Oct. 17th, 2014

andrewducker: (Default)
It seems remarkably old-fashioned to me that monitors are still locked to having a set refresh rate - or, at least, a refresh rate that's locked to a refresh rate on the device that's driving them.

Why have we not got a system by which the computer (or console, or whatever) prepares new screens and then hands them off as they're finished, for the screen to update itself to?

At the moment, my screen is updating about twice a second (as the cursor blinks), and yet my graphics card is still sending the same image repeatedly.

Similarly, games end up using things like VSYNC, and multiple levels of buffering in order to smoothly transition from one frame to the next, because not hitting that 1/60th of a second mark leads to unpleasant consequences. Getting rid of that mark would remove all sorts of complications from the pipeline, replaced by a signal that says "Here's the next frame, go ahead and repaint the screen".

Am I missing something obvious here?
andrewducker: (Default)
I've had a few days for the Google product announcement to sink in, and overall I think my response is "I think we've hit peak smartphone".

The replacement for the Nexus 5 is...the Nexus 5. No bump in speed, memory, or anything else. Because, basically, it's good enough to do anything you'd want to do with a smartphone at the moment*.

There's the Nexus 6, but that's firmly pushing into small tablet territory. I'm going to have a play with one, but I'm not excited by it, and I'm certainly not convinced it's worth the £400-odd it's going to cost.

So I had a quick look around at the competition, to see what I was missing. And, basically, nobody has brought out anything in the last year that's "must have". The OnePlus One looks nice, the Moto G is cheap, the Sony XPeria Z3 is waterproof**. But there's nothing that would make my daily smartphone usage any better.

Frankly, the only thing I could think of that would _really_ make my usage better would be longer battery life. And Android L increases battery life by about a third. In fact, it's the new OS update I'm looking forward to the most.

Is there something I'm missing? Any functionality either recently announced for a different phone, or something I should look forward to over the next year or so?



*To be honest, if the Moto G had 2GB of RAM then that would perfectly suit my smartphone needs. The only thing that I'm envious of any other smartphone for is the fingerprint unlock on the iPhone 5S and above.
**ish.
andrewducker: (Default)

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