Overkill? LG Phone Has 2560x1440 Display, Laser Focusing 198
MojoKid (1002251) writes LG is probably getting a little tired of scraping for brand recognition versus big names like Samsung, Apple and Google. However, the company is also taking solace in the fact that their smartphone sales figures are heading for an all-time high in 2014, with an estimated 60 million units projected to be sold this year. LG's third iteration of their popular "G" line of flagship smartphones, simply dubbed the LG G3, is the culmination of all of the innovation the company has developed in previous devices to date, including its signature rear button layout, and a cutting-edge 5.5-inch QHD display that drives a resolution of 2560X1440 with a pixel density of 538 PPI. Not satisified with pixel overload, LG decide to equip their new smartphone with 'frickin' laser beams' to assist its 13MP camera in targeting subjects for auto-focus. The G3 performs well in the benchmarks with a Snapdragon 801 on board and no doubt its camera takes some great shots quickly and easily. However, it's questionable how much of that super high res 2560 display you can make use of on a 5.5-inch device.
I have an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have an idea (Score:5, Funny)
That'll never work.
Probably not (Score:5, Interesting)
When Google still owned Motorola they tried to make some quality designs that had a lot more polish than the typical Android phone, but the sales didn't follow because it didn't have the bells and whistles that attract tech geeks or the type of people who fill buy based on some shiny, new feature. Similarly, none of the sales people were pushing it for any reason (usually some kind of kickback^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsales incentive) and so sales were poor and Google ended up dumping Motorola because they couldn't make a profit with the company.
That and if they make a quality device that lasts for three years, they can't sell you a new phone after two. Why do you think so many of the manufacturers and carriers stop providing Android updates even though the device could easily support them or a different version of the essentially the same hardware is getting the update?
Re:Probably not (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps part of the problem was that (prior to Google ownership) Motorola had already put off many of the geeks by producing the most locked-down phones of any Android manufacturer.
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Still does. I just bought, and then returned, a Moto X after discovering that Motorola's "unlock your bootloader" page is a sham. Tried it on a brand-new, retail, unlocked device and got "Your device does not qualify for bootloader unlocking" . The better part of an hour going round in circles with their tech support and they are unable (or unwilling) to even state the criteria that would, theoretically, make a device "qualify".
(An aside: While most companies might claim unlocking or rooting a device "could
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Motorola has actually seen a large amount of success with the Moto G (and is trying to expand further into the lower end of the market with the Moto E). http://www.phonearena.com/news/The-Moto-G-is-the-most-successful-Motorola-smartphone-of-all-time_id53190
Re:Probably not (Score:5, Interesting)
The Moto G is selling like hot cakes, and rightly so.
Just maybe not in the US, but India and friends are a bigger market, at the G's lower price. With the self-inflicted implosion of Nokia a big gap in the market opened up over there. And it's a new market not an already saturated one.
Google got the patent portfolio, which was what they were really after. Hardware isn't their core business so of course they'd move that part of the operation on at the first opportunity.
Re:Probably not (Score:4, Interesting)
When Google still owned Motorola they tried to make some quality designs that had a lot more polish than the typical Android phone.
I don't consider phones without user replaceable batteries "quality design". For real quality oriented design, the goal should be "as long as a network exists". And considering that batteries are expected to last for about 3 years, they make for an obvious planned obsolescence.
My old Nexus One is still in use today( although not my me and with a new battery) and there is no reason to dump it as it still works as well as it did when I bought it. The 2 or even 3 year smartphone is a pure fabrication. For normal (non-geek) people, keeping a smartphone for 5-10 years should be the norm.
Re:I have an idea (Score:5, Informative)
I own an LG phone. (Nexus 4). It never froze up or broke, in fact I like it a lot.
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Whoosh. The target of the joke is Samsung.
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Its called the Nexus 5, and its been out for 8 months now.
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Normally poor quality isn't from the product designer, but some guy in middle management who want his bonus ships the product out before all the issues has been worked out. Then after he ships it out, factoring that they can fix the problems later on, then decides to move all the workforce onto an other project.
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Isn't that exactly what LG have done?
Google Cardboard (Score:5, Interesting)
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How accurate does Cardboard track head movement?
Note that head displays have been done many times before over the past decades.
The problem has always been motion sickness inducing head tracking, never the display technology.
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How accurate does Cardboard track head movement?
That depends on your phone.
It's not meant for playing games for hours. It just lets you actually experience this content that is meaningless without at least that much hardware. Well, supposedly. I frankly think that even without parallax correction, a user can get a lot out of using their phone as a window on another world, and I don't see any reason to restrict these supposedly three-dimensional experiences to people who have stereoscopic displays.
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Turning it on its side and putting it into the Google Cardboard (or similar) stereoptic holder gives you about a 1440x1250 display per eye. Looks right to me.
Now if (as I suggested in the Cardboard item) they installed two cameras on the phone back, separated by about eye distance, you'd have a camera that could take and display stereoptic pictures and/or do augmented reality without losing the scene's depth.
Embarrasment (Score:5, Funny)
The principle reason to put 2560x1440 pixels on a phone is to further the embarrassment of monitor manufacturers who can only manage to get 1/4 of the pixels into a 19" screen.
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Re:Embarrasment (Score:4, Funny)
With all that resolution, you could use Google to look up the difference between principle and principal.
Re:Embarrasment (Score:5, Funny)
Thats not fair. It just isnt.
Your not nice.
Re: Embarrasment (Score:5, Funny)
wewsch
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Some humour is just a little too subtle for some people. Even not very subtle humour.
Re:Embarrasment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Embarrasment (Score:5, Interesting)
The principle reason to put 2560x1440 pixels on a phone is to further the embarrassment of monitor manufacturers who can only manage to get 1/4 of the pixels into a 19" screen.
Monitor manufacturers like, LG?
Re:Embarrasment (Score:4, Insightful)
The principle reason to put 2560x1440 pixels on a phone is to further the embarrassment of monitor manufacturers who can only manage to get 1/4 of the pixels into a 19" screen.
We will soon be better off buying a smart phone and a Fresnel lens instead of desktop monitor and our computers will begin to look a lot like the ones in the movie Brazil.
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Re:Embarrasment (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually smaller screens are easier to produce. Larger screens need to be perfect over a much larger area. A defect will write off a much larger chunk of silicon and glass. There is more to go wrong too, since you need more track to wire up all those widely spaced pixels. Things like propagation delay start to become a major problem too, so you end up with multiple controllers for different parts of the screen.
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Agreed. My 8 year old laptop had a 17" display with 1920x1200 resolution, and when I finally had to get a new one, it was a 17" screen with "FULL HD!!" 1920x1080. *sigh*
My decade old 18" viewable CRT does 1920x1440. So why should I be content to go down to 1080 height? That's a good chunk of screen real estate lost.
Or go up to a monitor size that I can't use without moving my head?
Desktop monitors need higher DPI, now. No, not touch screens or built-in USB hubs and card readers, but higher pixel densities. And zero-bad-subpixel warranties. Dear manufacturer, If you can't make a quality product, learn how to, and then come back.
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You can get higher resolution 27" monitors relatively cheap [ebay.co.uk], or at least cheaper than you probably bought your decade old monitor. If you can't bear to move your head, might I suggest you sit further away from your monitor?
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Good thing that DisplayPort 1.3 supports a bandwidth of 32.4Gbps [wikipedia.org], and that the current DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2 that has been available since 2009 supports 17.28Gbps then, right?
The bandwidth has been there for far better than 4K for quite some time. Oh, and HDMI sucks - you're paying for royalty-encumbered down-spec'd garbage from a litigious organization in comparison to the royalty-free VESA standard that is DisplayPort.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as they don't shorten battery life, of course. That is still the Achilles heel of mobile devices, after all, and all those pixels likely increase the amount of processing needed to control them.
Give it a name (Score:3)
If you want recognition, give it a name - preferably a cool name, but at the very least something people can pronounce without sounding like they're playing Battleships.
Rangefinder handy for more than camera focusing (Score:4, Interesting)
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There are all kinds of LRFs on the market, and tanks and other military equipment use them.
https://www.google.com/search?q=laser+range+finder&client=firefox-a&hs=lCg&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=np&prmd=ivnsp&source=lnms&tbm=shop&sa=X&ei=71mwU_3NG6fJsQS1woGQBA&ved=0CAgQ_AU
Re:Rangefinder handy for more than camera focusing (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. I do architectural work, including taking measurements of existing buildings. If I could use this to get a point cloud of a room it would be amazing. I'd be willing to start programming again if it meant being able to access even rudimentary data. While high accuracy is probably not in this, even +/-3" would be good for small places (up to, say 20-25 feet).
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Specs On Paper & Buyer Mindset (Score:5, Insightful)
This is simply a stats arms race.
Seeing how Android flagship makers are using someone else's OS and app ecosystem, the only two places they can differentiate their products are through custom OS skinning (horrible) and product tech specs.
Considering how many Android users tend to be the "build your own PC" crowd who are hardcore gadget people, the specs bloat appeals to them.
Meanwhile, Apple is selling a smartphone with a tiny less-than-HD screen, a processor that toddles along at a whisker over 1 GHz and a tiny 1400 MaH battery, and they're doing quite nicely for themselves.
"Purpose Built" vs. "Specs in a Box" ?
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one that seems overheating, too. You can buy quite well speced smart phones (way better than an iPhone, as you have correctly noted) for a very decent prize. Manufacturers seem to be running out of ideas on how to get traction in this market, so this is what they come up with: over-the-top-specs.
A market full of smartphones that can't find a way to differentiate themselves from each other seems to me like a market ready for collapse.
Re:Specs On Paper & Buyer Mindset (Score:5, Informative)
Considering how many Android users tend to be the "build your own PC" crowd who are hardcore gadget people, the specs bloat appeals to them.
Oh... bullshit. There were almost 6 times as many Android devices sold last quarter than iOS. How are we still propagating the "Android is for geeks" line?
Meanwhile, Apple is selling a smartphone with a tiny less-than-HD screen, a processor that toddles along at a whisker over 1 GHz and a tiny 1400 MaH battery, and they're doing quite nicely for themselves.
Depends on how you look at it, in the States yes, but worldwide no, and Apple are rather in danger of getting left behind when horesepower does matter. Android isn't standing still, optimisations like ART may well give another speed bump. Apple make nice devices, but they're not immune to performance, and that'll get acknowledged eventually in the same way that we were told for years how the Power architecture was just as good as x86... until they switched.
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But what of it?. Does it offend you that some people prefer a more economical device? That not everyone feels spending $700 a year on a phone is a priority?
It's a weird compulsion to have their tribe be first. The reason I always find most amusing is "Apple make all the profit from smartphones", like that's a positive thing. It's like, er, guys, you know they are making all that profit from *you*? That if they make so much money it suggests their product is overpriced?
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534 ppi is getting close to the 600 dpi used for print. There is a good reason for using 600 dpi in print. At normal reading distances text looks nice and crisp. We are still have a little way to go before resolution increases become meaningless.
As for the iPhone, the CPU simply takes a different approach to the ones used in other phones. It is rather complex and gets more done per cycle. Other designs are simpler which allows for a higher clock rate, so performance ends up being broadly similar. The latter
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RISC is not worse as a general purpose computer. They do not only offer gains in specific problem domains, they are a trade-off that are complementary to CISC. If storage is limited, or you have a very slow bottleneck getting to the CPU then CISC might be better. Generally RISC is better as single-cycle instructions means it is easier to parallise instructions and less expensive for branch prediction misses.
Most CISC instruction sets are reduced to RISC micro-code within modern processors. Take a look at th
Re: Specs On Paper & Buyer Mindset (Score:2)
The "Apple ships and underpowered processed" gets an ehhh from me.
It's clocked low, but it's a 64 but processor with many branching features from desktops.
It may be slower clocked but it punches well above it's weight class. Which is usually missed because most PC kiddies only look at clock instead of benchmarks, and think 64 bit is only something that let's you use a lot of RAM, and don't really understand things like processor features.
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Wait for tha Apple zealots... (Score:2, Funny)
...they'll say something to the effect:
"I don't care, Retina Display is better."
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...they'll say something to the effect:
"I don't care, Retina Display is better."
Just wait until you experience Apple's new "Eustachion Tube"[tm] audio, it's better than all the things that were ever better before.
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"I don't care, Retina Display is better."
I hate to break it to you and I'm certainly not and Apple Zeolot - my phone is an HTC Desire HD which I happen to be quite happy with - but the retina display actually *is* better, compared to the G3, if not perhaps in size. It has a wider viewing angle and a higher brightness range. Both only slightly, but noticable under certain conditions. How do I know? Just saw a detailed video review on the LG G3.
Given the choice between 4
Re:Wait for tha Apple zealots... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't remember that. But I do remember a number of Adroid vendors introducing displays with even higher PPI, and I do remember Apple losing control of the tablet market after introducing a product that had quadruple pixel count as essentially its only improvement, while regressing in battery life and weight.
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A koan for LG (Score:3)
I do not eat with scalpel and fork.
Marketed for Asia? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Marketed for Asia? (Score:5, Interesting)
Glad you like it. We don't do anything special, really. It's mostly just FreeType doing the rendering, and HarfBuzz doing the text layout. Hinting is turned off by default, though, as we find that looks a lot better once you get to 200dpi. A 2012 Nexus 7 is now considered a fairly low resolution device, even though its 216 dpi would be pretty amazing on a desktop.
The new CFF renderer that's now open sourced and part of FreeType should make the rendering of CFF fonts a lot better.
This is why... (Score:2)
Nobody tests RF ability anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
Just once, I'd love to see some side by side comparisons of the end-to-end RF ability of these new phones. While voice calls, the kids tell me, are a thing of the past we are getting more and more dependent on data connections. And how you get data is via RF link. And yet I haven't even seen link quality mentioned in a single review for at least two generations of smart phones.
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Just once, I'd love to see some side by side comparisons of the end-to-end RF ability of these new phones. While voice calls, the kids tell me, are a thing of the past we are getting more and more dependent on data connections. And how you get data is via RF link. And yet I haven't even seen link quality mentioned in a single review for at least two generations of smart phones.
The truth is that there are few radio manufacturers. If you have Verizon in the US then it's almost certainly going to be a Qualcom radio. The exact same Qualcom radio that are in all the other phones of the same generation. Kind of hard to differentiate yourself if the carrier forces you to use the same thing everything else is using.
That brings up another point. Radios are carrier and region dependent. Verizon and Sprint use CDMA, while just about everyone else in the world (except Japan) use GSM.
Re:Nobody tests RF ability anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
Testing RF capability fairly is actually really difficult. You can't just put two phones next to each other on a desk and expect a fair comparison, because even within that distance the RF field varies and you can't control which channel the cell tower allocates to each either. The cell tower and phones also negotiate the lowest possible power link and again you have no easy way of seeing if one managed to link at lower power (because it is more sensitive) than the other.
There are ways of testing this stuff, using expensive equipment in purpose built rooms, but tech web sites don't have access to it.
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No one tests them because doing so is actually quite irrelevant for the end user. One way of gauging devices ability to receive is to unplug the antenna and inject signals. Then you get the receiver sensitivity of the device. You'll find in the mobile phone industry the sensitivity will be almost identical across the board. There are relatively few vendors of chipsets which all the devices use.
Then you're left with the quality of the antenna. Unfortunately one antenna may not be better or worse than another
Screen size (Score:2)
That is Length not width (Score:2)
I don't care how many pixels you stuff in there, it doesn't matter if the monster 5.5" screen doesn't fit in my hand.
There is a joke involved in you not being able to handle anything more than 4" ;). The dimentions of the phone are 146.3 X 74.6 X 8.95mm so its about seven and a half cm wide that is really not that big even for a young teenager.
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They are, but phones vary in width and length depending on hard buttons and bezel sizes even for the same display size.
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As someone who's profoundly nearsighted... (Score:4, Funny)
...I'm feeling a bit smug about this development. I can hold it six inches away from my nose, peer under my glasses, and have the equivalent FOV and resolution of a 28-inch desktop display, handheld.
Of course, if I want to do anything with it, I have to use my fingers, which appear the size of fireplace logs...
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At that distance, your nose is closer than your fingers.
Arm Lasers! (Score:2)
Captain Blork, arm the lasers!
(Hundreds of people end up in the emergency room blind after having their picture taken...)
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or one phone user winds up in jail after trying to take a picture of a plane on approach.
how's the call quality? (Score:2)
The Linked article doesn't even mention voice or call quality. (Or are these features so well 'nailed' by now, they're taken as a given?)
However, the article might have, but I'm not clicking through more than 1 page of fucking advertisements. (yes, there is a 'print' view, but it's still bullshit to break things into multiple pages just for ad revenue.)
Overkill? What overkill? (Score:2)
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/... [techcrunch.com]
How about a higher-spec F3 instead? (Score:2)
I've been running LG's F3 for a while, and there are things I love about it, and other things that I hate.
The good: Incredible battery life (can get two days with moderate use and still have battery to spare), slim design that can easily be operated with one hand, reasonably fast CPU, bright IPS display, good RF performance, and LTE. Also, it has a replaceable battery and a MicroSD slot.
The bad: That MicroSD slot is needed, because there's less than 1.3 GB of internal storage, and there's only 1 GB of RAM.
Pictures of planes... (Score:2)
Is this useful for your smartphone? (Score:2)
I don't know if this useful for your smartphone, but the virtual reality headset makers will be very happy.
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laser bean for focusing the object for auto detection? will that do harm to our skin,eye,body? radiation is not good to health, now the laser beam, really?
It's true, the combination of dangerous radiation and now us all being exposed to lasers at the same time will mutate our DNA and turn us into lizard people. And that's what THEY want.
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Re:laser beam focus? sounds harmful... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wonder if you can hack the laser rangefinder to work as a remote window listening device :)
Re:laser beam focus? sounds harmful... (Score:5, Funny)
Wonder how well the laser works through glass or plastic windows, or other common transparent stuff you might want to take pictures through.
Or underwater, 'cause, you know ... sharks.
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laser bean
the photonic flatulence can be a problem
suggest non-flammable cheese if possible
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Re:laser beam focus? sounds harmful... (Score:5, Funny)
And where are our ancestors now? They're dead, that's where. AC is right, radiation is lethal!
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Yup, Taking a picture near an airport will now get you in jail...
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It seems that for a long time (say, up to 90s or 00s) it was believed that Gates said that 640KB thing. Then people did some research and didn't find any solid evidence of him saying that. So for some years people were reminded that "Gates never actually said that". But during the recent 5 years or so, talks about it being true after all have been coming back. I personally haven't followed the research much to know what's the current opinion. Hmm.
At the time he is alleged to have made that statement, most versions of the then-dominant desktop OS, CP/M, were limited to a maximum of 64 KB. Weather or not he actually made that statement, at the time it would have been true.
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The same Bill Gates who, as late as 1995, dismissed the internet as a fad? That Bill Gates?
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Would this be the same Bill Gates whose 1990s book "The Road Ahead" talked about how important the internet would be?
Good thing you posted AC though so noone has to see you stuffing your foot in your mouth.
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Bill G [theatlantic.com]
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And it was true.
The internet in the early 90s was _slow_.
I didn't get cable with 10 mbit until 1996ish, and even that was slow!
What evidence do you have of Gates intelligence? (Score:2)
His father is a lawyer. Bill Gates did what lawyers do. He was extremely hostile toward the opposition. Because most people were so ignorant about technology, Microsoft was able to dominate. In my opinion, the dominance of Microsoft was due to the hostility, not to the quality of Microsoft's products.
Read the book, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft, by Paul Allen [cybertester.com] (PDF file). Paul Allen quit Microsoft be
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No, Microsoft's domination is down to pure luck.
If Compaq hadn't cloned the PC BIOS, or the IBM PC been a flop, Microsoft would have been just a page in history now along with Lotus, Ashton-Tate and various other software houses that got borged by IBM and other large companies. With no IBM PC, MS-DOS would never have sold much, and would never have been the "Microsoft tax" that bankrolled the first versions Windows and Microsoft Office. Even Intel might be a secondary player today, it may have been Zilog wh
Battery Runtime (Score:2)
More, more, more. The only thing i'm missing is battery runtime and no vendor gives a shit about it.
Actually L or Lollipop includes Project Volta, which will add battery saving tools for developers and users alike. A "Battery Historian" gives more info on exactly what's draining energy, while a battery saver mode lets users squeeze up to an extra 90 minutes out of each charge.
That is vampire modes that turn smartphones into to dumbphones to extend smartphone my several times. I have witnessed it with the samsung galaxy S5 and was very impressed. I own the current Nexus which I love, but comes with a batt
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Overall, very happy with the HTC One (m8) other then I wish it was about 1/2" to 3/4" smaller. HTC did a good job with the UI and it's very snappy, makes my 18 month old Asus TF700T Transformer tablet feel slow (both are quad-core units).
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You appear not to have bothered to read about the new battery results
http://bgr.com/2014/06/09/lg-g... [bgr.com]
Screen contrast is down, indeed, though it went from the brightest smart phone to merely middle of the pack, which is a shame.
http://www.gsmarena.com/lg_g3-... [gsmarena.com]
I'll admit I never really worry about black levels on a phone as long as they are dark-enough, though, since I never use it for critical cinematic viewing and suspect most of the population is with me on that. The loss of max brightness is, imho, the
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The problem with the BRG battery results is they rely on LG's "opimizations" which only work when you're doing things like browsing the web. When you need to push the device like playing 3D games, all bets are off. If the benchmarks showed the G3 in a looping in a N.O.V.A. 3 demo, I'd be impressed, but they don't,
The real issue here is that even my G2 slows down in heavy fights in FPS games and doesn't have enough battery life. With the G3, they increased the number of pixels that must be rendered by nearl
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You know there are things called glasses, contact lenses and Lasik?