Im very interested in an officially supported linux phone, however the fitmware seems not to be upstream(yet?). I hope it will be upstreamed, or else were back to square one with linux mobile hardware support if they stop working on it!
Hong Kong only recently became part of China. (This was not correct, it became part of China in 1997). I’m sure the protests are fresh in people’s minds still. If anywhere would want private phones it would be HK.
China didn’t “conquer” anything. They had an agreement that would keep them independent until a certain date and that date passed. So HK now belongs to China, as was agreed.
I was a little misinformed, it turns out HK has belonged to China since 1997, and the recent protests were just because of some policy changes that make China’s influence stronger in regards to their ability to extradite people into mainland China.
I really want phones like this to actually work and to succeed, but there are so many things these companies have to get just right – it’s a huge undertaking.
Releasing a phone that’s admittedly unfinished seems really risky. People are getting sick of unfinished products being tossed at them for full price, with the empty promises from the company that those missing features will be added in later.
I have the Samsung one right now, but the problem with it is that I can’t charge while listening to music and I ain’t gonna sacrifice sound quality with a 2 in 1 dongle.
Some people think it’s a status symbol, but most people don’t care. But yeah it’s above 50 percent now and climbing (in the US).
I have both from time to time. I wish there was a viable 3rd party than picking our favorite multi-billion dollar company, but as a developer, I need both.
I don’t think this is the case here. Like, this is dead on arrival in most of Europe without WhatsApp. My phone is my most important device. I cannot access my bank account without it. But banks will not allow me to use that phone as a factor for authentication.
5 or 10 years ago you could have forced those companies to either support something third party or develop for a new phone os but now we are stuck with android and ios until something really messed up happens to our economy or until one of them really fucks up and gets into legal trouble to a point where they can’t sell phones or services anymore.
Yes but then you are half a percent of the user base that a new phone manufacturer would want to attract. And in Germany at least it is literally impossible to have a social life outside of the nerd bubble if you don’t use WhatsApp.
Arm is not any better than x86 when it comes to instructions. There’s a reason we stuck to x86 for a very long time. Arm is great because of its power efficiency.
That power efficiency is a direct result of the instructions. Namely smaller chips due to the reduced instructions set, in contrast to x86’s (legacy bearing) complex instruction set.
Yes I understand that and agree, but the reason x86 dominated is because of those QoL instructions that x86 has. On arm you need to write more code to do the same thing x86 does, OTOH, if you don’t need to write a complex application, that isn’t a bad thing.
You don’t need to write more code. It’s just that code compiles to more explicit/numerous machine instructions. A difference in architecture is only really relevant if you’re writing assembly or something like it.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I am talking about assembly code. I will again state that I am pro-arm, and wish I was posting this from an arm laptop running a distro.
It’s really not, x86 (CISC) CPUs could be just as efficient as arm (RISC) CPUs since instruction sets (despite popular consensus) don’t really influence performance or efficiency. It’s just that the x86 CPU oligopoly had little interest in producing power efficient CPUs while arm chip manufacturers were mostly making chips for phones and embedded devices making them focus on power efficiency instead of relentlessly maximizing performance. I expect the next few generations of intel and AMD x86 based laptop CPUs to approach the power efficiency Apple and Qualcomm have to offer.
All else being equal, a complex decoding pipeline does reduce the efficiency of a processor. It’s likely not the most important aspect, but eventually there will be a point where it does become an issue once larger efficiency problems are addressed.
yeah, but you could improve the not ideal encoding with a relatively simple update, no need to throw out all the tools, great compatibility, and working binaries that intel and amd already have.
Well, not exactly. You have to remove instructions at some point. That’s what Intel’s x86-S is supposed to be. You lose some backwards compatibility but they’re chosen to have the least impact on most users.
Arm is better because there are more than three companies who can design and manufacture one.
Edit: And only one of the three x86 manufacturers are worth a damn, and it ain’t Intel.
Edit2: On further checking, VIA sold its CPU design division (Centaur) to Intel in 2021. VIA now makes things like SBCs, some with Intel, some ARM. So there’s only two x86 manufacturers around anymore.
We stuck to x86 forever because backwards compatibility and because nobody had anything better. Now manufacturers do have something better, and it’s fast enough that emulation is good enough for backwards compatibility.
Yet another Linux phone with subpar specs. That processor is quite underwhelming even compared to Google’s Tensor G1, a proc that many regard as crap as is and it beats this Dimensity 900 handily.
theregister.com
Active