#the battery has been broken since 2018 and the screen has been replaced and the keyboard has been replaced this thing us so fucking shit

[luckyshrimpdude]

It only took me 5 hours to update! Go Apple! New record!!!

[dailytechnologynews]

I recently visited both a Microsoft store and Apple store for device repairs and my experience was wildly different

Short Backstory:

I am the IT Manager at my company, so I deal with a lot of repairs on all kinds of devices... I normally get pretty good service from most of the manufacturers that I deal with but every now and then I get really good service or really bad service, and I try to put my money where my mouth is and spread the good or bad experiences I have.

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Microsoft:

At my job, I use a Microsoft Surface Book 1 as my daily driver machine. It gets a lot of use, and when I purchased it, I decided to go the extra step and get an extended warranty just in case. About 6-9 months ago, my Surface started acting wonky as a result of the battery in the screen no longer functioning. A few months ago, I noticed the bottom of my Surface was becoming detached from the chassis... It looked like the adhesive that was holding it together was wearing out. Not thinking too much of it, I checked my warranty status and I was literally 6 days beyond my warranty date... FML... so I figured I would just use the laptop until it died and replace it.

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Apple:

We have a "heavy user" that goes through phones pretty fast... most of the time they get lost, but usually if there is an actual problem with the phone, it's pretty obvious what caused it (broken screen, etc.). So I purchased this person an iPhone X in June of 2018... In maybe the end of July, early August I get the phone back from him saying that it no longer turns on. I try a couple different recovery methods and get nowhere so I ask what caused it, and he says he thinks it may have got wet, but he says it was like splashed or dropped in a puddle or something to that effect... (He has no reason to lie, it's an owner of the company, it's his money, and he has confessed to WAY worse damage to phones and laptops)

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Trying to get help and Visiting the store(s):

Microsoft:

The mall near me has both a Microsoft and an Apple store, so I made my appt at the genius bar for the phone and figured I may as well bring my laptop to the MS store and see if they can give me an estimate for repair, since if it's only a couple hundred to repair, it will save me the trouble of buying a new one and setting everything back up. I go to the store, tell the dude I am here to look at new laptops since mine is pretty much toast unless they can fix it cheap, and he asks to see it. We go back to the workbench, and a lady comes out and tells me that I have a bulging battery in the lower part of my Surface (they have 2 since there is a detachable screen) and that they will need to replace it.

I ask how much that would be, and she told me it's a safety issue and it would be free of charge. I explain to her that I am out of warranty, and she tells me that is ok since it's a safety concern. I also ask her about the other battery in the screen, and what that would cost... She tells me that there will not be a cost... I repeat that I am not under my warranty, and she tells me that she is going to simply replace the entire laptop, free of charge.... I was literally speechless, and after a moment, she asked if that was ok, and I jokingly told her I was prepared for a fight... Not only did they replace it, but she did not have my exact model in stock, so they gave me one with a better GPU in it. Filled out a single form, signed a piece of paper, and went on my merry way with a new (refurbished) Surface Book... I was dumbfounded...

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Apple:

I brought 2 iPhone X with me. One was clearly damaged.... the other simply would not boot. He told me it's a flat fee of ~$600 to replace the one with the broken screen which I had no argument against.... No problem. I then showed him the ~4 month old phone that no longer powered up. He hooked it up to his diagnostic tool and got nothing from it... No surprise. He then took it in the back and came back out with a bunch of pictures showing me water damage.... I then asked how that could be, since the iPhone X is IP67 rated... which is not waterproof, but it clearly states that it can be splashed and submerged up to 1 meter of water for up to 30 minutes ... He then gives a blanket statement of water resistance is not waterproof, which I argued again that it can get wet... He then tells me that Apple will not cover water damage, and it will be a $600 fee to replace it. He then tells me that the user is too hard on their phones, and it's their fault. After trying to talk to him more, he basically just stood up and walked away, not wanting to talk any further... I left without repairing either phone.

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This phone had NO damage to it, no cosmetic wear, no broken screens, broken charger ports, broken speaker/mic ports, etc... It was less than 90 days old when it got wet. I am FULLY AWARE of Apple's policy of water damage not being covered under their warranty, but manufacturing defects are... If a phone has a rating that states that is protected against X, and then X happens and the phone breaks.. It should not matter what the warranty states... The certification states that it will be protected, and anything short of that should be considered a manufacturing defect/failure. The only thing that would have saved me was Apple care.. Another ~$200 for that, plus the ~$150 or so deductible... so half the cost of what they told me would be to replace it. It was truly despicable.

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I am no big fan of either company to be quite honest. I will say that I strongly prefer most products over anything Apple does, but I do see their value and understand why many people enjoy their products. However good or bad a product is, where companies really earn my business is support and customer service. I was actually ready to completely write off Microsoft as a hardware provider entirely due to saltiness from my expired warranty, but they completely turned me around with a simple act of good customer service.... They earned at least one return customer for sure... And, they didn't even pretend to try and sell me extra stuff, and I probably would have been convinced to buy something simply to thank them for not trying to fleece me.

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Apple is no stranger to bad customer service. Their genius bar that day was full of salespeople pretending to be service techs.. Basically every other person with a problem at that store was being told they needed to purchase new things instead of trying to fix anything... Apple care was pushed hard on everyone, and I just felt my skin crawling the entire time I was there. We are a company with a large iPhone user-base. We provide every employee with a phone, and I have been pushing people away from iPhones and iDevices as much as I can... I used to try and provide an unbiased opinion of what device they use, since supporting one device over another is not that much different.. We have a few Apple Zealots in our company, so we get a good amount of their products... With the money we shell out monthly/yearly for Apple products, though, I would expect a bit more confidence in the products I support, and I have little to no confidence left in them, especially after reading so many other "right to repair" and other scammy stories about Apple service all over Reddit lately.

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Call me a hater, a shill, a whatever-the-opposite-of-an-Apple-fanboy-is, etc... But I have a responsibility to the people I work for to make sure they get the best bang for their buck, and Apple is not on that list in any capacity for me, especially not after this.

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I really just wanted to share that not all companies are like this. Microsoft could have very easily just said "sorry, your battery is not covered, and also you are past your warranty date... the new laptops are over here, let's go pick one out".... The same is true for Apple... they could have said "hmm, well these are not waterproof, but since it's only 3-4 months old, it should not have had water damage from a simple spill/splash/whatever... let's get you a replacement."

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Thanks for reading (if you made it this far).

I would be interested in your good/bad stories from these or other similar companies!

[tabloidtoc]

National Enquirer, October 5

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Cops in the Crosshairs

Page 2: Fears for the health of Ryan Seacrest as Keeping Up with the Kardashians which is his cash cow is being put out to pasture -- Ryan is pulling his hair out about the potential loss of revenue and racking his brain trying to come up with something that can replace it 

Page 3: Ellen DeGeneres is in a panic fearing she may lose her daytime TV show and wife Portia de Rossi in the wake of the scandal that’s tarnished her once pristine reputation as the Queen of Nice -- Ellen is in the deepest funk of her life as most of her high-powered Hollywood pals have been ghosting her and she is convinced there may be no coming back from this -- what’s more Ellen is concerned additional bad news may drive away her wife Portia 

Page 4: Kelly Clarkson has vowed to remain silent about the nightmare behind her divorce from Brandon Blackstock to protect her kids -- Kelly is known for oversharing but she’s keeping her lips zipped about Brandon because she never wants her children to know how bad things really were with their dad 

Page 5: Cardi B’s divorce filing from Offset described her marriage as irretrievably broken -- Cardi accused Offset of cheating in 2018 five months after the birth of their daughter Kulture and Offset seemed to own up to his infidelities on Instagram -- following the massive success of WAP Cardi finally listened to pals who have been telling her to toss the cheater but she wants the break to be amicable and will accept a joint custody arrangement for Kulture 

Page 6: Kanye West is crowing he personally engineered the downfall of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and that he’s the one calling the shots in his marriage to Kim Kardashian from now on -- Kanye hated the show and his constant negativity wore Kim down and killed it for her too and without her it couldn’t possibly go on -- Kanye believes Kim’s appearance on the show was at the heart of all their problems and now that she’s out of there he’s got every hope they can fix things 

Page 7: Endless renovations at their Los Angeles mansion have left George and Amal Clooney at each other’s throats and the feuding twosome are on the brink of a $500 million divorce -- the construction work which has soared over budget to more than $1 million has confined them to close quarters with their twins Ella and Alexander and they’re constantly bumping heads, love-hungry Katie Holmes is heading for a showdown with new boyfriend Emilio Vitolo Jr.’s scorned ex Rachel Emmons who was blindsided by Emilio and now she’s demanding answers from both him and Katie -- Katie knew Emilio was engaged to the designer but launched a steamy fling with him anyway and Rachel is not finished with Emilio or Katie by a long shot 

Page 8: Hollywood Hookups -- Ray J and Princess Love split again, Kaia Gerber and Jacob Elordi dating, Cassie Randolph gets a restraining order from Colton Underwood 

Page 9: Queen Elizabeth snubbed Tom Cruise’s request for a private chat and it’s got the snobby superstar’s nose out of joint -- the Scientology poster boy got the bright idea to drop in on the British royal while filming the latest Mission: Impossible movies using London as a base because he is a huge royal fan but so far no one from the palace has responded and Tom’s ego is hurt because almost no one refuses the opportunity to meet with Tom and no isn’t a word he’s used to hearing and being ignored happens even less -- Her majesty would barely know who Tom Cruise is and he’d be just another American pipsqueak to her and Hollywood is not exactly her favorite place at the moment 

Page 10: Hot Shots -- Kristen Taekman of The Real Housewives of New York City in California, Riley Keough at the beach in Malibu, Frances McDormand offered the Vulcan salute before the L.A. screening of her film Nomadland, Jennifer Lopez at a lunch date in NYC, Bruce Willis out and about in Brentwood 

Page 11: A skin cancer scare has friends of sun-worshipping Caitlyn Jenner worried she’s playing Russian roulette with her health -- Caitlyn recently revealed a doctor took all the skin off her nose and reattached it to patch up a skin cancer scar -- she’s been treated for skin cancers on her cheek and nose but she’s a self-confessed tanning freak and can often be seen playing golf under the blazing California sun, Sofia Richie is getting revenge on ex Scott Disick by flirting up a storm with Will Smith’s son Jaden Smith and a string of other studs -- her phone was ringing off the hook with hot guys wanting a date and now that Sofia’s finally got Scott out of her hair she plans to show him what he’s missing

Page 12: Straight Shuter -- Gavin Rossdale plays tennis (picture), Kelly Ripa is fuming over Drew Barrymore’s new talk show and it’s been made clear to A-listers if they appear on Drew’s show they will not be welcomed back to talk with Kelly and Ryan Seacrest any time soon and the competition between talk shows to book big-name celebrity guests has never been more intense, there’s a new stud in town at ABC and it’s got World News Tonight anchor David Muir’s knickers in a twist because weekend anchor Tom Llamas is horning in on David’s spotlight, Britney Spears and her little sister Jamie Lynn Spears are looking for a home together because Jamie Lynn has accepted that she’ll need to help look after Britney for the rest of her life and Britney can afford to buy a house with separate wings so they’ll each have their privacy but Jamie Lynn can keep an eye on Britney 

Page 13: In the latest sex scandal to hit the Fox News network senior legal analyst and former New Jersey judge Andrew Napolitano is battling back against allegations he sexually abused a New Jersey man in the 1980s, frail Ryan O’Neal reconciled with daughter Tatum O’Neal after 17 years but he’s a long way off from doing the same with son Redmond O’Neal -- ailing Ryan has distanced himself from his only child with the late Farrah Fawcett since Redmond was arrested and charged with attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon and brandishing a knife and battery in 2018 -- Ryan sees Redmond’s troubles and demons as his alone to conquer and may even cut Redmond out of his will 

Page 14: Crime

Page 15: Reality show train-wrecks Kate and Jon Gosselin have renewed their toxic battle as the bickering exes engage in an ugly war of words over child abuse charges 

Page 16: Goodfellas movie gangster Ray Liotta has taken his whirlwind romance with brunette stunner Jacy Nittolo to the next level by tying the knot -- his new bride’s father was a real-life killer Stewart Woodman who was found guilty in 1990 of the execution-style slaying of his parents, Zac Efron’s summer lovin’ with an Aussie waitress seems to have already hit a sour note -- Zac has been living the high life Down Under with Vanessa Valladares since he hit up her boss for her number two months ago but by early September the pair were caught on camera in an outdoor cafe reportedly locked in a heated argument about their future -- this has been a fun fling for Zac but the reality is he has to head back to the U.S. and attend to his career while Vanessa is just a kid and her whole life is in Australia 

Page 17: Denise Richards is ditching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in a desperate bid to save her marriage -- the endless rehash of former co-star Brandi Glanville’s allegations they shared a same-sex fling despite Denise’s denials has pushed her relationship with alt-medicine guru Aaron Phypers onto life support 

Page 18: American Life -- I was trapped in wildfire hell 

Page 19: Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood plan to tell their story in a no-holds-barred documentary -- the country duo hopes to mimic the success of Walk the Line which was a biopic about Johnny Cash and June Carter’s fiery romance and they’ve been talking to producers and writers -- they’ll also discuss their weight battles and food binges and how they got back in shape with clips of Garth working out and Trisha whipping up some of her healthier meals 

Page 20: America’s colleges infested by spies -- enemy nations using top schools to steal vital secrets and recruit moles 

Page 22: They Stayed After Partners Strayed -- cheating scandals that couldn’t tear star couples apart -- Jay-Z and Beyonce, David Letterman and Regina Lasko, Woody Harrelson and Laura Louie 

Page 23: Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith, Kevin Hart and Eniko Parrish 

Page 26: Jaime King is locked in a vicious war with estranged husband Kyle Newman who has accused her of being a chronic drug addict and alcoholic and cleaning out their bank accounts -- Kyle also claims Jaime was abusing drugs during her two pregnancies and that their son Leo was born addicted to opiates -- Kyle said he makes $750 a month now as a writer and claimed he had to give up his directing career to look after their family and after their unsuccessful settlement talks in June he claimed Jaime went to Canada to film her show Black Summer leaving the boys with him for four months without support or any funds 

Page 27: Hoops phenom Maya Moore recently revealed she married Jonathan Irons the man she put her high-flying sports career on hold for as she helped free him from prison following his wrongful conviction more than 20 years ago -- Maya considered one of the greatest WNBA players ever ditched the league in 2019 to focus on social justice issues and secure Jonathan’s release -- Jonathan now 40 was only 16 when he was slapped with a 50-year sentence for burglary and assault in Missouri 

Page 28: Cover Story -- Cops in the crosshairs

Page 32: Acting legend Diana Rigg’s dying regret was that she never took advantage of the steamy chemistry she shared with Avengers co-star Patrick Macnee -- their sexual tension drove the series and young Diana always wanted to make it a reality but Patrick was married to Katherine Woodville at the time 

Page 34: Health Watch 

Page 36: Film femme fatale Sharon Stone is 62 but griped that folks are still angling to get an eyeful of her rack -- she compared her situation to Marilyn Monroe’s where she did movies that mattered but she still couldn’t get completely out of being that thing, Duane “Dog” Chapman claimed his late wife Beth haunted him after he found new love with fiancee Francie Frane 

Page 42: Red Carpet -- Robert Pattinson 

Page 45: Spot the Differences -- Laurence Leboeuf and Kenny Wong on Transplant 

Page 47: Odd List 

[echodrops]

The Promises I Made (2017-2018)

For the past eleven years, I have spent every New Year’s Eve compiling a list of fifty promises I intend to keep or fulfill over the next twelve months. The results have been truly amazing, and I have kept some promises I never thought I could. This year, for New Year’s, there will be a new set of promises for to me keep, but here are the old ones, for review!

The Promises I Made (2017 edition)

1) I will get a(nother) new job. Or probably just curl up and die. Status: Kept! I got a new job and moved to Texas. 2) I will translate at least one more month’s worth of Regenkatze. Status: Broken. T_T I did a few pages, but I didn’t get far. 3) I will repot all my plants that need repotting. Finally. Status: Kept, amazingly. 4) I will buy actual freakin’ curtains that I like for my house, RAWR. Status: Broken. I bought no curtains this year. D; 5) I will continue to utilize Plant Nanny to track my water intake and keep myself from getting dehydrated. Status: Broken. I was okay at the beginning of the year, but then the usage dwindled. 6) I will complete at least one craft project that requires me to utilize a new skill, like working with a new material. Status: Broken. I didn’t do anything really crafty this year… too busy moving. 7) I will repair the mortar on the fence out front and seal the bricks on the window sills. Status: Broken—ditto the above. Moved out and wasn’t able to really keep any of these promises about my Utah house. 8) I will finish at least 26 books over the course of this year. Status: …I read a lot of fanfiction. A lot. But not too many new published books. Made it to maybe ten counting the readings I had to do for World Lit class but other than that, nothing close to 26. 9) I will trim the grape vine and call the city to see about cleaning out behind the house because the water culvert is flooding into my yard and jeopardizing my garage. Status: Actually kept! It needs to be trimmed again, but yes, I was able to trim it down and keep it from flooding. 10) I will successfully pass Horsemanship II. Status: Kept. 11) I will broaden my music tastes this year by getting into at least three new bands that I have never heard of or in genres that I don’t normally listen to. Status: Kept! I got into a few new K-pop bands and also Spellblast. 12) I will do the laundry at least once every two weeks. I swear it!! Status: Uh… Somewhat kept? At the new house in Texas I have to wear nicer clothes to work so I have to do laundry more often, but I don’t know about at least once every two weeks… 13) I will finish my new Anime Expo costume early and not wait until the last moment! Status: Broken—I didn’t cosplay at all this year. D; 14) I will remove all the rocks from in front of my house because they are hella ugly. Status: Broken; see above about moving out of Utah and no longer being able to work on the Utah house much. 15) I will go to a dentist and get Invisalign or some work done to fix my front left tooth. Status: Broken. I swapped jobs and had to wait for my benefits to restart and then by that time it wasn’t a good time to get dental work done. 16) I will have at least a once weekly “game night” with my roommates. Could be fun. Status: Broken… I think that um… we played a few times. 17) I will replace the battery in my watch, finally. Status: Kept! 18) I will pay off at least half my credit card debt. Important adult thing, yo. Status: Broken, sooooo broken. T_T It just got worse, not better. D; 19) I will learn at least 100 new words in German and document them as I go to keep them fresh in my memory. Status: Broken. I totally forgot that I even made this promise… 20) I will keep up with my new book club as long as it is possible for me to attend (I.e., if I don’t move). Status: Kept. The book club kinda fell apart pretty quick, but I kept up with it until it did. 21) I will be better about walking my dog because I have been slacking lately. Status: Broken, I’m so sorry Kinguin… It’s sooo hot in Texas. 22) I will build a new PC to replace the desktop computer that my dog destroyed. SLFSFJNDFG. Still angry. Status: Broken. Moving sapped all my money away, so I could not afford a new PC. T_T 23) I will get the scratched lenses removed from my glasses and change the prescription on the orange pair of glasses too. Status: Broken. See the above deal with the new benefits not kicking in for 90+ days.

24) Also: I will get my black glasses fixed so that they stop FALLING OFF and flying into the every nearby rock and sharp pointy object… Status: Broken. T_T

25) I will obtain at least one six-star hero in Tales of Link. Don’t look at me like that. Status: Broken—I haven’t played Tales of Link in months. @_@

26) I will design at least ten outfits and post them. (I’m still trying with this one, dammit.) Status: Broken. …I guess I should probably just give up on this one…

27) I will organize my closets, especially the hall closet which looks like a bomb went off. Status: Broken. I moved out of my Utah house which did involve cleaning out the closets, but um… the closets at the new house might be just as bad now…

28) I will actually utilize the stupid Paint Tool Sai that I paid for. At least three fully colored artworks this year. Status: Broken. I was able to draw nothingggg this year. T_T

29) I will level all my battle classes to 70 in Stormblood. Status: Surprisingly broken. I wasn’t able to play much at all after July so my time for leveling just plummeted.

30) I will reach 700 followers on tumblr. You should follow me. I’m only marginally a waste of time and space. Status: Kept! I have 861 followers right now! Thanks everyone for the follows! :D

31) I will learn to make a new (delicious) cocktail or two. Status: Broken. I drank a new delicious cocktail but I didn’t make any myself.

32) I will lose ten pounds. Status: Somewhat kept? I don’t think I made it to a full 10 pounds but I did noticeably lose some weight.

33) I will reach at least 300 species on my birding life list. Status: Kept! I’m at 306 currently, thanks to making to Texas and seeing a bunch of new birdies. 34) I will win NaNoWriMo this year. (But pretend that I didn’t, to not disrupt my blue-purple-blue-purple NaNo site pattern. XDD) Status: Broken. I didn’t even get to like 5,000 words. T_T 35) I will obtain the Astrope mount in FFXIV. Status: HA. I think I’m at like 200/1000 for mentor roulettes. Broken. 36) I will see at least one new bird species in the wild that is not native to the United States. Status: Hmmm, not sure what I was thinking about for this one, but I did not succeed.

37) I will put a storm door on the side door of my house because water is leaking in (due to lack of said screen door) and causing damage! Status: Gonna count this as somewhat kept because I did try to get a storm door installed, but they wanted to charge me $300 just to install the door and I didn’t have the money at the time. But I did fix the gap beneath the door so that it no longer leaks. 

38) I will visit Nicaragua. Status: Broken. T_T I had the chance but things were so bad at work I didn’t want to blow my vacation in case I needed it… And I did end up needing it, so things worked out.

39) I will water my plants more consistently and take better care of them—to the point where the one orchid that hasn’t bloomed in years will bloom again! Status: Uh… somewhat kept? Namely, I moved and left my plants in Utah, but they’re being taken care of by others so they’re alive at least still.

40) I will write at least four new chapters of my Voltron fic. Status: Kept!

41) I will get duct work done to bring heat to the downstairs bathroom and side bedroom. Status: Broken… But we did get a bigger heater for the downstairs so at least it was warmer down there this year.

42) I will update my calendar with important dates—holidays, birthdays, etc.—and be productive about sending cards and well-wishes. Status: Uh… broken. I forgot I made this promise too.

43) I will complete my series of posts about Yato/Hiyori. Really. Status: T_______T One day. One day. Broken. 44) I will pamper myself more—spa day at least once a month! Status: Somewhat kept? Maybe like barely kept. I was good at this for the first couple months, but then it tapered off. 45) I will visit my out-of-town friends more often and make better efforts to stay in more frequent contact. Status: I think I’ll mark this as kept. I visited more people this year, anyway, including @rachelwritesstories! 46) I will make sure the lawn stays decently mowed this year instead of being embarrassingly tall and weedy. Status: Hrm… Somewhat broken/somewhat kept? I did move, but apparently the lawn has been at least somewhat consistently mowed since I’ve been gone. 47) I will do some work on my laundry room to make it look less like a dungeon. Status: Broken. The dungeon persists. 48) I will revise TVR, especially the early chapters, and move it to AO3. Status: Broken. I got like maybe 1/3 of the way through revising the first chapter. Um… maybe in time for KH3 or something? :C

49) I will get an electric tree trimmer to make trimming my trees out front much easier. Status: Kept.

50) I will keep these promises. Status: Mostly broken. T_T

Totals Kept promises: 12 Broken promises: 31 Somewhat kept/broken promises: 7

Jesus, I thought I was glad to see the back-side of 2016… 2016 had nothing on the roller coaster of a year that 2017 was. What a literal dumpster fire. While politics and the environment went haywire around me, my job situation grew untenable again (ooh, but hilarious karma—just last month they fired the shitty boss and REHIRED my old awesome boss… Except of course by then I had already, you know, quit and moved across the country to pursue a whole new career field… Well, c’est la vie!) and I ended up packing up everything and completely changing my life once again…

In just the last two years I’ve swapped career fields twice and randomly packed up and moved to Texas of all places. I experienced the drama of prepping for a hurricane and also got to see it snow in Mexico. Life’s weird.

Looking back on these promises, I honestly don’t feel too bad that so many of them were broken this year. I really had no idea what was going to happen in 2017 when I made last year’s promises, and so a lot of the goals ended up not matching up with my reality in the end. At the end of the day though, I feel like I’m in a much better place today than I was at the end of 2016.

I don’t think 2018 is going to be easy, but I do think it is going to be better, and that’s a good feeling to have. Let’s do this! The new set of promises will be up by tomorrow.

[exrayspex]

life update since i've been away recently

i actually feel like blogging again and am awake enough to do so for the first time in weeks! so, updates bc Stuff has happened:

so my dad had been unemployed (again) for a year almost exactly, and every single job he applied for in his career fell through. we think it's bc word has gotten out in the field that he's an asshole and that his alcoholism is starting to effect his work since his body can't metabolize it like it used to + he regularly injured himself while drinking. which still sucks. but he finally got over himself and started applying for jobs outside his field and got one! it's only part time and the pay isn't great (he's a shopper for a grocery shop + delivery service), but it's something! and we really, REALLY fucking needed it. he's still looking for a better job in his field, too.

phoebe bubba had had an ear infection that wouldn't quite go away even with me regularly cleaning it with special ear wash, and we were finally able to get her in to the vet. she had a bacterial ear infection and we got mediated ear drops for her. i gave them to her and poor baby HATED it, but all two weeks of the ear drops are done and i just checked her ear the other night and it's finally all clean and healthy!

COOKIES. i'm love baking, obviously, and wanted to make a shit ton of christmas cookies and try some new recipes. it took me a While to have the energy for it all, but i got around to it and enjoyed it so much and love the results! i made peanut blossoms, soft gingerbread cookies (which i made into lady and nonbinary gingerbread bears bc fuck men, gingerbread and otherwise), and slice-and-bake shortbread cookies w christmas trees in the middle and red-n-green sugar crystals! i freehanded the green triangles for the center and used very careful chilling and setting out to make the tree-shaped core and then put the un-dyed dough around it to make a round log with the trees holding their shape in the middle. very proud of how well i did on those, and without a tutorial or anything!

so we have been p broke lately and were preparing ourselves for a christmas where we just had delicious cookies and made a nice meal to have together in our pretty decorated room w our tree and foregoing any presents except for one to mail to my wee cousin, but! my mom remembered a couple days ago that my dad had lots of points with airline frequent flyer programs that would expire at the end of the year if they weren't used, that he racked up when working his old job. and the rewards programs allows you to use points to get gift cards for all kinds of places! so she did that and got several gift cards that allowed us to get gifts for some other family members, her boss and the woman she cares for, and have some left over to get each other some things! all without spending any actual money :D my dad and i went to target yesterday and used a gift card to shop for my mom, and it was tiring but fun! and i think my mom got me an over-ear gaming headset to replace my old one that is quite literally disintegrating!

so my phone is a galaxy s3 and i've had it for over 4 years, and my parents have the same. they still work, which is impressive actually, but they're very slow, we can only have a few apps at once bc they're so low on storage, lots of newer apps can't be installed on them, they're unable when anything is updating/downloading, my mom's camera is broken, my dad's has issues with receiving calls, all of them just freeze up completely and have to have the battery taken out to work again pretty regularly, etc. but my dad called sprint yesterday to try and negotiate a lower monthly bill/maybe switch plans, since we hadn't changed plans for years either.....and ended up being able to switch to a Better plan AND get us each a galaxy s7 and still have our monthly bill be $30 cheaper!!! apparently our old plan was a fucking ripoff lol, and he got us previously owned, refurbished phones that cost half the price of new ones of the same model. i think it also helps that he said how he'd been with sprint for over a decade but was looking into switching providers if he couldn't get a better plan and spend less lol. one of the gift cards my mom got is for amazon and i'm hoping i can find some decent cases and screen protectors for all three of us with it!

so i started playing neverwinter online last summer, and i've become hooked lol. i'm also in a good lgbt guild and alliance!! i almost quit the game after i hit max level since i couldn't solo most stuff anymore, but the people in it were all so nice and helpful and not judgey about me being still relatively new to mmos in general (i'd played a little bit of lotro, wow, and eso but not much, and i had once been super into fucking wizard101 lol, but that one's very different from most, actually more like magic the gathering than other mmos). anyway, i've started to break into actually being decently good at the game, i'm on nearly every fucking day lol, and i'm pretty involved in like contributing to guild stuff/running dungeons w guild people, and the dude who is the current guild leader is gonna mostly retire from the game in 2018 and asked me if i'd be up for taking over for him then, and i said yes! he's ranked up my permissions to do guild stuff and has been slowly showing me how to do things and what bugs to look out for when doing them, and it's fun and exciting! plus he's still gonna be around on psn and occasionally in-game after he goes, so i'll still be able to ask him for help/advice since i'm definitely not as knowledgeable as him. i've also been talking more in the guild and alliance chat and on mic too, and it's nice! ooh and i recently did some research and a respec on my main and she's now easily doing like 1.5x her previous damage and i've had a couple people be like "wow holy shit" since which like yes.....YES.....fuel my dps ego.....(also just? people in this game/guild generally seem to like me?? it's so unfamiliar and nice!) ((also also i started a tank alt and got her to max level already! and she's super butch and super hot))

our proposed plan of restoration was submitted to the historical neighborhood board thing and approved! and today the third contractor is gonna come over to discuss what work we'd want done on the house and provide an estimate. then my parents just have to do a bit more paperwork and can finish their application for the grant we can get since we're now in an official nationally recognized historical neighborhood! the grants are given in order of application, and there's currently only one ahead of us, so hopefully we can get it early on in 2018 and have that money to do some much-needed repairs on the house! the bird family living in my windowsill will fucking finally have to move lol. no more screeching and scratching right behind my head every morning! it won't be enough money to get every repair we need done, but it will def cover the worst stuff, like that and our rotted porch! also the contractor we're hoping to use is a nice guy who's done work for us before (he fixed our fence when it broke a while ago, my parents have some mutual friends of his, we trust him), and the other day when he was here my sweet hutchie made friends with him :) there were pets and purrs!

OKAY i think that's mostly it lol. thank you for caring if you actually read all of this! :D you are now up to date on the Life of Spex. also if any of you start playing neverwinter and want a guild invite, lemme know! :)

[ackhub]

2019 PC Build (pc-cairo)

This build log is about my 2019 PC build. Buying parts started in October 2018, and construction began in the January of the next year.

Buying parts

I reasoned that instead of buying everything in one go, I would wait for sales to pop for each part I needed. This was my "wait and see" strategy, which is why buying parts took over a month.

There were only two major decisions to make: one for the CPU and one for the GPU. After impulse buying a Freesync monitor on sale, I seriously considered a Vega 64 build. Yet, after hearing horror stories about how loud the “blower” Vega was, I decided to commit to a 1080Ti. My brother was able to find one on HardForums for a reasonable price.

The Ryzen 1700x was definitely the bang-for-buck option.  I hesitated because of buyer’s remorse for my college laptop, the budget Thinkpad T460s. Forgoing a more premium option made my life a lot harder for the three years of college I had been through. After confirming that it could run Witcher 3 on ultra at a reasonable pace, I decided to go with it over the Intel 8600k.

Another thing to remember. If you are in Texas on Black Friday, stay awake the extra two hours for California to reach midnight. This is how my brother snagged an insane bundle deal on Newegg, who called it off due to lack of inventory. We then went to a brick-and-mortar Microcenter, who honored an expired deal for a Ryzen bundle. The bundle included a cheap B350 motherboard, which became a problem in itself later.

By the end of November, I had ordered all the parts for the build. In hindsight, I regret waiting for sales at all. Buying everything on the same day would have saved a lot of time mulling over parts. Also, Black Friday prices ended up undercutting a lot of the deals I had jumped on a month earlier. In short, I didn't actually save any money by waiting and seeing.

Assuming I had all the parts, I began to assemble the PC, mounting the CPU on to the B350 motherboard. Due to an unexpected loss of stored parts during winter break, the build was stalled. This basic failure to keep inventory secure was the biggest setback so far in time and money. Were they stolen? Misplaced? Eaten? They had, for all intents and purposes, vanished in to thin air.

The shipping of the replacements was another ordeal. Replacement packages were a no-show for a week after the posted delivery date. Without any other options, I ended up requesting replacements for the replacements. This time at least, Newegg fronted the cost (or forced their supplier to).

Parts list

Even more mysteriously, more than a month after the posted delivery date, what I assume were the original replacement parts arrived. I sold the extra RAM and installed the SSD. The only thing we can learn from this is that USPS is terrible.

Construction

The first construction began on February 2nd, 2019. 

Everything had arrived. Compared to my last build, the build process was much easier. The improvements in case design made since 2010 was a certain factor. Especially impressing was the section designed for cable management. Without any skill or extra equipment, I got the cables mostly out of sight. Tom's Hardware, various paper manuals, and lizard-brain intuition covered all the rest.

After finishing, I tried booting the system. No response. None of the LEDs told me that I had built something that wasn't thousand dollar piece of garbage. After panicking for a bit, and then remembering to plug an important power supply cable in to the B350, the gods rewarded me with a successful boot in to Windows.

Construction 2

The second construction began on February 13th, 2019. 

The main goal of building a computer is to be able to turn it on. I was able to complete this goal in a normal amount of time. What was much harder for me was to get my computer to turn off.

From a forum post I made: 

Describe your problem. List any error messages and symptoms. Be descriptive.

PC can not wake up from sleep and can not shut down all the way. When I try to shut the PC down through Windows, the screen goes black and the fan seems to get a little bit louder. However, the motherboard fan LED will stay on (I've used AORUS Engine to turn off the lights for the graphics card, but before I did so the graphics card RGB would stay on too). In this state, the power button does nothing, so I have to force shutdown to turn the computer on again. When I try to sleep, the computer also stays in this half-awake state and the screen is unresponsive, even when pressing the power button/keys on the keyboard.

List anything you've done in attempt to diagnose or fix the problem.

Turned off Fast Startup in Windows 10 make sure Deep Sleep is off in BIOS Updated drivers Reset cmos with jumper and taking out battery. I've also tried shutting down when booting Ubuntu from a usb drive, it hangs on what looks to be a terminal window. Reset CMOS with jumper with all power cables disconnected. CMOS reset isn't fixing this problem. Reinstalling Windows, despite confirming with Ubuntu that it isn't an OS related problem. Interestingly enough, freshly installed Windows acts similarly to Ubuntu when attempting to shut off, where the shutdown screen freezes. Booting Windows in to Safe Mode also has the same problem when shutting down. In fully updated Windows, the motherboard can make it to No Signal before the computer has trouble shutting down. Downgraded BIOS to 3.0, upgraded it back to 5.4 with Instant Flash

Just for reference, other people who had similar problems with ASRock motherboards: 1, 2, 3

I gave up on my old motherboard and bought an Asus X370 on April 12, 2019. In a month and eleven days’ time, I spent around thirty hours of effort to try and fix a hardware problem. Another loss of time (and money).

Replacing a motherboard is annoying, because almost every other component connects to it directly. The only way to do it is to take your computer apart and put it back together again. Which I did. After the second “first” boot, I was able to shutdown without any delay. It only took buying a new motherboard and rebuilding the entire PC to fix whatever had been broken before.

Some doubt still remains. While installing the new motherboard, I realized I had used the wrong standoff screws. What are standoff screws? A new PC case comes with many sets of screws. One set works as a gap between the motherboard and the case, preventing electrical interference. During the first construction, I had used the wrong set of screws as standoff screws. The actual set was still sealed inside a ziplock bag. I needed to test again with the old motherboard and the right set of standoff screws to isolate the screws as the issue. That said, I had already applied some expensive thermal cream and mounted my CPU on the new board. I didn’t want to remove it and install it again on the old board just to isolate the standoff screws as the problem.

Given all this, there are two valid theories about the reason for the “shutdown” issue.

The old B350 motherboard was broken as a piece of hardware, or was incompatible with some other piece of hardware. It could not deliver the operating system’s shutdown signal to the rest of the machine.

Using the wrong set of standoff screws caused interference. This affected the circuitry and prevented a component from shutting off.

Theory 2 is unlikely. The wrong screws still created a generous gap for both components. As long as the metal on the motherboard wasn’t touching the metal on the case, they were still fulfilling their purpose as standoff screws.

Conclusion

Like any other endeavor, building a computer requires decision-making competence. I lacked this at several otherwise inconsequential steps. This made the build much harder than it needed to be. Still, it works. I’ve yet to find a good naming scheme for the computers I’ve built (all two of them), but I’ll figure one out one in time. 

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/when-will-you-next-buy-a-mobile-phone/

When will you next buy a mobile phone?

Image copyright Getty Images

The days when people camped outside stores to get their hands on the latest smartphone may well be numbered, if recent sales figures are anything to go by.

Despite a dazzling array of new devices on display at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: phones that fold, phones with buttons, phones with enormous batteries, expensive phones, budget phones, 5G-ready phones… they aren’t exactly flying off the shelves.

Samsung’s overall operating profits were down by 60% year-on-year for the first quarter of 2019.

Apple slashed its iPhone sales forecasts at the start of the year, blaming a slowdown, particularly in China.

It has since repositioned itself to focus on services rather than gadgets, unveiling a new TV streaming platform, gaming portal and credit card at a star-studded event in March attended by Oprah Winfrey and the actor Reese Witherspoon – with not a new device in sight.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionWATCH: Apple announces new services

Sales in China, the world’s biggest phone market, were down 20% year-on-year in February 2019.

That’s their lowest in six years, according to figures released by the state-affiliated research unit China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

Sales had already been slowing in Europe, says Marina Koytcheva, technology markets analyst at CCS Insight, and elsewhere, with the possible exception of India and Africa.

“I don’t think I have seen the market with such a negative outlook in the last 10 years,” she says.

“I don’t think we will ever again see the growth of five or 10 years ago.”

There are several reasons why.

Innovation (or lack of)

The top-end handsets have increased in price dramatically in recent years. In 2017, Apple boldly smashed the $1,000 (£775) price point with the iPhone X, followed by Samsung with the Galaxy Note 8.

“In less than a year, the $1,000 phone has become entirely normal,” noted Vlad Savov on tech website the Verge in August 2018.

Critics of the phone industry argue that at the same time, innovation has stalled. Each new handset might have a slightly better camera, slightly faster processors than the last, but for the average consumer, one black rectangle is pretty much being replaced by another.

In the last few weeks, both Huawei and Samsung have unveiled a new take on the black rectangle – the folding phone.

The Huawei Mate X folds out into an 8in device. It has split screen abilities, no notch and is 5G ready.

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Media captionWATCH: First look at Huawei’s folding phone

When it was unveiled, the audience gasped loudly at the 2,299 euros ($2,600; £1,996) price tag.

For those with that cash to spend on a new phone, is it exciting enough to break the global ennui?

“There will be a small number of big enthusiasts who will buy these phones but they will have to fall in price quite a lot to make an impact,” says Marina Koytcheva.

“They will have to start selling in large numbers.”

That will only happen if the device can prove itself useful.

“It’s impressive innovation,” says Ms Koytcheva .

“But why do you need it?”

And here’s another potential red flag: Samsung has now delayed the launch of its Galaxy Fold following reports of broken screens.

Big screens, small pockets

The traditionally male-dominated tech sector has been accused of ignoring at least 50% of its target market – women – in not acknowledging that women’s hands and trouser pockets are generally smaller than men’s while flooding the market with ever larger devices.

Image copyright Getty Images

When Apple announced it was discontinuing its iPhone SE, which has a 4in screen, Caroline Criado-Perez, author of a new book called Invisible Women, tweeted that the tech giant had “failed to update the only phone it makes that fits the average woman’s hand size”.

“Weak applause all round from my arthritic hands,” she continued in the now-deleted thread on Twitter in September 2018.

5G future

5G – the next generation of mobile internet – could give phone sales the vital injection they need.

Promises made for it include being able to download a 15-minute video in one second, potentially making home broadband redundant and getting all your smart gadgets properly connecting with each other.

However, there are no 5G devices on the market yet.

They are on their way – although global security concerns threaten to derail the rollout schedule.

Chinese firm Huawei is one of the few manufacturers of the infrastructure required for 5G and there are concerns from several countries, led by the US, over whether it can be trusted.

Mobile provider O2 said Huawei makes up only 5% of its UK 5G infrastructure, but it would take time and money to remove it all if the government orders it to do so.

“In October 2018, we expected 5G to have some positive effect on the market this year,” says Marina Koytcheva.

“We thought it would support it, but 5G is coming more slowly than we hoped.”

Phone freedom

And finally – a growing number of people are choosing to step away from their phones altogether.

Are you ready to break up with your phone?

Last year, France introduced strict rules around the use of smartphones in schools, banning them for all pupils under the age of 15.

Apple, Google and Facebook also released tools that show you the extent of your screentime – a move which was greeted with amused horror, and some criticism.

“It’s like locking an alcoholic in a booze cupboard and then helping them count how many bottles they’ve consumed,” said Catherine Miller, director of policy at the think tank Doteveryone.

The phone industry’s response to this desire to detach has been to unleash so-called companion phones – smaller handsets with more basic functions, designed to keep people connected without keeping them hooked.

Image caption The Punkt phone is one example of a companion device

Now whether the solution to you spending less time on your big phone involves you buying a smaller phone is perhaps debatable but it shows the industry is at least listening, having devoted years to producing devices specifically designed to maintain our interest.

Marina Koytcheva thinks the smartphone market is ultimately stabilising after a frenzied few years but predicts that 2019 is going to be “a difficult year”.

“Yearly sales of 2 billion mobile phones seemed so close just a few years ago, but might become a distant dream for the industry,” she wrote in a report on declining sales.

“Our new five-year outlook is for 1.9 billion units on an annual basis until 2023.”

[cottonfreakz]

Will foldable phones surivive their birth

It’s the overriding question about foldable phones: can they survive all that… folding?

The answer seems to be no. Take Samsung Electronics Co.’s new foldable handset. According to early reviews, it stopped working within just two days. That’s an ominous sign for the smartphone industry, which had been hoping the technology would provide its next growth spurt.

Samsung is expected to release the Galaxy Fold on April 26 in the U.S. at a price of $1,980 – roughly a third more than the most expensive iPhone. The device’s party trick? It folds open to reveal a 7.3-inch display, only slightly smaller than Apple Inc.’s iPad Mini tablet.

ButNews reporter Mark Gurman found that defects quickly emerged on the larger screen before it ultimately failed completely. He had removed a plastic film resembling the temporary protective layer that users typically peel off their new smartphones. Others had similar issues. Samsung subsequently told reviewers that the film was intended to be permanent. Either way, it looks like a major design flaw.

The screen on my Galaxy Fold review unit is completely broken and unusable just two days in. Hard to know if this is widespread or not. pic.twitter.com/G0OHj3DQHw

— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) April 17, 2019

he obvious point of comparison is Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7, which the South Korean company had to recall by the millions in 2016 after its batteries spontaneously burst into flames. The affair didn’t have any sustained impact on Samsung’s fortunes.

But if the issue with the Galaxy Fold proves to be widespread, its implications could be more severe. Not so much financially, because the company only expects to sell one million of the handsets this year – a rounding error compared with the 292 million smartphones it sold in 2018. The bigger risk is that a bungled launch of a product that isn’t ready poisons consumer appetite for all foldable handsets.

Samsung and many of its rivals have been gambling on the new form factor to, if not prompt a wave of new purchases, then at least allow them to raise their average prices. Smartphone sales have been slowing since their 2016 peak. Consumers are increasingly satisfied with the handsets they already own, so are replacing them less regularly. That’s why firms were developing foldable screens: Huawei Technologies Co. has its own competing model, while Xiaomi Corp. and Lenovo Group Ltd.’s Motorola are also working on the technology.

Samsung is easily the most significant of these players. Not only because it is the world’s biggest seller of smartphones, but also because it sells its technology to others, not least Apple. By some estimates, in fact, Samsung made more profit from supplying the iPhone X’s organic light-emitting diode display than it did from its own Galaxy S8. If Samsung gets the foldable tech right, then Apple could well use it in a future iPhone.

Samsung’s nightmare would be if the Galaxy Fold became another Google Glass. The smartglasses, released in 2013, proved an abject failure. The technology wasn’t ready and pushed the appetite for augmented reality eyewear back by years. Foldable phones are different – they have far more obvious uses – but Samsung has to be careful not to kill the market before it even starts.

[ladystylestores]

Realme Watch Review – GSMArena.com news

Realme debuted as a smartphone brand in May 2018 but it’s quickly expanding its ecosystem lately. The company launched its first TWS earphones Buds Air last December, then the first smartband, Realme Band, in March, followed by its first smart TV and smartwatch in May that are simply called Realme TV and Realme Watch.

The Realme Watch is kept at the center of Realme’s AIoT ecosystem, and in the future, it will be able to control multiple AIoT devices like air purifiers, smart lamp and smart speakers without requiring a smartphone.

Priced at €55/INR3,999 ($53), the Realme Watch comes with a 1.4″ color touchscreen, app and call notifications, activity tracking, IP68 dust and water resistance, and 24-hour heart rate monitoring. It also features an SpO2 monitor that measures your blood oxygen level. I used the Realme Watch for over a month and I’m ready to give you a rundown of its real life performance.

Realme Watch specifications

Display: 1.4″, 320×320 pixel color screen, 323ppi pixel density, 2.5D Gorilla Glass 3

Straps: Detachable silicon straps, 20mm width, 164-208mm adjustable length

Features: Real-time heart rate monitor, Blood Oxygen level monitor, IP68 rating, Sleep Tracking, Sports Tracking, Step Counter, Meditation, Smart Notifications, Idle Alert, Drink Reminder, Phone Finder, Weather Forecast, Music and Camera Control

Sports Modes: Outdoor Run, Indoor Run, Walk, Outdoor Cycle, Strength Training, Football, Basketball, Yoga, Cricket, Aerobic Capacity, Badminton, Indoor Cycle, Elliptical and Table Tennis

Sensors: PPG optical heart rate sensor, SpO2 sensor, 3-axis accelerometer, Rotor Vibration Motor

Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.0, Compatible with Android 5.0+

Battery: 160 mAh

Colors: Black, Blue, Red, and Green

Dimensions: 36.5 x 11.8 x 256 mm

Weight: 31 grams

Design

The Realme Watch has a minimal design reminiscent of the Apple Watch. It has a glossy finish and on its right side is a multi-functional physical button with a golden accent. It offers decent feedback and can be used to turn on/off the screen, go back, and power on/off the smartwatch. However, the button does make some noises when pressed which makes me question its durability.

The Realme Watch weighs just 31 grams, making it ideal to wear at night for sleep tracking. Its detachable silicon straps are also quite comfortable and durable. They are 20mm wide and have an adjustable length of 164-208mm. However, their design sometimes makes the process of wearing the smartwatch quite cumbersome.

Realme Watch

The straps are offered in black, blue, red and green colors and have two design types – Classic and Fashion. The former is available only in black color and comes bundled with the Realme Watch, while the latter arrives in all four shades and needs to be purchased separately.

The Realme Watch is IP68 certified, meaning you can take it in a shower and wear it while swimming, but like the Realme Band, the Realme Watch doesn’t track swimming so you won’t get any data about your performance.

The smartwatch packs a 1.4″ color touchscreen and below that is the Realme logo. It isn’t clearly visible most of the time, making us question the need to put it there in the first place. Realme could’ve avoided that to make the bezels smaller and pack a larger display.

Around the back, we have charging pins, PPG optical heart rate sensor and the SpO2 sensor. These are arranged inside a slightly elevated circular plate, which ensures the sensors make proper contact with the skin for accurate measurements and there’s no grime accumulated over time.

Charging pins, PPG optical heart rate sensor, and SpO2 sensor on Realme Watch

Display

The Realme Watch packs a 1.4″ color touchscreen of 320×320-pixel resolution. It has a peak brightness of 380 nits and comes with the protection of 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass 3.

The screen of the Realme Watch looks quite good indoors even at 10% brightness, but outdoors you need to crank up the brightness all the way up to 100% to be able to see the on-screen content. However, even at max brightness, it becomes a tad difficult to see the content under sunlight if the screen is covered with fingerprint smudges.

Since we are talking about brightness, it’s worth mentioning that unlike the Realme Band, the Realme Watch doesn’t support Night Brightness Setting in the Realme Link app, meaning you’ll have to manually reduce the brightness at night and then increase it during the day. This is really inconvenient and we hope Realme adds the Night Brightness feature to the Watch soon.

The Realme Watch currently supports a total of 12 watch faces with the default one displaying time, date, weather, steps, heart rate, and calories burned. The battery level can be checked with a right swipe on the homescreen which also presents quick shortcuts for DND, Lift Wrist to Wake Screen, Brightness, and Power Saving Mode.

Realme says more than 100 watch faces will be rolled out through an OTA, but no timeframe has been provided for that. At present, the smartwatch can hold a maximum of six watch faces on board and these can be replaced whenever you want through the Realme Link app. However, you don’t need the app if you want to change the watch face on the smartwatch. You can do that from the smartwatch itself by long pressing on the homescreen and selecting the watch face you like.

Realme Watch currently supports 12 watch faces

It’s worth noting that unlike some other smartwatches in the price range, the Realme Watch doesn’t come with a customizable watch face, but Realme told me it will provide this functionality with a future update.

The Realme Watch comes with a the Smart Notifications feature which alerts you of incoming calls, SMS as well as notifications from other apps installed on the paired smartphone. And there’s also the Lift Wrist to Wake Screen feature which turns on the display when you raise your wrist. This worked mostly fine but unlike the Realme Band, you can’t set it up to turn on/off automatically at a given time. It needs to be enabled/disabled from the Realme Watch manually which is quite a chore.

Software

Like the Realme Band, the Realme Watch also relies on the Realme Link app to be set up and operated. The app is currently only available for Android users and there’s no word on when it will come to iOS.

The pairing process of the Realme Watch is similar to Realme Band’s and you can check out the screenshots below to get a better idea of smartwatch’s settings options in the Realme Link app.

Realme Watch settings in Realme Link app

The UI of the Realme Watch is pretty clean and simple but sluggish at times. A swipe down on the homescreen gives access to the notifications, one on the right presents quick settings, and swiping left provides information about the weather, last night’s sleep, daily heart rate as well as daily step count and burned calories.

Swiping up on the homescreen presents different options which include Workout, SpO2, Heart Rate, Activity Records, Sleep, Music, Camera, Find My Phone, Meditation, Alarm, Stopwatch, Weather, and Settings. The last one lets you tinker with Do Not Disturb, Raise to Wake, heart rate monitoring, time format, display brightness, and vibration intensity among a few others.

Those who’ve used the Realme Band will notice that settings for alarm, DND, and Lift Wrist to Wake Screen have been moved from the Realme Link app to the Realme Watch. We talked to Realme about this and were told that the company moved these features to the smartwatch since it has a screen bigger than Realme Band’s which makes it easier for the users to customize them.

Features and Performance

The Realme Watch, like the Realme Band, comes with real-time heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking, step counter, drink reminder, sedentary reminder, sport modes and Smart Notifications, and the new features include blood oxygen level monitor, meditation relaxing and camera control.

The Realme Watch also features weather forecast, music control and phone finder, which were rolled out for Realme Band in April.

Let’s talk about heart rate monitoring first. The Realme Watch comes with a PPG optical heart rate sensor located on the back like the Realme Band, but this time it’s supplied by Goodix.

I compared the heart rate monitoring on the Realme Watch with the slightly more expensive Amazfit Bip S and found the values to be similar most of the time. You can measure the pulse manually from the Realme Watch or have it measured automatically at an interval of 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, or 30 minutes. You also get options to set thresholds for low and high heart rates to receive alerts if your pulse remains above or below the thresholds for 10 minutes. You can get a quick glance at your pulse data for the current day on the smartwatch itself and more details can be found in the Realme Link app.

Realme Watch can measure heart rate manually and automatically

The Realme Watch comes with an SpO2 sensor located at the back which measures the oxygen level in your blood. However, unlike heart rate monitoring, the blood oxygen level isn’t measured automatically at a set interval and you have to manually start it from the smartwatch. All the data is displayed in the Realme Link app along with your blood oxygen level range, its average, and the number of times it was measured. But do note that this data should be only used for reference and Realme advises against using it as a basis for diagnosis and treatment.

Blood oxygen level data in Realme Link app

Moving on to sleep tracking, the Realme Watch automatically measures the quality of your sleep and provides quick access to the data on the smartwatch. It also presents the data in a graphical form in the Realme Link app and tells you when you fell asleep and woke up, and the total sleep hours are broken into Deep Sleep, Light Sleep, REM, and Awake. However, sleep tracking is buggy at the moment and many times the smartwatch thought I was awake when I wasn’t.

Sleep data with sleep heart rate

The Smart Notifications feature works the same way as it did on Realme Band – you get alerts for incoming calls, SMS, and notifications from other apps installed on the paired smartphone.

Initially, the Realme Watch could only show one notification but after an OTA update, the smartwatch shows up to 10 notifications. And like the Realme Band, the Realme Watch also doesn’t display notifications with icons of many apps – even popular ones like Instagram that’s mentioned in the company’s marketing material. Besides, notifications aren’t displayed on the screen when one of the 14 sports modes is turned on or the music control screen is open, but with the latter, you can press the back button and check notifications from the notification center.

Incoming Call alert • App Notification alerts

Scrolling through the notifications isn’t always a smooth experience since the smartwatch often registers accidental touches and opens the notification you may not be interested in. And to exit the notification center you have to scroll down all the way to the Clear All button and then swipe up, which doesn’t always work and you end up opening a notification, but fortunately, you can exit the notification center using the physical button of the smartwatch.

Besides, there’s no way to reply to notifications from the Realme Watch right now and it’s unclear if Realme will roll out Quick Replies for the smartwatch since the company’s Indian CEO Madhav Sheth last month said that this feature is still under evaluation.

Talking about sports tracking, the Realme Watch comes with a total of 14 sports modes which include Outdoor Run, Indoor Run, Walk, Outdoor Cycle, Strength Training, Football, Basketball, Yoga, Cricket, Aerobic Capacity, Badminton, Indoor Cycle, Elliptical and Table Tennis. The last five are the new ones introduced by Realme.

Badminton • Indoor Cycle/Spinning • Elliptical • Table Tennis

Aerobic Capacity is basically a VO2 Max test that requires you to take an outdoor run for 12 minutes, while the other four are self-explanatory. You can check out your workout history for the current week on the Realme Watch with some data that’s not shown on the Realme Link app for some reason. For example, the Walk mode will record your peak heart rate, average speed, average pace, and average cadence and display that data in the Activity Records section on the smartwatch but not on the Realme Link app.

Walk mode data in Realme Link app

The steps counter isn’t perfect and does count some extra steps which is often the case with fitness trackers, but it’s worth mentioning that the Realme Watch counted steps when driving. I also noticed that the Realme Watch doesn’t record the distance in sports modes like Walk if the GPS with the paired smartphone is disconnected.

The Realme Watch also comes with a feature called Meditation which helps you relax by inhaling and exhaling. It’s turned on from the smartwatch and you get four duration options – 1 minute, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes. At the end of the session, the smartwatch displays your beats per minute but the data isn’t recorded and shown in the Realme Link app.

Other health features on the Realme Watch include sedentary reminder and drink reminder. The former reminds you to get up and move while the latter reminds you to stay hydrated by drinking water. You get to select the reminder frequency for both features, but Realme has made a small change to the drink reminder – you don’t get to select the days when you want to be reminded to drink water, which was possible with the Realme Band.

Sedentary Reminder • Drink Reminder

Lastly, we have the Weather Forecast and Phone Finder which are self-explanatory, as well as Camera Control and Music Control – the former allows you to use the Realme Watch as a remote shutter button for your phone, while the latter lets you play/pause music, change tracks and adjust the volume. It also worked with YouTube videos.

Phone Finder • Camera Control

Before I wrap up the performance review of the Realme Watch, I want to point out the connectivity issues the smartwatch is marred with. After the Realme Watch is reconnected with the paired smartphone you have to open the Realme Link app, tap on the Realme Watch option, and swipe down to sync a few times before the smartwatch is actually connected with the phone to receive notifications. This often took a couple of minutes and hampered the overall experience with the Realme Watch.

Battery life

The Realme Watch ships with a 160mAh battery which the company says can offer seven days of autonomy with heart rate monitoring turned on, and nine days without it.

In my testing, the Realme Watch lasted four days on an average with the display brightness at 20%, vibration intensity set to highest and over 100 notifications throughout the day, which do consume extra power since the smartwatch vibrates every time you get a notification. This also includes around 80 minutes of walking and do note that your mileage will vary depending on the duration and type of your workout.

Realme Watch with its circular charger

It’s also worth mentioning that once the battery dips below 10% charge, you can’t measure heart rate manually, but for some reason, the smartwatch keeps measuring the pulse automatically. It even lets you measure your blood oxygen level with the SpO2 monitor.

To juice up the battery, the Realme Watch ships with a small, circular charger which the company told us can fill the cell from flat to 100% in around 2.5 hours. But our charging tests yielded different results.

The smartwatch took 2 hours and 45 minutes to go from zero to 100%, 5 hours and 21 minutes to go from 3% to 100%, and 3 hours and 42 minutes to go from 4% to 100%. We talked to Realme’s product team about this and they concluded that my unit was defective and shipped a new one, but I couldn’t get the battery to fully drain for a charge test at the time of writing this so we’ll update the review once we’ve completed the tests on the new unit.

Verdict

The Realme Watch is a nice-looking smartwatch that is lightweight and comes with features like IP68 dust and water resistance, SpO2 monitor for blood oxygen level measurement, and music and camera controls. But the smartwatch has its fair share of issues. The outdoor visibility of its display isn’t impressive and sleep tracking is also buggy at the moment. Besides, the Smart Notifications feature is less than stellar right now and the smartwatch only supports Android devices.

So is the Realme Watch worth your money? Well, the Realme Watch is a first-gen smartwatch from the company and we weren’t really expecting it to sweep us off our feet. Besides, most of the issues the smartwatch has right now are something Realme can fix with software updates. So if you have the patience to wait for Realme to squash the bugs or plan on investing in the company’s ecosystem, you can buy the Realme Watch, but if that’s not the case, the Amazfit Bip S is worth considering. It’s slightly more expensive but offers a better overall experience than the Realme Watch. We’ll publish our Amazfit Bip S review soon, so you might want to hold off your purchase for a few days.

Pros

Design

Lightweight

IP68 rating

SpO2 monitor

Cons

Display

Sleep Tracker is buggy

Smart Notifications need improvement

Has connectivity issues

Some workout data is only accessible on the smartwatch for a limited time

No iOS support

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[techreddit]

Short Backstory:I am the IT Manager at my company, so I deal with a lot of repairs on all kinds of devices... I normally get pretty good service from most of the manufacturers that I deal with but every now and then I get really good service or really bad service, and I try to put my money where my mouth is and spread the good or bad experiences I have.​Microsoft:At my job, I use a Microsoft Surface Book 1 as my daily driver machine. It gets a lot of use, and when I purchased it, I decided to go the extra step and get an extended warranty just in case. About 6-9 months ago, my Surface started acting wonky as a result of the battery in the screen no longer functioning. A few months ago, I noticed the bottom of my Surface was becoming detached from the chassis... It looked like the adhesive that was holding it together was wearing out. Not thinking too much of it, I checked my warranty status and I was literally 6 days beyond my warranty date... FML... so I figured I would just use the laptop until it died and replace it.​Apple:We have a "heavy user" that goes through phones pretty fast... most of the time they get lost, but usually if there is an actual problem with the phone, it's pretty obvious what caused it (broken screen, etc.). So I purchased this person an iPhone X in June of 2018... In maybe the end of July, early August I get the phone back from him saying that it no longer turns on. I try a couple different recovery methods and get nowhere so I ask what caused it, and he says he thinks it may have got wet, but he says it was like splashed or dropped in a puddle or something to that effect... (He has no reason to lie, it's an owner of the company, it's his money, and he has confessed to WAY worse damage to phones and laptops)​​Trying to get help and Visiting the store(s):Microsoft:The mall near me has both a Microsoft and an Apple store, so I made my appt at the genius bar for the phone and figured I may as well bring my laptop to the MS store and see if they can give me an estimate for repair, since if it's only a couple hundred to repair, it will save me the trouble of buying a new one and setting everything back up. I go to the store, tell the dude I am here to look at new laptops since mine is pretty much toast unless they can fix it cheap, and he asks to see it. We go back to the workbench, and a lady comes out and tells me that I have a bulging battery in the lower part of my Surface (they have 2 since there is a detachable screen) and that they will need to replace it.I ask how much that would be, and she told me it's a safety issue and it would be free of charge. I explain to her that I am out of warranty, and she tells me that is ok since it's a safety concern. I also ask her about the other battery in the screen, and what that would cost... She tells me that there will not be a cost... I repeat that I am not under my warranty, and she tells me that she is going to simply replace the entire laptop, free of charge.... I was literally speechless, and after a moment, she asked if that was ok, and I jokingly told her I was prepared for a fight... Not only did they replace it, but she did not have my exact model in stock, so they gave me one with a better GPU in it. Filled out a single form, signed a piece of paper, and went on my merry way with a new (refurbished) Surface Book... I was dumbfounded...​Apple:I brought 2 iPhone X with me. One was clearly damaged.... the other simply would not boot. He told me it's a flat fee of ~$600 to replace the one with the broken screen which I had no argument against.... No problem. I then showed him the ~4 month old phone that no longer powered up. He hooked it up to his diagnostic tool and got nothing from it... No surprise. He then took it in the back and came back out with a bunch of pictures showing me water damage.... I then asked how that could be, since the iPhone X is IP67 rated... which is not waterproof, but it clearly states that it can be splashed and submerged up to 1 meter of water for up to 30 minutes ... He then gives a blanket statement of water resistance is not waterproof, which I argued again that it can get wet... He then tells me that Apple will not cover water damage, and it will be a $600 fee to replace it. He then tells me that the user is too hard on their phones, and it's their fault. After trying to talk to him more, he basically just stood up and walked away, not wanting to talk any further... I left without repairing either phone.​This phone had NO damage to it, no cosmetic wear, no broken screens, broken charger ports, broken speaker/mic ports, etc... It was less than 90 days old when it got wet. I am FULLY AWARE of Apple's policy of water damage not being covered under their warranty, but manufacturing defects are... If a phone has a rating that states that is protected against X, and then X happens and the phone breaks.. It should not matter what the warranty states... The certification states that it will be protected, and anything short of that should be considered a manufacturing defect/failure. The only thing that would have saved me was Apple care.. Another ~$200 for that, plus the ~$150 or so deductible... so half the cost of what they told me would be to replace it. It was truly despicable.​​I am no big fan of either company to be quite honest. I will say that I strongly prefer most products over anything Apple does, but I do see their value and understand why many people enjoy their products. However good or bad a product is, where companies really earn my business is support and customer service. I was actually ready to completely write off Microsoft as a hardware provider entirely due to saltiness from my expired warranty, but they completely turned me around with a simple act of good customer service.... They earned at least one return customer for sure... And, they didn't even pretend to try and sell me extra stuff, and I probably would have been convinced to buy something simply to thank them for not trying to fleece me.​Apple is no stranger to bad customer service. Their genius bar that day was full of salespeople pretending to be service techs.. Basically every other person with a problem at that store was being told they needed to purchase new things instead of trying to fix anything... Apple care was pushed hard on everyone, and I just felt my skin crawling the entire time I was there. We are a company with a large iPhone user-base. We provide every employee with a phone, and I have been pushing people away from iPhones and iDevices as much as I can... I used to try and provide an unbiased opinion of what device they use, since supporting one device over another is not that much different.. We have a few Apple Zealots in our company, so we get a good amount of their products... With the money we shell out monthly/yearly for Apple products, though, I would expect a bit more confidence in the products I support, and I have little to no confidence left in them, especially after reading so many other "right to repair" and other scammy stories about Apple service all over Reddit lately.​​Call me a hater, a shill, a whatever-the-opposite-of-an-Apple-fanboy-is, etc... But I have a responsibility to the people I work for to make sure they get the best bang for their buck, and Apple is not on that list in any capacity for me, especially not after this.​I really just wanted to share that not all companies are like this. Microsoft could have very easily just said "sorry, your battery is not covered, and also you are past your warranty date... the new laptops are over here, let's go pick one out".... The same is true for Apple... they could have said "hmm, well these are not waterproof, but since it's only 3-4 months old, it should not have had water damage from a simple spill/splash/whatever... let's get you a replacement."​Thanks for reading (if you made it this far).I would be interested in your good/bad stories from these or other similar companies! via /r/technology

[theinvinciblenoob]

The iPhone XS proves one thing definitively: that the iPhone X was probably one of the most ambitious product bets of all time.

When Apple told me in 2017 that they put aside plans for the iterative upgrade that they were going to ship and went all in on the iPhone X because they thought they could jump ahead a year, they were not blustering. That the iPhone XS feels, at least on the surface, like one of Apple’s most “S” models ever is a testament to how aggressive the iPhone X timeline was.

I think there will be plenty of people who will see this as a weakness of the iPhone XS, and I can understand their point of view. There are about a half-dozen definitive improvements in the XS over the iPhone X, but none of them has quite the buzzword-worthy effectiveness of a marquee upgrade like 64-bit, 3D Touch or wireless charging — all benefits delivered in previous “S” years.

That weakness, however, is only really present if you view it through the eyes of the year-over-year upgrader. As an upgrade over an iPhone X, I’d say you’re going to have to love what they’ve done with the camera to want to make the jump. As a move from any other device, it’s a huge win and you’re going head-first into sculpted OLED screens, face recognition and super durable gesture-first interfaces and a bunch of other genre-defining moves that Apple made in 2017, thinking about 2030, while you were sitting back there in 2016.

Since I do not have an iPhone XR, I can’t really make a call for you on that comparison, but from what I saw at the event and from what I know about the tech in the iPhone XS and XS Max from using them over the past week, I have some basic theories about how it will stack up.

For those with interest in the edge of the envelope, however, there is a lot to absorb in these two new phones, separated only by size. Once you begin to unpack the technological advancements behind each of the upgrades in the XS, you begin to understand the real competitive edge and competence of Apple’s silicon team, and how well they listen to what the software side needs now and in the future.

Whether that makes any difference for you day to day is another question, one that, as I mentioned above, really lands on how much you like the camera.

But first, let’s walk through some other interesting new stuff.

Notes on durability

As is always true with my testing methodology, I treat this as anyone would who got a new iPhone and loaded an iCloud backup onto it. Plenty of other sites will do clean room testing if you like comparison porn, but I really don’t think that does most folks much good. By and large most people aren’t making choices between ecosystems based on one spec or another. Instead, I try to take them along on prototypical daily carries, whether to work for TechCrunch, on vacation or doing family stuff. A foot injury precluded any theme parks this year (plus, I don’t like to be predictable) so I did some office work, road travel in the center of California and some family outings to the park and zoo. A mix of uses cases that involves CarPlay, navigation, photos and general use in a suburban environment.

In terms of testing locale, Fresno may not be the most metropolitan city, but it’s got some interesting conditions that set it apart from the cities where most of the iPhones are going to end up being tested. Network conditions are pretty adverse in a lot of places, for one. There’s a lot of farmland and undeveloped acreage and not all of it is covered well by wireless carriers. Then there’s the heat. Most of the year it’s above 90 degrees Fahrenheit and a good chunk of that is spent above 100. That means that batteries take an absolute beating here and often perform worse than other, more temperate, places like San Francisco. I think that’s true of a lot of places where iPhones get used, but not so much the places where they get reviewed.

That said, battery life has been hard to judge. In my rundown tests, the iPhone XS Max clearly went beast mode, outlasting my iPhone X and iPhone XS. Between those two, though, it was tougher to tell. I try to wait until the end of the period I have to test the phones to do battery stuff so that background indexing doesn’t affect the numbers. In my ‘real world’ testing in the 90+ degree heat around here, iPhone XS did best my iPhone X by a few percentage points, which is what Apple does claim, but my X is also a year old. The battery didn’t fail during even intense days of testing with the XS.

In terms of storage I’m tapping at the door of 256GB, so the addition of 512GB option is really nice. As always, the easiest way to determine what size you should buy is to check your existing free space. If you’re using around 50% of what your phone currently has, buy the same size. If you’re using more, consider upgrading because these phones are only getting faster at taking better pictures and video and that will eat up more space.

The review units I was given both had the new gold finish. As I mentioned on the day, this is a much deeper, brassier gold than the Apple Watch Edition. It’s less ‘pawn shop gold’ and more ‘this is very expensive’ gold. I like it a lot, though it is hard to photograph accurately — if you’re skeptical, try to see it in person. It has a touch of pink added in, especially as you look at the back glass along with the metal bands around the edges. The back glass has a pearlescent look now as well, and we were told that this is a new formulation that Apple created specifically with Corning. Apple says that this is the most durable glass ever in a smartphone.

My current iPhone has held up to multiple falls over 3 feet over the past year, one of which resulted in a broken screen and replacement under warranty. Doubtless multiple YouTubers will be hitting this thing with hammers and dropping it from buildings in beautiful Phantom Flex slo-mo soon enough. I didn’t test it. One thing I am interested in seeing develop, however, is how the glass holds up to fine abrasions and scratches over time.

My iPhone X is riddled with scratches both front and back, something having to do with the glass formulation being harder, but more brittle. Less likely to break on impact but more prone to abrasion. I’m a dedicated no-caser, which is why my phone looks like it does, but there’s no way for me to tell how the iPhone XS and XS Max will hold up without giving them more time on the clock. So I’ll return to this in a few weeks.

Both the gold and space grey iPhones XS have been subjected to a coating process called physical vapor deposition or PVD. Basically metal particles get vaporized and bonded to the surface to coat and color the band. PVD is a process, not a material, so I’m not sure what they’re actually coating these with, but one suggestion has been Titanium Nitride. I don’t mind the weathering that has happened on my iPhone X band, but I think it would look a lot worse on the gold, so I’m hoping that this process (which is known to be incredibly durable and used in machine tooling) will improve the durability of the band. That said, I know most people are not no-casers like me so it’s likely a moot point.

Now let’s get to the nut of it: the camera.

Bokeh let’s do it

I’m (still) not going to be comparing the iPhone XS to an interchangeable lens camera because portrait mode is not a replacement for those, it’s about pulling them out less. That said, this is closest its ever been.

One of the major hurdles that smartphone cameras have had to overcome in their comparisons to cameras with beautiful glass attached is their inherent depth of focus. Without getting too into the weeds (feel free to read this for more), because they’re so small, smartphone cameras produce an incredibly compressed image that makes everything sharp. This doesn’t feel like a portrait or well composed shot from a larger camera because it doesn’t produce background blur. That blur was added a couple of years ago with Apple’s portrait mode and has been duplicated since by every manufacturer that matters — to varying levels of success or failure.

By and large, most manufacturers do it in software. They figure out what the subject probably is, use image recognition to see the eyes/nose/mouth triangle is, build a quick matte and blur everything else. Apple does more by adding the parallax of two lenses OR the IR projector of the TrueDepth array that enables Face ID to gather a 9-layer depth map.

As a note, the iPhone XR works differently, and with less tools, to enable portrait mode. Because it only has one lens it uses focus pixels and segmentation masking to ‘fake’ the parallax of two lenses.

With the iPhone XS, Apple is continuing to push ahead with the complexity of its modeling for the portrait mode. The relatively straightforward disc blur of the past is being replaced by a true bokeh effect.

Background blur in an image is related directly to lens compression, subject-to-camera distance and aperture. Bokeh is the character of that blur. It’s more than just ‘how blurry’, it’s the shapes produced from light sources, the way they change throughout the frame from center to edges, how they diffuse color and how they interact with the sharp portions of the image.

Bokeh is to blur what seasoning is to a good meal. Unless you’re the chef, you probably don’t care what they did you just care that it tastes great.

Well, Apple chef-ed it the hell up with this. Unwilling to settle for a templatized bokeh that felt good and leave it that, the camera team went the extra mile and created an algorithmic model that contains virtual ‘characteristics’ of the iPhone XS’s lens. Just as a photographer might pick one lens or another for a particular effect, the camera team built out the bokeh model after testing a multitude of lenses from all of the classic camera systems.

I keep saying model because it’s important to emphasize that this is a living construct. The blur you get will look different from image to image, at different distances and in different lighting conditions, but it will stay true to the nature of the virtual lens. Apple’s bokeh has a medium-sized penumbra, spreading out light sources but not blowing them out. It maintains color nicely, making sure that the quality of light isn’t obscured like it is with so many other portrait applications in other phones that just pick a spot and create a circle of standard gaussian or disc blur.

Check out these two images, for instance. Note that when the light is circular, it retains its shape, as does the rectangular light. It is softened and blurred, as it would when diffusing through the widened aperture of a regular lens. The same goes with other shapes in reflected light scenarios.

Now here’s the same shot from an iPhone X, note the indiscriminate blur of the light. This modeling effort is why I’m glad that the adjustment slider proudly carries f-stop or aperture measurements. This is what this image would look like at a given aperture, rather than a 0-100 scale. It’s very well done and, because it’s modeled, it can be improved over time. My hope is that eventually, developers will be able to plug in their own numbers to “add lenses” to a user’s kit.

And an adjustable depth of focus isn’t just good for blurring, it’s also good for un-blurring. This portrait mode selfie placed my son in the blurry zone because it focused on my face. Sure, I could turn the portrait mode off on an iPhone X and get everything sharp, but now I can choose to “add” him to the in-focus area while still leaving the background blurry. Super cool feature I think is going to get a lot of use.

It’s also great for removing unwanted people or things from the background by cranking up the blur.

And yes, it works on non humans.

If you end up with an iPhone XS, I’d play with the feature a bunch to get used to what a super wide aperture lens feels like. When its open all the way to f1.4 (not the actual widest aperture of the lens btw, this is the virtual model we’re controlling) pretty much only the eyes should be in focus. Ears, shoulders, maybe even nose could be out of the focus area. It takes some getting used to but can produce dramatic results.

A 150% crop of a larger photo to show detail preservation.

Developers do have access to one new feature though, the segmentation mask. This is a more precise mask that aids in edge detailing, improving hair and fine line detail around the edges of a portrait subject. In my testing it has led to better handling of these transition areas and less clumsiness. It’s still not perfect, but it’s better. And third-party apps like Halide are already utilizing it. Halide’s co-creator, Sebastiaan de With, says they’re already seeing improvements in Halide with the segmentation map.

“Segmentation is the ability to classify sets of pixels into different categories,” says de With. “This is different than a “Hot dog, not a hot dog” problem, which just tells you whether a hot dog exists anywhere in the image. With segmentation, the goal is drawing an outline over just the hot dog. It’s an important topic with self driving cars, because it isn’t enough to tell you there’s a person somewhere in the image. It needs to know that person is directly in front of you. On devices that support it, we use PEM as the authority for what should stay in focus. We still use the classic method on old devices (anything earlier than iPhone 8), but the quality difference is huge.

The above is an example shot in Halide that shows the image, the depth map and the segmentation map.

In the example below, the middle black-and-white image is what was possible before iOS 12. Using a handful of rules like, “Where did the user tap in the image?” We constructed this matte to apply our blur effect. It’s no bad by any means, but compare it to the image on the right. For starters, it’s much higher resolution, which means the edges look natural.

My testing of portrait mode on the iPhone XS says that it is massively improved,  but that there are still some very evident quirks that will lead to weirdness in some shots like wrong things made blurry and halos of light appearing around subjects. It’s also not quite aggressive enough on foreground objects — those should blur too but only sometimes do. But the quirks are overshadowed by the super cool addition of the adjustable background blur. If conditions are right it blows you away. But every once in a while you still get this sense like the Neural Engine just threw up its hands and shrugged.

Live preview of the depth control in the camera view is not in iOS 12 at the launch of the iPhone XS, but it will be coming in a future version of iOS 12 this fall.

I also shoot a huge amount of photos with the telephoto lens. It’s closer to what you’d consider to be a standard lens on a camera. The normal lens is really wide and once you acclimate to the telephoto you’re left wondering why you have a bunch of pictures of people in the middle of a ton of foreground and sky. If you haven’t already, I’d say try defaulting to 2x for a couple of weeks and see how you like your photos. For those tight conditions or really broad landscapes you can always drop it back to the wide. Because of this, any iPhone that doesn’t have a telephoto is a basic non-starter for me, which is going to be one of the limiters on people moving to iPhone XR from iPhone X, I believe. Even iPhone 8 Plus users who rely on the telephoto I believe will miss it if they don’t go to the XS.

But, man, Smart HDR is where it’s at

I’m going to say something now that is surely going to cause some Apple followers to snort, but it’s true. Here it is:

For a company as prone to hyperbole and Maximum Force Enthusiasm about its products, I think that they have dramatically undersold how much improved photos are from the iPhone X to the iPhone XS. It’s extreme, and it has to do with a technique Apple calls Smart HDR.

Smart HDR on the iPhone XR encompasses a bundle of techniques and technology including highlight recovery, rapid-firing the sensor, an OLED screen with much improved dynamic range and the Neural Engine/image signal processor combo. It’s now running faster sensors and offloading some of the work to the CPU, which enables firing off nearly two images for every one it used to in order to make sure that motion does not create ghosting in HDR images, it’s picking the sharpest image and merging the other frames into it in a smarter way and applying tone mapping that produces more even exposure and color in the roughest of lighting conditions.

iPhone XS shot, better range of tones, skintone and black point

iPhone X Shot, not a bad image at all, but blocking up of shadow detail, flatter skin tone and blue shift

Nearly every image you shoot on an iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max will have HDR applied to it. It does it so much that Apple has stopped labeling most images with HDR at all. There’s still a toggle to turn Smart HDR off if you wish, but by default it will trigger any time it feels it’s needed.

And that includes more types of shots that could not benefit from HDR before. Panoramic shots, for instance, as well as burst shots, low light photos and every frame of Live Photos is now processed.

The results for me have been massively improved quick snaps with no thought given to exposure or adjustments due to poor lighting. Your camera roll as a whole will just suddenly start looking like you’re a better picture taker, with no intervention from you. All of this is capped off by the fact that the OLED screens in the iPhone XS and XS Max have a significantly improved ability to display a range of color and brightness. So images will just plain look better on the wider gamut screen, which can display more of the P3 color space.

Under the hood

As far as Face ID goes, there has been no perceivable difference for me in speed or number of positives, but my facial model has been training on my iPhone X for a year. It’s starting fresh on iPhone XS. And I’ve always been lucky that Face ID has just worked for me most of the time. The gist of the improvements here are jumps in acquisition times and confirmation of the map to pattern match. There is also supposed to be improvements in off-angle recognition of your face, say when lying down or when your phone is flat on a desk. I tried a lot of different positions here and could never really definitively say that iPhone XS was better in this regard, though as I said above, it very likely takes training time to get it near the confidence levels that my iPhone X has stored away.

In terms of CPU performance the world’s first at-scale 7nm architecture has paid dividends. You can see from the iPhone XS benchmarks that it compares favorably to fast laptops and easily exceeds iPhone X performance.

The Neural Engine and better A12 chip has meant for better frame rates in intense games and AR, image searches, some small improvement in app launches. One easy way to demonstrate this is the video from the iScape app, captured on an iPhone X and an iPhone XS. You can see how jerky and FPS challenged the iPhone X is in a similar AR scenario. There is so much more overhead for AR experiences I know developers are going to be salivating for what they can do here.

The stereo sound is impressive, surpassingly decent separation for a phone and definitely louder. The tradeoff is that you get asymmetrical speaker grills so if that kind of thing annoys you you’re welcome.

Upgrade or no

Every other year for the iPhone I see and hear the same things — that the middle years are unimpressive and not worthy of upgrading. And I get it, money matters, phones are our primary computer and we want the best bang for our buck. This year, as I mentioned at the outset, the iPhone X has created its own little pocket of uncertainty by still feeling a bit ahead of its time.

I don’t kid myself into thinking that we’re going to have an honest discussion about whether you want to upgrade from the iPhone X to iPhone XS or not. You’re either going to do it because you want to or you’re not going to do it because you don’t feel it’s a big enough improvement.

And I think Apple is completely fine with that because iPhone XS really isn’t targeted at iPhone X users at all, it’s targeted at the millions of people who are not on a gesture-first device that has Face ID. I’ve never been one to recommend someone upgrade every year anyway. Every two years is more than fine for most folks — unless you want the best camera, then do it.

And, given that Apple’s fairly bold talk about making sure that iPhones last as long as they can, I think that it is well into the era where it is planning on having a massive installed user base that rents iPhones from it on a monthly or yearly or biennial period. And it doesn’t care whether those phones are on their first, second or third owner, because that user base will need for-pay services that Apple can provide. And it seems to be moving in that direction already, with phones as old as the five-year-old iPhone 5s still getting iOS updates.

With the iPhone XS, we might just be seeing the true beginning of the iPhone-as-a-service era.

via TechCrunch

[eddiejpoplar]

FIRST DRIVE: Tesla Model 3

It’s been called the most anticipated automobile in history by numerous news outlets. Nearly half-a-million people plunked down a $1,000 (refundable) deposit to reserve one, years before they would actually be able to take delivery of it. They did so without ever seeing the actual production version, without being able to sit in one let alone test drive it, and without knowing what the actual cost was going to be. That. Is. Crazy.

Yet, I admit that I’m one of the crazy ones. On March 31th, 2016, I waited until the line of about 250 people that came before me dissipated, and then walked into the Tesla store at the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey and handed them $1,000 with no clear knowledge of when my car would be available, what exactly it would look like or how much it would cost. Walking out of the mall I thought to myself, “Did I just order a car, or did I just join a cult?”

It’s nearly two years later and I still don’t have my Model 3. Tesla has pushed my estimated delivery date back twice now. Originally, my estimate was late 2017 to early 2018, but after another delay just this week, my new delivery window estimate is now April 2018 – June 2018. Luckily for me, we aren’t in urgent need of car and can wait. I recently took possession of a 2018 BMW i3 Sport, and my wife has a car to use until the Model 3 arrives. The i3 Sport is actually my fifth BMW electric car, and I have a long history of driving BMW EVs dating back to 2009 when I was in BMW’s MINI-E test program.

So when it comes to electric cars, I’m used to being called crazy. I’ve been saying, blogging and writing about how battery electrics were soon going to replace internal combustion for nearly a decade now, and only recently have people begun to think that might be true. Tesla, by the way, has had a lot to do with that. While most other OEMs were busy making small compliance EVs, Tesla has been going head to head with the traditional OEM’s luxury models, and faring pretty well at that. Model S sales have consistently surpassed BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, Lexus and Jaguar, making it the best-selling car in its class in the US.

But will the Model 3 also do that to the competition in the compact premium and midsized classes? Judging from the reservation list and early reviews, it just might. I was able to secure the use of a Model 3 from a friend who had recently taken delivery, and below are some of my thoughts.

The Good

Appearance: The exterior styling is excellent, in my opinion. Styling of course is highly subjective, I really like how the car looks. It has a nice blend of sporty aggressiveness as well as conservative class.

Interior: The minimalist interior gets marks in both the good and the bad categories. Everything is controlled by the huge center touch screen. It’s pretty intuitive, and I was able to perform most tasks immediately, without getting help from the car’s owner.  Although it’s definitely going to take some time for new owners to get used to having everything controlled by center screen. Not having buttons and levers to perform common tasks definitely feels unnatural at first. The seats are very comfortable and supportive. They are much better than the first-generation Model S seats were. Tesla has since updated the Model S seats and the “Next Generation” seats are very supportive and comfortable. I place the Model 3’s seats in between the original Model S seats and the ones currently used for comfort and support. The rear seats are comfortable and there’s plenty of leg and head room for most adults. The rear seats fold flat so longer cargo can extend up into the rear seating area from the trunk, if necessary.

Performance: The instant, neck snapping torque that’s become synonymous with Tesla wasn’t left out of the Model 3. It’s not as powerful as a P100D Model S, but it has 271 HP and 307 lb-ft of torque and a curb weight of 3,838 lbs. That’s enough power to launch the Model 3 from 0-60 in 4.8 seconds and through the quarter mile in 13.4 seconds at 104.9 mph, according to Motor Trend. Which, by the way, is quicker than a BMW 330i, and I’m sure that wasn’t accidental since Tesla has stated that the Model 3 will target potential 3-Series customers.

Handling and Ride: One of the first things I noticed in my time behind the wheel was how solid and planted the car feels. The steering is direct and is just heavy enough. Tesla definitely got that right, in my opinion. I didn’t have the car on a track, but I was able to toss it around a bit on some curves and it performed like a true sports sedan should.

Tesla’s Charging Network: When having a frank discussion about electric vehicle adoption, the 800 lb gorilla in the room is always the need for plentiful, accessible, high-speed public charging to enable long distance travel. Sure, there are other problems, like battery cost and energy density, but it’s pretty well accepted that these issues are rapidly being solved, and in the near future will no longer be an impediment. However, high speed public charging is still one issue the OEMs are trying to figure out. Everybody except Tesla that is. Tesla’s Supercharger network is now expanding at a rate of about twelve new stations per day. There are currently well over 1,000 locations worldwide, and nearly 10,000 individual stations. Using the Supercharger network, I can pretty much go anywhere I want to with ease. That simply isn’t the case with any other electric vehicle made today. There aren’t nearly enough DC Fast charge locations that support the Combo or CHAdeMO protocol. To make matters worse most locations have only one station so if it’s in use or broken you’re out of luck. Tesla locations have six to twelve stations on average, and since Tesla owns and operates the network they keep them up and running all of the time.

OTA Software Updates: This is one thing that current Tesla owners love. They wake up one day and there’s a message in the car that overnight the system updated and fixed a problem, or added a feature that wasn’t previously available. Model 3 owners have already had a few updates. I had to bring my previous i3 to my BMW dealer a couple times for software updates. I would have much preferred having it done automatically while I slept.

The Bad

The Wait: With a more established OEM like BMW, for all but their rarest cars, you can pretty much get whatever car you want within a month or two of ordering it. I’m now on month 23 of waiting since I placed my Model 3 deposit and I still have no idea when I’ll get my car. Sure, Tesla estimates my turn will come in two to four months, but that’s already been pushed back twice, so I really have no reason to believe that it won’t be delayed again. But this isn’t new for Tesla. They’ve had launch problems for all three of the previous cars that they’ve sold (Roadster, Model S & Model X). At some point Tesla will have to grow up and start acting like a real car company and execute a proper vehicle launch.

Limited Rear View: The trunk deck lid extends far up the back of the car and because of this the rear view is very limited. The workaround is to simply turn on the rearview camera, which unlike most cars can be turned on at any time. It’s not a huge problem, especially because of the rearview camera, but it is worth noting. To make matters worse, the rear window defroster elements are thicker than I’ve seen an any other car. What’s odd about that is reports from early Model 3 owners seem to indicate that the rear defrosters take unusually long to work. I would think that such thick defroster elements would work better, but it appears that isn’t the case.

Fit and Finish: This is one area where Tesla still has a lot of catching up to do. The body panel alignment on the car I drove was pretty good, with only a couple minor exceptions. However, I’ve now seen five more Model 3s on the road and on each one of them I have found a few more egregious misalignments. This is the one reason I’m not upset that Tesla keeps pushing back my delivery estimate. I figure the longer they take, the more initial manufacturing issues they’ll have worked out by the time they make my car.

Center Screen Controls Everything: While I really loved the minimalistic approach to the interior, I sometimes think Tesla may have gone a little too far. For instance, you can turn on the windshield wipers for a quick single-swipe with the steering column left-side stalk, but only for that one quick swipe. If you want the wipers to stay on, you need to go to the center screen to activate them. Also, you can activate the cruise control by pushing down the right-side stalk once (twice activates Autopilot) but it can only continue at the speed you were going at when you activated it. If you want to increase or decrease the cruise control speed, you need to do that on the center screen. It seems too distracting to do this while you’re driving, especially for the wipers which you’ll be activating when you already have reduced vision because of the rain. You can’t even open the glovebox without using the center screen.

I get why Tesla designed the car this way. It’s really setting up the car for car sharing and full autonomy where there will be very little need for human interaction. But that’s not here yet, and we still need to pilot the cars and have the features easily accessible. I’m hoping that once I get my Model 3, and have more time behind the wheel that I will feel more comfortable with relying on the center screen.

Summary

The Model 3 is far from perfect. Tesla, as a company has a lot of issues to work out, and I’m sure they will continue to experience growing pains for the foreseeable future. That said, the Model 3 is still a special car worth waiting for. The Long Range version has more than 300 miles of range, can seat five passengers comfortably, drives like a true sports sedan, outperforms nearly all of the competition in its class and looks great. It has access to thousands of rapid charging stations which can add about 170 miles of range in 30 minutes, enabling long distance travel with minimal inconvenience.

The Model 3’s main competitors aren’t other electric cars. The Model 3 offers so much more than the current electric competition that they aren’t really worthy competitors. The Model 3 is going straight after the BMW 3-Series, Mercedes C-Class and Audi A4 market. How much of this market the Model 3 takes from the competition remains to be seen. That said, none of legacy OEMs have ever had 450,000 people plunk down a deposit on a car that they have never seen or driven, don’t know when they’ll get it or how much it will cost.

BMW recently disclosed their future electrification plans which is based on their new flexible vehicle architecture. This new architecture, starting in 2020 will allow BMW to make all future models available in ICE, plug-in hybrid and all electric, giving the customer the choice of which version they prefer. That’s BMW’s electrification plan; offer all new cars in all variations. Some have argued that this path ensures that none of the versions will be optimized for the powertrain they have. Since the flexible architecture has to accommodate three different types of powertrains, all versions will have some compromises baked into the design.

Mike Tyson one said that all of his opponents have a plan, until they get punched in the face. The Model 3 is going to be a punch to the face of BMW and the other legacy automakers once Tesla works out their initial manufacturing issues and starts to deliver thousands of copies every week. It’s going to be really interesting to see who gets up and brings real electric competition to market, and who becomes a has-been. 

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[gta-5-cheats]

Samsung Galaxy A8+ Review

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/samsung-galaxy-a8-review/

Samsung Galaxy A8+ Review

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Nearly a year after the first smartphones with 18:9 screens debuted at MWC 2017, nearly every manufacturer has jumped on board. This kind of design started out as a novelty, quickly became trend, and is now pretty much a mainstay of smartphone design. It isn’t any surprise, since this is the first time in a very long time that phones have looked any different, and people do feel like they’re getting something better and more modern. Phones with 16:9 screens, (and heaven forbid, actual buttons on the front) do now seem old-fashioned.

Samsung gained an early lead with its Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus (Review) at the beginning of last year (though it went with 18.5:9 which it calls “Infinity Display”) and then released the Galaxy Note 8 (Review) six months later, but didn’t seem think the rest of its range deserved the update. Meanwhile, its competitors were clambering over themselves to make sure they didn’t fall behind the curve. Over this past year, we’ve seen dozens of new 18:9 phones launching across the price spectrum. The most notable example of that is OnePlus rushing to replace its barely five-month-old OnePlus 5 (Review) with the 5T (Review), just to make sure it didn’t cede even the slightest ground to its competitors.

That makes today’s review subject all the more interesting – the new Galaxy A8+ (2018) is Samsung’s first non-flagship phone to be graced with an Infinity Display, and it’s priced to go right up against the OnePlus 5T. Is Samsung too late to the party, or has it been worth the wait? We’re about to find out.

Samsung Galaxy A8+ (2018) look and feel

As its name suggests, this is one large phone. Samsung hasn’t launched the smaller Galaxy A8 (2018) in India, which is a pity, because the A8+ (2018) can be a bit of a handful. It’s relatively thick and heavy at 8.3mm and 191g. That weight also feels unbalanced, especially when typing, which requires you to hold the phone from close to the bottom. It will stick out of many pockets and generally make itself felt wherever you try to stash it.

Samsung has listed two colour options for this phone, black and gold. We had a black unit for review and with the removal of buttons from the front face, it looks really plain and monolithic. The front and back are both shiny glass, though only the back curves around the matte black metal frame. While some might like this look, others will prefer the gold version which has a black front face and camera module providing a bit of visual relief.

The front face is broken only by the earpiece and dual front cameras right near the upper edge. When the phone is on, Samsung’s Always-On Display readout is splashed across the screen, taking advantage of the sAMOLED panel’s ability to selectively light up pixels without consuming a lot of power. By default, there’s a large clock, the date, the battery level, and four icons representing your most recent notifications. You can choose different clock styles and hide other information, or only enable the Always-On Display between hours of your choosing.

The power button is on the right, and the phone’s single mono speaker is positioned right above it – an unusual position, but one that Samsung has been using on multiple models of late. On the left, there’s a volume rocker and a tray for the primary Nano-SIM. The second Nano-SIM as well as a microSD card fit in another tray that slides into the top. There’s also a USB Type-C port and a 3.5mm audio socket on the bottom. An advantage of the all-black look is that the antenna lines are barely visible.

The primary camera is in the upper middle of the rear, with a single-LED flash to the side and small, rectangular fingerprint sensor right below it. Unusually for phones these days, the camera doesn’t protrude at all. There’s a surprisingly subtle Samsung logo lower down, and some barely visible regulatory text at the bottom.

One feature that we’re always happy to have is weatherproofing, and the Galaxy A8+ (2018) is certified IP68 for water and dust resistance. The SIM trays are flanged with rubber to prevent ingress. However, there’s no mention of whether the glass is reinforced, which is concerning.

Samsung’s Galaxy A-series phones are meant to be more affordable versions of the current reigning S-series flagships, in this case the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus. The Galaxy A8+ (2018) inherits many of their design cues, but it doesn’t look quite as slick or refined. It’s a bit too bulky and awkward to handle, and in fact it more closely resembles last year’s oversized Galaxy C9 Pro (Review). In fact, with its pricing and specifications, it serves the same market. In terms of look and feel alone, it doesn’t really stand out compared to the competing OnePlus 5T or Honor View 10 (Review) either.

Samsung Galaxy A8+ (2018) specifications and software

Samsung usually plays it conservatively with specs outside its flagship tier, but with this launch, it’s hoping to take on upstarts like OnePlus and Honor. The Galaxy A+ (2018) uses Samsung’s brand new Exynos 7885 SoC, which has two high-speed 2.2Ghz ARM Cortex-A73 cores and six supplementary 1.6GHz Cortex-A53 cores, plus an integrated ARM Mali-G71 GPU. There’s 6GB of RAM, and the only Samsung phones to ship with so much before now have been the Galaxy Note 8 and the aforementioned Galaxy C9 Pro.

You get 64GB of storage, of which about 51GB is available to users. MicroSD card support goes up to 256GB. Because of Samsung’s unique 18.5:9 aspect ratio, the screen resolution is 1080×2220, giving you a tiny bit more height than the 1080×2160 that you get at 18:9. It measures 6 inches diagonally but the corners are rounded for aesthetic purposes, so you lose a little screen space.

The Galaxy A8+ (2018) also features dual-band Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth 5, NFC, GPS, and 4G with VoLTE. There’s a rich complement of sensors, including a barometer and gyroscope in addition to the standard ambient light and proximity sensors. The battery comes in at 3500mAh which is the least we’d expect for a phone this large. Fast charging is supported, but not wireless charging.

This phone and its smaller siblings are Samsung’s first to feature dual front cameras. There’s one with a 16-megapixel sensor and another with an 8-megapixel sensor, and both have F/1.9 apertures. The rear camera is a 16-megapixel unit with an f/1.7 aperture. While most companies boast upfront about how a second camera is different in terms of its lens or sensor’s capabilities, we had to dig through Samsung’s documentation to discover that the second lens is intended to deliver better low-light performance. Surprisingly, video recording tops out at 1920×1080. There’s also no optical image stabilisation for any of the cameras.

Samsung ships the Galaxy A8+ (2018) with Android 7.1.1 which is disappointing in 2018. The Samsung Experience skin on top is beginning to get as bloated as the company’s reviled TouchWiz UI from years past. At first boot, we were allowed to choose which Samsung apps we wanted installed. We were happy to ditch Samsung Email, Samsung Notes, and Samsung Internet Browser, but there was no way to know what exactly Samsung Connect and Samsung Members are. It’s also surprising that Samsung Voice Recorder and Samsung Pay are optional apps – these should be part of the phone’s core experience.

On the homescreen, there’s a giant My Galaxy widget showing off the phone’s various features and advertising services such as ordering a meal or taxi and paying bills. You need to sign up with your phone number, but when we tried it we didn’t receive the required one-time password by SMS for hours. Unfortunately, you have to register for My Galaxy if you want to be able to find a phone service centre and book an appointment, or chat with tech support.

Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant takes up a page to the left of the first homescreen and requires you to create a Samsung account which is a separate process. Interestingly, the Galaxy A8+ doesn’t get Bixby as a voice assistant – you only get reminders of your upcoming calendar appointments and panels for things like the weather and news. There’s no Bixby key on the side of the phone, and long-pressing the Home button brings up Google Assistant (or S-Voice if you choose) so Bixby as a feature isn’t the same as it has been advertised on Samsung’s flagships.

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There’s more bloat around every corner – Samsung has tried to transform even the humble Contacts app into a social network with sharable status updates and profile pictures. The Samsung Gallery creates “stories” and multiple apps want you to use a “customisation service” which collects your stored contacts and tries to determine which people you are closest to, for undefined reasons. Opera Max and a bunch of Microsoft apps are preinstalled whether you want them or not. The default system keyboard is customisable in many ways and supports transliteration into Hindi, Tamil and Telegu which could actually be useful.

In the Settings app, you’ll find options to manage the full-screen scaling for apps that can’t handle it natively, the on-screen Android navigation buttons, fingerprint sensor gestures, a one-handed mode, “Dual Messenger” apps (cloning apps to allow you to use multiple accounts), Samsung Cloud syncing, and split-screen multitasking.

Samsung Galaxy A8+ (2018) performance, cameras and battery life

The Galaxy A8+ (2018) has some powerful hardware and for the most part it runs without any problems. Large games load quickly, and the phone doesn’t get too warm at any point. However, there were tiny hiccups on rare occasions, when we felt the UI behave a little sluggishly or touch input didn’t seem to register. Hopefully, periodic software updates will iron these kinks out, because usage was otherwise perfectly fine.

Samsung’s new mid-range processor is fairly powerful, and delivered scores of 78,359 in AnTuTu, 5,192 in PCMark Work 2.0, and 1,525 and 4,349 respectively in Geekbench’s single-core and multi-core runs. 3DMark’s Slingshot test gave us 1,069 points, and GFXBench’s T-rex test ran at 31fps. We can definitely see that this phone isn’t on the same level as the similarly priced OnePlus 5T and Honor View 10, but should still be able to handle most apps and games.

The Infinity Display doesn’t look quite as “infinite” on this phone as it does on Samsung’s flagships, because instead of glass curving around the sides of the phone, there are still distinct edges. Even so, it’s immersive and vibrant. Brightness isn’t a problem even outdoors, and all kinds of content look pretty crisp and enjoyable. The odd placement of the speaker turned out to be a good thing, because it’s hard to block when holding this phone in any orientation and it doesn’t get muffled with the phone lying on soft surfaces. Sound is loud and voices are clear, but music comes out a bit too harsh for our liking.

One feature of the Galaxy A8+ (2018) that Samsung is promoting heavily is face recognition. This isn’t the same as the iris recognition feature on Samsung’s top-end phones, but is much more like what you’d get with the OnePlus 5T. In our experience, it just didn’t work well, either failing completely or taking more than five seconds to unlock the phone every time we tried it. This was despite trying to enrol our faces multiple times to account for poor lighting or angles. There’s an option to make recognition quicker by reducing the security threshold, which we obviously do not recommend. It’s best to just forget that this feature is even there.

The camera app is a little bloated with stickers (some of which are live and animated with sound), filters, and Bixby Vision for object and place recognition. It isn’t immediately clear how you’re supposed to switch between the two front cameras – there’s a Live Focus mode shortcut right within the viewfinder which lets you take shots with background blur, and then there’s a Wide Selfie mode in the hidden menu that you have to swipe right to see. In both cases, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference in the composition of frames when using the secondary camera. In Wide Selfie mode you still have to physically pan the phone from side to side, whereas other phones have a wide-angle lens that just gives you a wider frame.

This might be Samsung’s first phone with dual front cameras, but there really doesn’t seem to be anything that really takes advantage of the second sensor. Live Focus gave us some fairly decent-looking results, and the phone lets you adjust the degree of background blur from the gallery app long after taking a shot. As far as the promise of low-light performance goes, we couldn’t see much of a difference there either.

As for photos taken with the rear camera, results were a bit weak. If there was even lighting, the Galaxy A8+ (2018) managed well, though we would still have liked to see better handling of details and exposures. Objects at even a slight distance came out looking artificial, with noisy textures, rough edges, and overblown whites. At night, things took a drastic turn for the worse. If there wasn’t a lot of artificial light falling directly on a subject, the phone could barely pick out any details whatsoever. Even on the phone’s bright sAMOLED screen, it was clear that there was a ton of noise, and that you just couldn’t see things even if you were standing right in front of them. We weren’t expecting camera quality to be on par with that of the Galaxy S8, but this was totally disappointing.

Tap to see full-sized Samsung Galaxy A8+ (2018) photo samples

In another big surprise for a phone at this price level, video recording only goes up to 1080p with the rear as well as front cameras. You can choose the slightly wider custom resolution of 2224×1080, which at least doesn’t crop your frames in order to fill the screen, but Samsung wisely decided not to make this the default selection. There is digital stabilisation but not optical.

Battery life was good overall, and we were able to get through a full day of normal usage with about 15 percent left over. Our HD video loop battery test ran for 12 hours, 52 minutes which is not too bad for a phone with a screen this size to light up. We found that the phone charged up to 50 percent in slightly over half an hour, which is also good. Wireless charging isn’t supported, in case you were wondering.

Samsung Galaxy A8+ (2018) in pictures

Verdict

Samsung is at risk of becoming a slow, lumbering giant that cannot keep up with its nimble competitors. There’s no reason for it to have waited this long to release an updated premium-tier model, and the Galaxy A8+ (2018) is in a bit of an awkward position. It isn’t very convincing when seen next to the OnePlus 5T and Honor View 10, especially because of the features and capabilities that Samsung still reserves for its flagships.

We don’t know who the company is targeting with this phone, other than people who like large screens and blindly trust the Samsung brand. We don’t think the new Galaxy A8+ it’s strong enough to fend off the OnePlus 5T at exactly the same price. Camera quality is severely disappointing, and the half-hearted implementation of dual front cameras just leaves us confused. Despite its Infinity Display, the phone’s design doesn’t really scream for attention, and software bloat is another area of concern.

Samsung needs to figure out how to give its phones at this price level a strong identity and build on unique capabilities such as Samsung Pay, because the Galaxy A8+ (2018) definitely can’t compete on specifications and cost. Right now, the Galaxy S7 is more attractive and has a lower price. The Galaxy S8 is also soon to be replaced, which means it will become more affordable as well.

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