smartphone

Computer Latency: 1977-2017 →

December 26, 2017 · 15:35

Dan Luu:

I have this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices I’ve run into in the past few months. Here are the results […]

It’s a bit absurd that a modern gaming machine running at 4,000x the speed of an apple 2, with a CPU that has 500,000x as many transistors (with a GPU that has 2,000,000x as many transistors) can maybe manage the same latency as an apple 2 in very carefully coded applications if we have a monitor with nearly 3x the refresh rate […]

On the bright side, we’re arguably emerging from the latency dark ages and it’s now possible to assemble a computer or buy a tablet with latency that’s in the same range as you could get off-the-shelf in the 70s and 80s […]

The smartphone results that Dan posted put things in perspective.

Not As Essential — Andy Rubin’s Phone Gets A $200 Price Drop →

October 23, 2017 · 08:44

Darrell Etherington, writing for TechCrunch:

Regardless of the reason, the price drop makes Essential arguably the best value smartphone on the market, and definitely the best Android device in that range. It’s one major failing has been its camera, which launched as a slow and buggy feature compared to most out there, but the subsequent camera software updates have improved its speed and reliability a lot, and more updates are promised in the future, too.

It will take a while before we get to the designs of the phones they used in The Expanse. Accepting all of the design trade-offs until we get there won’t be easy. They will however fuel the fires of many flame wars to come.

RED is Making a $1,200 Smartphone With a ‘Holographic Display’ →

July 7, 2017 · 08:25

Sean O’Kane:

High-end cameramaker RED has just announced a premium smartphone called Hydrogen One, and the headlining feature is something the company is referring to as a “holographic display.” A buzzword-filled press release for Hydrogen One says that the 5.7-inch display somehow uses nanotechnology to “seamlessly [switch] between traditional 2D content, holographic multi-view content, 3D content, and interactive games.”

The teaser image paints it as hideously ugly. That design might work on RED’s cameras, but it sure doesn’t look good on a smartphone. Waiting to see the finished product, but there’s no way I’d put down $1200-1500 on that without seeing the whole picture.