I just came back from a children’s birthday party. Naturally, I made sure to charge the phone as much as possible on the drive to the indoor playground. I took and sent a sizable number of pictures and videos, and played some Spotify over the car system on the way home. Nothing else, not even navigation.
5.5h on mobile, 1.5h total SoT - the battery went from 92% to 29% during that time. This is a great “half-a-day” phone, but, sadly, useless for any significantly longer outings.
Yeah being from AUS, I’m actually not too sure if I am missing some AI features. Which ones are you missing?
Most of the call-related AI features:
“Hold for Me” being the most painfully absent.
That call center menu navigation AI thing is missing (but that’s rarely supported even in the US).
No Google Duplex at all.
No improved Call Screen Assistant at all, it’s still that extremely robotic sounding, first generation one.
No “summarize this” feature for websites, either. That was one of the big, new, introductions.
Honestly, that’s pretty much half of the on-device AI features. The rest is the cloud-based photo magic stuff that isn’t run on the phone’s chip at all, that works and can be really cool (but is painfully slow and often quite buggy).
I don’t expect most of these to make it out of the US / to the EU anytime soon, and I’m willing to bet that I won’t see “Assistant with Bard” for a very, very long time.
Pixel 8 Pro 265Gb here. My first Pixel, my last Google device was a Nexus.
Right now, it’s a love/hate relationship:
I love the camera, display, software, haptic feedback, build, design, sound, call quality (seriously, I can use speakerphone without the other side even noticing that I’m doing so, wow!) and the face unlock during the day - when it’s bright enough, it’s almost magical. All really, really great things.
I’m fine with the performance (coming from an older Snapdragon 865 it surprisingly doesn’t feel like a notable uplift, but it’s good enough, and the most demanding game I play mobile is the NYT crossword), the fingerprint scanner is a little worse than on my old Xiaomi/Poco midranger and, I believe/hope, currently hampered by a bug where it doesn’t reliably trigger from AOD, which probably is the reason why it’s only just “ok” for me overall. Battery life on wifi is fine, albeit surprisingly a bit worse than on my three-year-old phone with its 4700mAh and identically sized display. Reception is fine, no complaints there.
I’m a bit miffed that some of the more interesting AI features are US-only, but what is there in the EU is still mostly nice and useful. Bluetooth is a bit weak, I had some connection issues with my Sony in-ears that I never had before.
I hate, hate, hate the battery life on mobile, especially on 5g. It’s utterly, embarrassingly, awful. How the fuck is it so much worse than on my three-year-old cheap-o phone with its far smaller and slowly dying battery - on the same carrier/5g? Why does it constantly feel warm when on 5g? There’s no way I can use this phone away from charger and wifi for a whole day.
So, yeah, best phone I ever had on wifi. A pretty, but useless, paperweight after a slightly longer day out on mobile. And it’s hard to comprehend why it’s so awful for me, I feel like there must be some kind of explanation or bug.
Literally the only issue I’m having with the phone, but if there’s no solution to this, it may turn out to be a dealbreaker.
You are aware that this isn’t a lifelong commitment, right? A Plex license doesn’t make using it mandatory. In fact, had you read a bit further, you’d have seen that it’s no commitment at all, and I’m still running and maintaining a Jellyfin server simultaneously, reverse proxy and all. Not just as a fallback, but also for the things it still does better.
I migrated my household use to Plex, though, because this evil “closed source for profit app” offers an on-device user experience that is as good, if not better, than that of a commercial streaming services. This makes the rest of the household use it happily, instead of seeing it as an inferior alternative.
Jellyfin’s user experience is simply not there yet, not even close. Its clients, if available at all for the system in question, are (mostly) functional, but certainly not fun.
I had the money to spend on the evil “closed source for profit app” and it made my family’s life a little better for it - are you sure that trying to shame me for that was the right reaction?
Plex killed their official plugin repository, but plugins are, technically, still supported. There just isn’t much life left in that ecosystem after Plex strangled it.
Ironically, it’s probably Jellyfin’s thriving plugin-ecosystem that’s holding back its clients - since anything with a native UI can’t really be used with any plugin that extends the UI feature set and vice versa.
Oh, and all “workarounds” that I know of for “offline” Plex involve essentially disabling user auth for certain IPs - which is insane. Plex simply doesn’t support local auth, it’s not an offline-capable solution. That (and some other restrictions) is why I’m still running and maintaining Jellyfin as a fallback.
Jellyfin requires a reverse proxy or similar to be reachable from outside the network, once that’s set up, the usability gap between the two becomes a lot smaller. And Jellyfin does, still, have some benefits over Plex - first and foremost: it doesn’t require an active Internet connection and an “ok” from a central server to fully function - it also has fewer restrictions when it comes to sharing content and a better plugin ecosystem.
Again, I think both are highly capable servers and I’m running both in parallel, even after migrating most of my personal use to Plex.
It’s the clients where it all falls down, sadly. Jellyfin’s are, even after all these years, clunky, ugly and unpleasant. The choice of supported devices and systems is also quite limited. This is where Plex shines: they have a, generally excellent, client for pretty much everything you would ever want to play your media on.
Do you mean hardware encoding, because that’s what’s paywalled in Plex.
I personally migrated from a Jellyfin ecosystem to a Plex with Lifetime Pass one when building my current server - while both are highly capable media servers, Plex has, by far, the better clients.
I’m disabled …
Don’t worry, Plasma 6 will default to half square and hat rounded instead.
Geeze, what an obvious sales pitch.
Try The Secret of Money Island instead, it’s much better than Loom. 😉
They’re pushing their proprietary “Metal” API, which is iOS and MacOS compatible. Just Apple being Apple.
MacOS is a good middle ground but not one I would personally use outside of a work machine.
I fail to see how it’s a “middle ground” between the drawbacks you mentioned before.
When it comes to gaming, Mac OS is the absolute bottom of the barrel, compatibility is utterly atrocious. With Apple’s insistence not to allow Vulkan drivers, they pulled the rug out of any leaps Mac OS could have made in that regard (like Linux did).
Apple also pulled the plug on any server capabilities Mac OS once had.
So, when it comes to gaming or server use, Mac OS would be my absolute last choice, not a middle ground.
Software choice is limited, but software quality is generally high and for some professions, the choice is flawless: when it comes to content creation, Apple’s ecosystem is hard to beat.
Yes, I’ve seen the documentary:
As an AI language model, I concur with this assessment.
The Epson Eco-Tank printers are probably one of the most infuriatingly mislabeled products ever, though. They come with self-destruct timers.
If their software counter device that their excess ink sponge pad is full (which can happen rather quickly depending on printing behavior and the amount of cleaning cycles), they turn themselves into e-waste. Epson considers the sponge non-serviceable and the only official solution is to buy an entirely new printer with a clean sponge. Absolutely nothing Eco about that.
There are (paid!) counter reset hacks available now, though.
So, yeah, fuck Epson, but for very different reasons than op is listing.
Made good printers. They were one of the last bastions of sanity, but last year that one fell, too:
As far as I know, they finally pushed firmware updates to block 3rd party toner to most of their printers - which is pretty evil, given that most people purchased Brother devices exactly to avoid that kind of bullshit and nobody expected it from them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
That said, I love my Brother DCP-9022CDW. It has been an indestructible workhorse, eats any toner I want and lets me reset the counter and keep printing another 2000 pages on an “empty” toner. Heck, I’ve had third party toner that I could reset three times before actually running out. That latest firmware update will stay far away from it, though.
“Arguing with an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon. It’ll just knock over all the pieces, shit on the board, and strut about like it’s won.”
I know, you know, that I’m not telling the truth.