I REALLY wish these companies would drop the extra sensors. It’s just for the look, to make it LOOK more expensive. It’s better than when cheap brands would put fake lenses on the back of a phone, but not by much.

I try to tell people to “upgrade in place” and save money, unless they WANT to try new things on their phones. If you WANT to try playing more graphics intense games or edit video/podcasts from a phone (and you werent don’t that already on your current phone) it makes sense to shop a more powerful replacement. Otherwise, let’s say you have a three to four years old premium phone, and you want to keep doing the same things with it, then replacing it with a mid-ranger should still be a slight performance upgrade, move you down a price tier.

If you can skip premium phones from this year, you’ll get noticably better battery life. The Samsung fabbed Snapdragon 8Gen1 is kind of a dog. 8+Gen1 and 8Gen2 were fabbed by TSMC, and deliver a significantly better performance per watt.

We keep seeing these “record breaking” articles about Samsung selling more phones than some previous high watermark, but increasingly, Samsung can’t seem to sustain interest in their products past the first surge of pre-orders.

The S8 and S8+ went on to sell 41 million units according to analysts. That doesn’t include a Note.

I’ll lay the prediction out that Samsung will sell fewer Galaxy S phones with three models this year than they did with two models back in 2017.

Always worth mentioning the free version of davinci resolve. It’s feature complete for your described needs, doesn’t hassle with things like watermarks, and the tools are great if you ever need to step up to something a little more robust.

Awww… Simpler times…

We saw a glimpse of some great mobile awareness in Cortana. Contacts and location reminders were amazing on windows phones.

“Next time I talk to my wife, remind me to ask bout the dogs medication.” Phone call, text, or email, I’d get a reminder.

“Next time I’m at the store, remind me to buy bread.” “Which store?” “Any grocery store.”

Phone assistants have basically been going down hill since windows 10.

Google is using an order of magnitude more electricity to basically copy Siri. Neat.

And for how expensive portable consoles can be, I’m not calling anything a “steam deck killer” until I’m also confident it can be repaired and upgraded for years after I buy it.

I really want to try the withings. The new fossil hybrid is more like a Pebble. It’s a solid little notification machine.

Can’t blame them. Google cut mobvoi and fossil off at the knees, while courting Samsung. Why would they stay? I hope they try another hybrid watch.

Seems to me that Android as a platform was healthier when there was broader competition, and a wider range of designs and features. Samsung peaked with the S10, and sales have plummeted the more they copy Apple.

The only benefit to Netflix games is that these games have no ads or IAP.

Direct report from the FTC. ISPs are DIGGING into your web behavior. https://www.ftc.gov/reports/look-what-isps-know-about-you-examining-privacy-practices-six-major-internet-service-providers

4K120 is the most useful “extreme” video mode, and it’s a shame more companies haven’t supported it, just ZTE, OnePlus, and Sony. It’s crazy flexible. Can be easily dropped to 60 or 30 fps, and makes for absolutely stunning slow motion. It’s such an easy edit in something like LumaFusion to time stretch it. Even silly little family videos look so much cooler at that resolution in one quarter time. When done right, at a good bitrate, it looks much better than most phones’ potato quality 1080p slow motion. Sony absolutely chose right offering 4k120 over 8k24.

I have my daughter’s first steps in 4K. That was roughly seven years ago. Shot from an old LG. That little clip is amazing, and it looks so much better than what 1080p at the time would have looked like.

I honestly thought they already had…

More video out support and desktop modes. Mid-ranger phones are more powerful than budget Chromebooks. It’s silly to act like these pocket computers couldn’t replace a LOT of folks home PCs or laptops.

Dang. Those are two rough chips to recommend at the end of 2023. The 8Gen1 isn’t as bad as the 810 that would melt solder, but it’s not gonna age as gracefully as the 865 or the 8Gen2. Sad that Samsung’s own design is still poorer than the 8Gen1.

It’s higher level, but video editing on mobile got ugly with this. I’m totally fine to pay for new plugins, but there’s no processing done off my phone. There’s no reason to subscription lock features like 4k rendering and plugins. Especially when free editors are pretty good (after dealing with ads) or Lumafusion is great with a one time purchase.