Motorola released the Skip tag line around 2013, including a keychain battery that could charge your phone, and had Bluetooth and could use that service to locate whatever it was attached to.

…in 2013.

“My new email address is persen@icloud.com”

Done.

No explanation necessary. Just give people the new address.

(Just used icloud as a bad joke there.)

They don’t even need to push an update, they just need to send a kill command from their activation servers.

There are some that do power negotiation on the input side, and then power negotiation on the output side so you can have your cake and firewall it too.

I want a metal back phone

Steve Jobs did too, they still needed a plastic window for some antennae on the OG iPhone, then went to full plastic. It has become worse now, the back isn’t just for wireless charging. It is also for NFC, UWB, and often cellular/gps/wifi/bluetooth may share antenna connections through the back.

Right there with you though. NFC could probably be packed in a band at the top of a phone. UWB seems of dubious value thus far.

I miss the Nexus concept. There were some whiffs, but then wins like the Nexus 6. Having a vendor juggle was always fascinating, and they mostly used good modems.

Sounds like they may have set it up to wipe for security paranoia, and maybe not to be jerks?

That’s fascinating software! Thanks for the share!

Health Connect “beta” is a battery hog. Until they fix those issues, it’s a non-starter for anyone caring about battery life.

That OG Moto X with rubberized back was delicious. First phone in a long time that felt worse with a case, and fit so deftly in the hand. Camera was pretty amazing too for the time.

To be fair, the camera flash alert light was meant for deaf people. Others just chose to use it.

Sure would be nice to see status LEDs make a comeback though.

Would kinda work on T-Mobile but no 4G/5G band 71 as another commenter mentioned. Would work ok on AT&T but they probably would block it. Would be terrible on Verizon without band 13.

Would be a good Wi-Fi mp3 player though.

No, they don’t care about privacy. It is just marketing buzz. They give Google and Facebook access to internal data for money. They give governments access to iCloud data for market share.

They then design the OS full of dark patterns to trick you into enabling iCloud. They have telemetry on every aspect of the operating system from a timeline down to the millisecond as to when and where you opened and closed browser tabs, to what application was consuming power at a given time, to where you go and what bluetooth and wifi devices you saw along the way. Metadata scrapers index the contents of your devices under the guise of making it “smart and helpful.” The health monitor is ostensibly capable of dead reckoning location tracking, and you have to jump through hoops to even shut off BTLE when the phone is off.

Their communications platforms log all sorts of metadata, (this can easily be seen by requesting a GDPR data dump) and if one believes they don’t tee every iMessage conversation off to three letter agencies and who knows where else, one would be sorely mistaken. (This, I don’t know of direct evidence of, so it is more inferred based on how the messaging technologies work and how the government(s) wouldn’t truly allow privacy to exist.)

One can’t even stop their Apple product from talking to Apple servers, as they run access to their own systems on a layer of abstraction above the user’s userspace network layer. If they so choose, they can brick your phone at a moment’s notice using their “activation” infrastructure.

Nothing they do is privacy-oriented, beyond making it slightly difficult for Johnny the bicycle thief to gain access.

All without any of the code being available for inspection.

It started as a hardware problem and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. LTE needed more and larger antennae for lower frequencies than older tech. Four cellular antennae are now pretty standard. Then you have wifi, Bluetooth (which can share if they can TDM), wireless charging, NFC, ultra wideband, GNSS. Then the chips are so powerful they need heat dissipation systems installed (or just lame thermal throttling like what Apple does.)

The modems require more power, (especially at the beginning of LTE) which means bigger batteries. LTE and NR have reduced range compared to the older narrowband technologies, so the phone needs to use more power to transmit, especially when carriers like Verizon didn’t backfill cell sites to compensate for the reduced coverage.

Then, cameras, one wasn’t enough, 4 or 5 are very common now (usually 3 primary and depth or low res sensors for aiming.)

When tablets became popular, many people decided to just have a large phone screen rather than a tablet, further entrenching the size.

The tech is more mature now, a 2-antenna MIMO antenna for cellular would suffice, albeit at the expense of network performance. Likewise one camera with a depth sensor would work, although mobile photography would be more limited. Dropping some limited-use items like wireless charging and ultra wideband could further shrink space.

So it would be possible now, but as others here have mentioned, the supply side focuses on larger hardware.

Ironically, at this point I’d almost prefer a smart watch with LTE and stop carrying a phone altogether. However, the aforementioned antenna issue makes it so watches generally have poor to unusable signal, poor battery life in cellular mode, no camera, and the 5G NR low power spec/chips aren’t fully done yet, so it’s LTE only on them, which, with carriers transitioning to 5G will make it so watches can only access a handful of congested bands.

Also, that device manufacturers tend to design smart watches to be companion devices to a smartphone rather than primary makes that concept’s execution problematic.

Another idea I had that was anti small phone but huge battery boost was to just bring a backpack or a satchel or whatever. Carry a full sized tablet around, and use a Bluetooth headset for calls. However, tablets are also often crippled by carriers/manufacturers so they can’t do common things like SMS or voice calls, and Apple has basically monopolized that market.

I know how it is. Used to work on phone chipsets. That being said, I have no idea how pixel 8 is doing this, but likely the Bluetooth chipset has a mode it can go into to behave like AirTags and just pulse out a BTLE beacon occasionally with both the main OS and sub-OSes turned off and power just being trickled to VCC on the BT chip.

Edit: apologies, didn’t mean to sound so curt. Tl;dr: I know how bootloaders run to allow battery charge while off, not sure how pixel 8 is doing their magic-to-be but have a good theory.

That’s the bootloader. It boots when power is connected. It’s limited in functionality.

Deleted the above as it was a double-post and it orphaned other comments. Whoops.

They can’t claim carrier compatibility yet before they even source the parts. (They’re in Japan right now sourcing Chinese parts, allegedly, and only have renders thus far.) Let alone until they have a working prototype to test against fyi.

Carriers may very well not certify the device due to compatibility issues. Or they won’t be able to afford the certification process.

Apple has different design tradeoffs, they use smaller camera modules than Samsung, at least compared to the last few Samsung models, for example. They also tend to use smaller batteries, and charge them slower, requiring less cooling components. They also design more of their components in-house than other manufacturers, allowing them more efficient use of space. Their RF also tends to be inferior to Samsung, trading antenna design for space. Apple also uses inferior cooling solutions, relying on software thermal throttling to cut down on the physical size of the device. The whole trade-off of what can be fit in that smaller space is something each manufacturer has to make per model.

Optical zoom will always be superior to digital from the perspective of getting focused light onto a sensor, it’s just science. Digital methods will indeed continue to improve, I’ll leave most of that philosophical debate to those more passionate about camera tech, however. They’re definitely leveraging the new coprocessor to enable better image processing, in the same way Google leveraged their ML coprocessor to improve pictures out of Pixels a few generations back. Companies think software processing of images can “work around” image quality that requires physical hardware. (Look at Samsung Moongate.) It results in images that may end up being visually pleasing, but as for image quality, that’s debatable. (Zoom in on a Samsung zoomed picture of a pine tree for example, the way it tries to contrast/filter/process the branches makes them look like some 1990s Photoshop unsharp mask filter job meant for newsprint.)

Good conversation.

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