Yeah, hopefully we’ll get Oreo soon. It’s still in beta, apparently. I love this phone. Be sure to check out the Essential subreddit. Lots of useful stuff there.
Upthread aways was the tale of my son’s 6P that had the battery-drain problem a few weeks out of warranty. A local shop replaced the battery for ~$100 and all was well - until early this week when it went into forever bootloop. Tried everything the internet had to offer to get it to boot once (mostly involving a heat gun, apparently to get the ‘big’ cores to shut down) so as to set the bootloader to open, which would allow a hack to shut down the big cores permanently (apparently these cores are prone to hardware failure).
Neither Google nor Huawei are willing to own up to what a disaster that phone was, so we just took it in the whatever and he bought a Pixel 2. I would have sworn off Google phones forever, but that was his choice. It will be interesting to see - I expect they will refuse to give us the $70 trade-in value on a 6P, though it does “turn on”, and it’s their own damn fault it doesn’t boot.
Anyway, the Pixel 2’s camera seems so far to live up to its lofty reputation:
Not bad, but why is only part of the Christmas tree bokeh?
Yep, I’m off expensive google flagship phones forever, pretty much. Unless they do the right thing and start fixing this shit. Cheap Android phones with user replaceable batteries forevermore.
How to do audio-only YouTube? Read on…
YMMV of course, depending on how “stock” the Android on your device is, and maybe this is a well-known thing, but I was looking into this yesterday as a way to avoid having the screen on while listening to a game soundtrack, and I found out that if you open YouTube in Chrome, navigate to the video you want to just listen to, then “request desktop site” and play it, you can listen to a backgrounded tab’s audio (it will stop when it goes into the background, BUT then you pull down your control/notifications center and the audio should be re-startable from there), and even turn off your screen/lock your phone and use the same control screen trick to get the audio to play.
There was a way to do this with Android Firefox before but I kept futzing with that and couldn’t make it work.
You can also just subscribe to Play Music/Youtube Red and it’ll work screen off without issue. . . it’s nice :)
Sure, but this way it’s free. :-)
Totally! I was just surprised to learn the “screen-off Youtube” thing was a Youtube Red feature and not the default behavior when some friends didn’t have it. It’s a really nice side benefit to Google’s fairly decent music streaming service :)
You are limited to music which is considered music, so a lot of stuff is not covered by this. I’m looking at you, compilation of 1980’s cartoon theme music.
Really? Cuz I definitely, like, play rainy lake and blowing box fan style videos with my screen off with that feature.
Maybe I’m only thinking about Youtube Music. There were a number of songs missing from that list. It’s been a while since I used Youtube Red in any fashion.
So it looks like Samsung is gonna release the S9 soon?
The Huawei boss did something unexpected at the end of his keynote, however. Framed by a simple slide reading “Something I Want to Share,” Yu proceeded to address the failure of Huawei’s carrier deal directly. Shedding the earlier hesitation in his speech, he made the point that American phone buyers can’t have the best and widest choice of device if Huawei products — those of the world’s third-biggest phone vendor — weren’t on offer. “Everybody knows that in the US market that over 90 percent of smartphones are sold by carrier channels,” he said. “It’s a big loss for us, and also for carriers, but the more big loss is for consumers, because consumers don’t have the best choice.”
If he’s so refreshingly candid, perhaps he’s willing to discuss with me a refund for the Nexus 6P that required a new $80 battery (or twice that if Huawei did it) at 13 months and then became a bootlooping brick at 18 months.
Yep, my issues with my 6p are also why I’ll never buy another Huawei device.
Hey @ArmandoPenblade!
Starting in 2019, the bill would ban the sale of electronics that are designed “in such a way as to prevent reasonable diagnostic or repair functions by an independent repair provider. Preventing reasonable diagnostic or repair functions includes permanently affixing a battery in a manner that makes it difficult or impossible to remove.”
One step closer to replaceable batteries for all!
Huzzah! Huzzah for Washington state! Wait. What’s in Washington state again?
If passed in Washington, information and parts made available there would likely filter out to the rest of the United States.
Amazon has removed the lock screen ads from their Prime phones. The update to Amazon Offers that removes the ads is now live. I’m guessing it’s because of Google’s new lock screen ad ban
I am having an issue unlocking my android phone. Basically to get to the unlock screen (the dots to make a pattern), I need to swipe up a bunch of times, sometimes 5 or 6 times. This has been happening for a good while, but after the last android update, it is an order of magnitude more difficult.
Is there some technique I just have wrong or is there some kind of sensitivity setting that I can set somewhere?