kirk781

After 4a and 6a, now is the time for 7a to shine!

Though, is it still in early beta and apparently very few models seem to be affected and there isn't any word of system update to nuke the battery life on this model. But it goes to show that Google is treating the A series really badly.

This is a relatively old review when the TicWatch was new. This watch easily outperforms the Galaxy Ultra and even Oneplus 2R and musters in 4/5 days of battery life (looks sadly at my GW 6).

Some did report its app being not as good as S Health or Google's implementation. However it's main Achilles heel is the update problem. Pixel Watches, IIRC, get 3 years and Galaxy Watches get 4 years ; but TicWatches are lucky to get one major Wear OS upgrade and that too, delayed. Which is a Shame because the hardware here easily equals last gen Galaxy/Pixel Watches and in terms of battery life, will stand for many years to come.

In my country, Wear OS forms a tiny share of the market and Samsung has the biggest pie of it (it doesn't help that watches aren't considered for trade in here, so if and when I do upgrade to a new watch, my current watch becomes e waste and I pay full price). I did consider the TicWatch but seeing it's relatively poor software support went with Samsung. However, damn if I said that I love Samsung's battery life or charging implementation. The WPC mechanism wastes so much heat and throttles itself to heck in hot temperatures.

This link about Glance made me think about this.

Majority of folks here might not be aware of this company. Their software usually ships on low end phones mainly in the Indian/South Asian market. They do seemed to have pivoted to the US as well but I am not sure if overseas models also see this scourge. As of right now, if one's phone has this, they will basically see a new glorified wallpaper with news/text each time they unlock their phone. And if you read the article, they wish to go even furthur. It can technically be switched off though often it's buried deeper than Dante' s last layer of hell.

Do overseas(read:other Asian markets/European/American and so on) also have any local equivalent to this scourge from my country? Are ads plastered on lock screens on entry level phones common anywhere else in the Android world?

This is an old article I stumbled upon when browsing archives of this site. But it's quite in depth and covers the history of this somewhat politically charged topic.

Filled with some images as well, I wasn't expecting Verge to do a deep dive on Vietnam of all things

This is a regional release from the brand apparently for Nigerian market only which explains the fact that despite having decent specs( things like 90W charging, 8 GB RAM and 144 Hz high PWM dimming display), it is a 4G phone only.

Though it is gimmicky in some respects. It has a SpO2 sensor apparently built into the back but skips out on basic things like micro SD or 3.5 mm jack (but hey, they do give free USB C headphones; now I can switch from Sennheiser's IE 600 to an upgraded variant :p).

It is a half baked review, IMO. The author says that despite having 45 W charging, the phone takes 75 mins to charge. Samsung really slows down it's charging speeds post 80%, so testing from 0 to 100 is not a good criterion at all.

Plus, he forgets to mention that Samsung skips on a microSD card for A56 which was present on A55. Though in Samsung's favor, they are offering 6 OS upgrades and I doubt any other OEM except Google matches it.

I originally used Spotify a long time ago before switching to Premium again from YT Music. I mainly liked the fact that it supported third party clients ( I got a low overhead terminal based client on Linux setup that supports proper keybindings and Spotify connect as well). I also liked the fact that it had a good Wear OS app better than ironically, Google's own offering.

Sadly, my positives end there. The Wear OS itself had a giant bug for me where songs wouldn't add to custom playlists (they would add to liked songs, but not to any custom playlists NOT at the first position). Also, for some reason, there is an outstanding bug on Spotify Forums relating to Bluetooth multipoint that causes playback issues dating back to 2020 which has not been fixed till now.

People wax poetically about Spotify Wrapped and other services like YT Music have copied it in form of Recap but since I use Last.fm ; that did not play a significant factor for me. What I wanted was customizability. The simple fact that I can't remap the plus sign to say, add songs to most recent Playlist instead of liked songs is a downer (YT Music does better in that regard).

Other services are fast catching up. Google bundles YouTube (or the other way around) for little more the price (in my country Atleast) and gives Music service. Apple offers lossless audio(though ironically Apple's own Bluetooth offerings can't stream it).

Spotify does have the advantage that it has a partially open API and many third party apps/services can take advantage of it(and many have been written around it) though a part of me wishes that just like there were third party clients for Spotify on Linux/Windows, something like that existed on Android as well. All in all, I personally still have not found any streaming service (Tidal included since I used it once somehow) that rivals the simplicity of locally stored music.

Pre 1990s, there was supply side limit in my country and long waiting time(like years) for cars. This meant that car ownership flourished in the hands of elite only. Post opening up of economy, owning a car has become a status symbol and even villages, where once the ubiquitous sustainable cycle was the way of life, cars now rule.

Cars choke the street like pollution choke my country's cities. Trains carry hundreds of passengers, buses dozens, autos multiple, but a single vehicle mooching on the street just for sake of a single person. Since parking is a joke, people park their cars anywhere on the side of roads creating more traffic (Yes, it's a developing country). Folks here love to blame shared autos or government(and some criticism is valid) but none wonder about cars. What is the need for a single person driving an SUV that takes nearly half the space of a small bus?

I see old images of Bangalore from 1960 or Delhi from 1930s and it was wide open spaces/streets. Now it is choked to the limit. Cars have made my country an urban dystopia. There are many things I would have loved my country to copy from the US. It's obsession with cars is NOT one of them.

For me, cars are an utilitarian waste of space(until they are always running packed to capacity which they rarely do)