of any type with an option of multiple officially supported battery sizes.
-- HTC Pure: It's possible, and I'd buy it, but chances are it won't happen. Officially selling a non-Nexus pure-Android phone implies that your Sense brand is not as great as you'd like. So it's unlikely.
-- HTC Tinker: There is no way you'll ever get a phone that officially supports both Android and WP8. Microsoft would never allow that. And there is no convincing non-carrier reason you need to lock your bootloader on any device. Having a specific version just for the unlocked bootloader seems wasteful. Just unlock them all.
Overall, it makes more sense to just make one or two phones and include whatever of these options are feasible.
So instead of everything you proposed, they could just release the HTC One with an unlocked bootloader, varying internal storage, provide downloads for officially supported AOSP images, and multiple battery sizes. That's actually feasible and economical. That doesn't satisfy every possible niche, but it gets to the big ones, and the increase in production/engineering cost is much less significant.
But it still won't happen. Fact is that the cost of catering to these niches is probably far more than then the associated increase in revenue. Best you can hope for is an unlocked bootloader.
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You've echoed many of the sentiments responded elsewhere, and I'll hope that the other posters are eagle-eyed enough to see this response instead of me cutting-and-pasting everywhere.
I pulled a few ideas off the top of my head, clearly without the market research or engineering teams required to actually bring one to fruition. I'm also not saying that every model is a good idea, just that if HTC keeps trying to compete with both the iPhone and Galaxy series phones, they're going to have to be very content w
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The thing that gets me is that most phones have removable batteries. Why are the manufacturers not selling overpriced back plates with double, triple and quadruple sized batteries? It just cant be that expensive to make a replacement back plate.
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I own an iPhone 5 that I use off and on all day for different things. It easily lasts two days before needing to be plugged in.
Nexus (Score:2)
I want HTC to build a Nexus phone again. The Nexus One was (relatively speaking) the best Nexus phone made, in my opinion. The Samsung Nexus phones were/are OK (I have a Galaxy Nexus now) but they were never the absolute top of the line phones. The Nexus 4 is a nice piece of hardware but has some serious flaws (low, non-expandable memory being the show-stopper for me).
I might have to just give up on Nexus phones and hope for good Cyanogenmod support for this guy. But I'll see what Google brings out in May.
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I want HTC to build a Nexus phone again. The Nexus One was (relatively speaking) the best Nexus phone made, in my opinion
I agree... I had a Nexus One and to this day, it was my favorite smartphone.
Unfortunately, that phone was destroyed due to water damage. I've tried 3 replacements and none have compared.
Currently I am using a HTC One V. If you look at the hardware specs, it seems to be a decent phone, but it is slowed down by this horrid abomination know as Sense.
Sense alone will stop be from buying any other HTC phone. It is slow as sh!t...
The UI itself is horrid... The contacts/dialer interface is complete different from
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> Sense alone will stop be from buying any other HTC phone. It is slow as sh!t...
See I don't care about that kind of stuff, since any phone I get HAS to have CyanogenMod support. GOOD CyanogenMod support!
Well, thank god (Score:2)
Wow, finally a phone with a readable screen. Those 300ppi screens were just killing my eyes. That 1080p screen totally makes my 1280x768 screen obsolete. /s
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SD cards are going away on phones. They are slow and lead to customer complaints. Besides USB on the Go basically obsoletes them. Removable batteries mean a battery door. This makes the phone thicker.
Personally neither is a deal killer.
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Removable batteries mean a battery door. This makes the phone thicker.
Personally neither is a deal killer.
I've replaced the battery on every phone I have owned for the passed 6 years because they typically do not last longer than a year before they are degraded beyond usefulness. Yeah -- it's a deal killer.
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What are you doing to them?
Replacing the battery once like that should still not be that hard to do. I have done that to several ipods over the years.
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I have never had any issues with any Li-ion batteries as long as they are properly maintained. That means do not let it run below 20% (yes, it means stop yakking on the phone and stop playing games on the phone if it is that low).
In which universe does that qualify as acceptable usability for a consumer device? Especially considering that typical high end smart phones don't even last a day, just running maps or other moderate loads.
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Re:Non removable battery, no memory card slot. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't mind the phones being a bit thicker. I want my replaceable batter (since it's one of the more likely to go wrong components), I want a keyboard (I always have found even "the best" touch screens a hassle), and a SD card slot would be really nice, though not a dealbreaker like the first two.
Then again, the phone manufacturers are go so far for thin and light, they ignore forget about battery life and reception, which are more important than any of the above IMO.
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I wish I could find a phone with a keyboard that did not suck. It seem they only put them on low end devices though or bootloader locked which is even worse.
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Samsung put out the Relay [wikipedia.org] on T-Mobile in the fall, which is quite competitive with the S3. While I don't care too much for Samsung phones, it has an unlocked bootloader, a decent keyboard, and reasonably active development.
Verizon and Sprint respectively have the similarly speced Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II and Motorola Photon Q, both of which released around the same time. I can't speak to their lockedness.
While it is sad that they're few and far between, they aren't low end devices... They come out
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I am not interested in being tied to one carrier, nor in a midrange phone. None of those are high end devices.
The display on the Relay is pathetic, it compares with my old Droid1 not a GS3.
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> I am not interested in being tied to one carrier, nor in a midrange phone.
Good luck with that on nearly any phone. Besides, the Relay can be unlocked for free from a service menu, DMCA not withstanding (T-Mobile is good with unlock codes besides).
> None of those are high end devices.
Yeah, sorry, they are, even months later. Really, aside from not having massive internal storage (a non-issue since they support SD cards), the only thing they are behind on is having 1GB RAM instead of 2GB, something
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Nexus devices are not tied to one carrier. Nor are good GSM devices.
Any device with a screen that would be considered pathetic a year ago is not high end. 1GB of RAM is midrange. The screen is low DPI as well, my GF's Rezound is at 342dpi. That is a 4.3" device, I doubt adding .3 inches to the Relay would be a big deal.
Making it larger would be fine. I would love a normal GS3 with a slide out keyboard. Not sure why you keep mentioning what is barely a highend device anyway. The GS3 is getting pretty dated a
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Thanks for posting that. I've been looking for a replacement to my HTC G2 but have yet to find a T-Mobile phone with an acceptable keyboard. I don't know why phone manufactures mess with the standard keyboard layout so much. Trying to code on the G2 (even just HTML) is a nightmare (it doesn't even have ..yet they include a www. key???).
The Relay's keyboard looks great. I think it's the only T-Mobile phone to have 5 rows since the long dead HTC G1.
My only concern with the Relay is that it's made by Samsung.
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the phone manufacturers are go so far for thin and light, they ignore forget about battery life and reception
Perhaps you should take a look at the Razr Maxx HD. It's thin, light, has fabulous reception, fabulous sound quality, and a battery life measured in days.
No, it doesn't have a keyboard, so I
bought a folding bluetooth keyboard.
Now, when I need a keyboard, I have something that rivals a desktop, and when I want portability, I use Swype. And I'm honestly surprised at how well Swype actually does.
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I don't mind the phones being a bit thicker. I want my replaceable batter (since it's one of the more likely to go wrong components)
My replacable battery is a lifesaver when the phone crashes. Sometimes it won't turn off, and then pulling the battery out is the best way to reset it.
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II want a keyboard (I always have found even "the best" touch screens a hassle)
You're not alone. The now ancient Epic 4G is still clinging in the top ten Android phones: https://plus.google.com/114278817778674561147/posts/C6Ei9EWZ9Yg [google.com]
Kind of shocking, but my wife and I both keep ours and are hoping somebody comes out with a keyboard case for the Note 2.
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SD cards are going away on phones. They are slow and lead to customer complaints. Besides USB on the Go basically obsoletes them. Removable batteries mean a battery door. This makes the phone thicker.
Personally neither is a deal killer.
I don't think I'd want a phone without an easily replaceable battery - I replaced my one year old Galaxy Nexus battery last month and immediately got about 50% better battery life - back to when the phone was new.
I thought I'd regret not having an SD card slot, but I've only used just over half of the 32GB of storage space and that includes a half dozen movies that I loaded up before a long plane trip and a couple hundred CD's worth of MP3's. It still might be nice to have an SD slot so I could load up more
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No spare batteries? no no-downtime replacement if the battery dies? No easy extraction of data if the phone breaks? I'm willing to sacrifice A LOT of thickness/weight to get these features.
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What helps mitigate that is having an app like Titanium Backup which not just encrypts backup data, but saves the encrypted backups onto Dropbox or another provider. Done right, it provides a decent level of protection, especially if one takes a periodic nandroid backup and uploads that.
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0. Going away? Really? Barring HTC and the Nexus 4, basically every current Android phone I see has a microSD slot, as does the new Blackberries and all the non-HTC windows phones.
1. They should ship a real SD card rather than the class 4 junk. A class 10 or UHS card will keep pace with the onboard flash easily.
2. So having a (quite possibly even slower) usb drive dangling off the phone is replacement for an SD card in the device? And then you're complaining about thickness in the same breath?
3. Not to
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I don't mind thicker phones. In fact I'd prefer a higher quality non-smart phone if it had great voice and long battery life and replaceable batteries. Function over style. I wouldn't have even gotten the smart phone if I had a choice of useful basic phones instead (really, they were utter crap given that the good phone makers have just given up on the basic market).
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SD cards are going away on phones
Sounds like wishful thinking from someone who doesn't have one. SD cards are plenty fast enough for me. I would far rather have an SD card than be forced to futz around with USB cables, dongles, adapters etc. I have some Android devices with SD card and some without. I have a strong preference for the devices with SD cards. That's one of the big annoyances of the Nexus 4, no SD card. Plus, needing a special tool or a pin (problematic on an airplane) to get the SIM card out is just plain idiotic. But I digre
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Not only are SD cards plenty fast, but manufacturers are free to use flash so slow that it's not any faster than an SD card, and they may, to cut costs. Having internal storage is no guarantee of anything except lack of expandability.
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Bollox. The Sanyo Zio had a batter door that was at best the width of three sheets of paper; and the battery lastest much less than the lifetime of the phone (my wife still uses her somewhat-less-than 3yr old Zio)
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SD cards are going away on phones. They are slow and lead to customer complaints. Besides USB on the Go basically obsoletes them. Removable batteries mean a battery door. This makes the phone thicker.
Personally neither is a deal killer.
"slow and lead to customer complaints" smells like phone company bullshit.
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2. Class 4 SD cards are slow, Class 10 SD cards are not. SD cards are going away because it allows you to mark up the 'extra ram' version of your phone and/or tablet...again, something that's been standard on all fruit themed hardware since the very beginning.
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Removable batteries mean a battery door. This makes the phone thicker.
This is a red herring for. Manufacturers and apologists will say it to explain away bad engineering. It is used because while it it technically true if no other factors are considered, once proper engineering is applied, it becomes an insignificant factor. If there was a hard line between the thickness of phones with replaceable batteries and those without, MAYBE the excuse would carry some weight. Looking at the available phones, and we see that plenty of phones with replaceable batteries that are noti
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The screen doesn't sound so great either. 4.7" diagonal on a 5.4*2.7 form factor? That's almost 3/4 of an inch of Bezel all the way around.
1080p for less than 5 inches? (Score:2)
1080p would be a complete waste on something less than five inches, so far as I can see.
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This phone is not acceptable for those two reasons, I don't care how great its screen is or how fast its processor.
Just as any mainstream phone manufacturer wouldn't care about the features you want.
If lack of either of those were an impediment to sales, they'd include them. They're not, so they don't. But I'm sure there's people at HTC who are broken up over an AC on Slashdot declaring its not acceptable to them.
Re:Hmmmm .... (Score:5, Interesting)
They made the sensor bigger for a given resolution.
That is a big image quality improvement.
I don't carry my camera everywhere with me. My smartphone is always with me.
No it means they foucsed on light not pixels. (Score:3)
Lower res pictures with bigger pixels? That sounds more like "we've put in a lower resolution camera, and that's better".
No its about being able to see detail in a photo, by being able to record those differences. So pictures don't look washed out or black without being able to make out detail.
Physics wins (Score:2, Informative)
Given that a cell phone has a certain range of thicknesses, you only get a small choice of focal depths -- roughly the camrea thickness - (imager thickness + front case thickness). That limits the useful physical size of your imager. Given the race for megapixels, each cell on the imager has gotten smaller, which translates directly to higher noise and, in particular, reducing max possible low light performance. In other words, cell phone pictures are shitty in poor light. By increasing the size of the pixe
Re:Hmmmm .... (Score:5, Informative)
Other than the "ultrapixel" marketing bullshit - a lower resolution camera IS better at the sensor sizes of mobile devices.
There's a reason Canon dropped from 14 to 10 going from the G10 to G11 (or was it G9 to G10?) - yes, they DROPPED resolution in their flagship P&S.
It's well known to experienced photographers that more pixels = less area per pixel = lower dynamic range (more noise) per pixel, especially in low light.
Especially since there's a fixed amount of "overhead" per pixel taking up sensor area - as the pixels are packed more densely, that overhead becomes a higher percentage of the sensor area that is wasted.
10+ megapixels, even 8, is simply way too much for the sensor size of mobile devices. A mobile device with 75% of the pixel count of a DSLR but only 25% or less of the physical sensor area = guaranteed to be shit in anything but sunlight.
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I don't know if it's BS. They need some way to explain that more doesn't mean better. It needs to be short, because a four sentence paragraph will get a TL;DR. The vast majority of people assume more pixels means a better picture.
Example: http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3475983&cid=42947325 [slashdot.org]
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This doesn't sound like it's a good thing.
Lower res pictures with bigger pixels? That sounds more like "we've put in a lower resolution camera, and that's better".
Of course, the problem with low light performance on a phone is the sensor is so small as to be useless at the published megapixel rates. Which is why my cell phone will never replace my actual cameras.
My iPhone 5 has a great camera compared to most other phones. The 8 megapixel images it captures are about equivalent to those created by my 1.3 megapixel $400 digital camera manufactured in 2001. The lower resolution, larger sensor size approach taken by HTC in this new phone looks like a massive step change improvement over the iPhone.
Unfortunately, the other problem in iPhotos is that they get way, way oversharpened and autoleveled to blow out bright pixels and crush all the dark pixels into a uniform
Physics (Score:5, Informative)
Lower res pictures with bigger pixels? That sounds more like "we've put in a lower resolution camera, and that's better".
No, it's better - provided they have made the pixels bigger. I'm sick of phones with so-called multi-megapixel cameras, which give noisy photos in the best of circumstances. A typical 8 Mpix sensor would be much better as a 2 Mpix sensor of the same total detector size and sensitivity, and sometimes, they should have even fewer pixels with the the same total detector area and sensitivity.
Here's the essential info: shot noise [wikipedia.org] is unavoidable - it's intrinsic in the physics of photon arrival at the detector. The sigma of the output noise is the square root of the number of photoelectrons.
So if you have a crappy electron well that can hold 10^4 photoelectrons when full (a "decent" cellphone camera), the signal to noise ratio is barely 100 (10^4 divided by square root of 10^4). Similarly, the photon flux per pixel in good lighting will rarely exceed 10^5 photons per second per pixel, due to the tiny lens aperture and small pixel size. It's unsurprising that the images are utter crap, as the output gain must be cranked up (amplifying noise as well as signal) to get any shot in less than 1/100 second. People downsize their images in almost all circumstances, unless they're happy with blurry and/or noisy images. FWIW, this is borne out by my experience with my own Samsung Galaxy S3 and Nokia E70, my daughter's HTC Desire Z, a colleague's Nokia 920, a friend's Samsung Galaxy S2, another colleague's iPhone 4, and various other Nokia, Samsung, and Siemens phones belonging to family and friends They are all crappy in nearly all circumstances[*], unless downsized 2:1 or more (i.e. at most one quarter of the pixels).
In a DSLR, the much larger electron well means that a pixel can hold up to 10^6 photoelectrons, so the signal to noise ratio is closer to 10^3. Similarly, the larger aperture (there's a reason for those big lenses) and larger detector pixels mean that it gets a flux of more than 10^8 photoelectrons per second per pixel in typical lighting. That's why even action shots in 1/1000sec exposure can be sharp and have relatively low noise.
[*] Exception: a relatively long exposure shot of a still life scene, or a deliberately extended exposure shot of running water or similar (with hand support to improve steadiness), say 1/15 sec or thereabouts. Not what cameras in phones are commonly used for...
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That's all fine, but what really matters how many more electrons the well will hold if you make the sensor pixel 4 times larger in area and how many more photoelectrons you can generate at the same exposure settings. If both of them are scaled by a factor 4, you can just as well average four adjacent small pixels to cre
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That's all fine, but what really matters how many more electrons the well will hold if you make the sensor pixel 4 times larger in area and how many more photoelectrons you can generate at the same exposure settings. If both of them are scaled by a factor 4, you can just as well average four adjacent small pixels to create a lower-resolution image.
Of course this averaging should be done in the camera/phone firmware before the JPEG compression step.
Not so; the averaged pixel would be noisier than a larger pixel of the same area as the aggregate even if the number of detected photoelectrons scaled perfectly.
I mentioned only photon shot noise, but other sources of noise exist in CCD and CMOS detectors, and their effects are additive (in a mean-square fashion). In particular, readout noise and bandwidth noise will make the situation worse if the same number of photoelectrons are divided among more pixels. Bandwidth noise increases with the bandwidth a
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Lower res pictures with bigger pixels?
Yes. My 20D with 8 megapixels takes much higher quality pictures that any known cell phone, or any point and shoot with 50% more nominal pixels. It's not just the vastly better optics, it's also the quality of the sensor.
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Yes. My 20D with 8 megapixels takes much higher quality pictures that any known cell phone, or any point and shoot with 50% more nominal pixels. It's not just the vastly better optics, it's also the quality of the sensor.
You did mention the optics though, there's just no point to 10MP with a quarter-inch lens. All it does is blow up your file sizes.
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From now on, I'm sticking with companies with better support
Which is?
(Not Motorola, their phones come out without very out of date OS and then they don't upgrade it.)
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Something marked NEXUS should get much quicker updates. Provided you are buying it from the play store and not a carrier branded version. All carrier branded phones lag behind though.
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You can buy your nexus phone from the carrier. Just remember after opening the box to flash in the official Google factory image and it'll get updates that way.
The carrier image points updates at the carrier, while the official factory image points to google. It's just a little work with fastboot.
No reason not to flash the offi
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Where is this magic google factory image for the Sprint or Verizon Galaxy Nexus?
HTC One X Receives Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean (Score:3)
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/436822/20130219/htc-onex-android422-jellybean-cyanogenmod101-nightly-rom.htm [ibtimes.co.uk] The original HTC One X seems to be updated just right :) perhaps your experience is from fantasy...interestingly their allegedly is less Sense and more Stock in this Android too :)
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Or he has any phone other than that one. My GF has a Rezound and it is on 4.0 still.
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CM10.1 nightlies for a device released last spring just starting now is nothing to be proud of.
S-ON bullshit plus rampant GPL noncompliance = HTCs suck to work with for developers.
Samsungs with Exynos chipsets aren't much better... All of the Exynos maintainers have switched to Sony.
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HTC is decent. Worst case, unlock the bootloader and grab an unofficial ROM that is well maintained.
I do prefer Motorola phones, because their cellular quality just seems better on average. However, until they offer some way of unlocking bootloaders, I rather go with HTC, Samsung, or another brand that gives me the ability to have unfettered access to the device I paid for.
Re:Camera? (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest problem with cell phone cameras is that the pixels are small and not sensitive. HTC decided to go with fewer, bigger pixels that collect more light and are more sensitive. I'd much rather have a 4 MP picture with less grain and noise than an 8 MP picture with more grain and noise. After all, you only look at the pictures at around 2 MP max.
Better camera in some ways (Score:2)
1) As mentioned, the photosites are larger so in theory it may have better low light performance (though some 8MP cameras have technology to help that as well).
2) The new camera has something called "Zoe" mode, where you can record a video at full resolution, and use any point in the video later, at any time, to pull a full-size still image from.
They are just trying a slightly different take on a cell camera, which I think is a great idea.
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It's 4MP. Many phones have 8MP these days. Seems like an odd corner to cut.
The funniest thing about your reply is the Insightful moderations. Clearly neither you, nor the mods, read the article.
Hint: megapixels effectively never matter when it comes to consumer digital photography...
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I /almost/ agree with you. I severely regret getting my current phone (Galaxy Nexus) because it has no SD slot and only 16gb of space. And I filled that up real fast.
However, it looks like SD slots are pretty much going away, and these phones Do come with 32 or 64gb of space which should be plenty for the next couple of years.
That's my main complaint against the Nexus 4, and the reason I won't get one. The max space on that thing is 16GB which is just ridiculous.
That is because its not about your Apple (Score:2)
And one that includes a plug for the stillborn NFC technology too! WHERE'S THE FUCKING IRDA PORT BITCHES?
I'm sorry right now Apple are not innovating
Lets Compare Phones your flagship phone with HTC's
iPhone 5
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1.3 GHz dual core Apple A6
1GB LPDDR2-1066 RAM
4-inch (100 mm) diagonal
640 × 1,136 pixels at 326 ppi
HTC One
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1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600
2GB of RAM
4.7-inch display
1080p(1920×1080) Super LCD 3 display at 468ppi 1080p
Don't piss on my back and call it rain (Score:2)
re-read your post it tries to justify a cheap, slow, memory shy, low resolution, second rate software iPhone...and justify against the flagship HTC phone. That is not going to happen, not here. The only response is that Apple is going to step up, and in four months is going to have a response of killer updated software...and hardware, and it is more than capable [at least foxconn is]. Want to see how to respond watch Samsung and its Galaxy launch...although personally I want to see the Xphone from Motorola.