Android!

[Salamok]

Megapixels isn't just not everything, megapixels are nothing.

It is a stupid metric which bears no relationship to picture quality, so long as you have at least 2 megapixels.

This is a bit of an overreaction to the megapixel marketing hype.  If you are having 8x10's done or like to crop your photo's while still maintaining an adequate pixel density for print then more pixels help.  I agree that in the context of a phone where you are shooting through a fingerprint covered plastic case and tiny lens onto an even tinier sensor a bunch of extra megapixels aren't really helping you but saying "megapixels are nothing" is way off the mark.  I also doubt I would place my minimum threshold for helpful megapixels on a phone as low as 2.

On my 6 megapixel SLR I frequently run into situations where I wish it was more, on my 5 megapixel phone I never do.

[Sky]

My 4MP P&S sucks for printing. I wish I had the money to upgrade...hell, go back and time and give myself at least a 10MP camera 6 years ago. So many amazing photos that will never be framed because they're too pixely/grainy at 16x20.

For a phone, yeah I think 5 would probably be cool. 2 would be something like I'm getting with my tracfone = useless.

[eldaec]

I would, for instance, take a single stop of speed over doubling the image resolution on any camera-phone currently in production.

1080p is only 2 megapixels.

Though I completely accept you want more than that for 20" prints. I don't know how many 20" prints I've ever produced from my phone. Oh. Yes I do. People who are not like me in this respect are of course allowed to continue giving fucks about megapixels. The rest of you, I am adjusting my beret and will now snort in derision.

/snort

[eldaec]

As I cannot help myself, I'm just going to add that the reason your picture looks grainy when shot at 2 megapixels, is probably because your camera has terrible jpeg conversion.

[Salamok]

Though I completely accept you want more than that for 20" prints. I don't know how many 20" prints I've ever produced from my phone. Oh. Yes I do. People who are not like me in this respect are of course allowed to continue giving fucks about megapixels. The rest of you, I am adjusting my beret and will now snort in derision.

I do a calendar of my daughter every year, prints are 8x10 and at the DPI that cafepress/snapfish/zazzle/etc.. prints them this is almost a perfect matchup for the native resolution of my D70s.  I have included some phone shots a few times and if the lighting is perfect they come out pretty good but because of the pixel density neither camera has a high enough resolution to crop a portait photo into a landscape orientation and still have enough native resolution to fill out the 8x10 w/o resizing it.

[eldaec]

They'll be running at about 200 dpi. So 3 megapixels. If we want to use 3 as the number of megapixels we give shits about - ok. Though I'm dubious about the prospect of your phone lens being that sharp anyhow.

[Salamok]

3 megapixels if you don't crop it.

[apocrypha]

It's hard to directly compare them because they work in such different ways, but the rough equivalent resolution to 35mm film (ASA200-400 neg) is about 6 MP.

You also can't directly correlate print DPI (dots per inch) with MP since multiple printer dots are used to print a single digital pixel. And as has been said already there's a lot more to it than simple megapixels. Pixel density is very important - the bigger those individual pixels are on an imaging chip then the better they are likely to deal with low light situations. And ofc the lens quality makes a huge difference. Also when editing photos then the more MP the better generally. Downsizing a large image gives you huge advantages for sharpening, cleaning up, noise removal, etc.

The rule of thumb that I find works well is that for a 10" x 8" print you want a bare minimum of 3 MP from a decent camera, i.e. APS-C or larger sensor. For a 16" x 20" print you want 4 times that, so 12 MP. For mobile phone pictures you just expect them to look a bit rubbish regardless of pixel size because they all have tiny lenses. The iPhone4 has a semi-decent camera but most of the ways in which it produces good looking images are to do with the extreme post-processing that the phone does. It runs heavy noise reduction and selective sharpening and it cranks up local contrast and vibrance. Apps like Instagram just turn all of that up to 12 and throw in a faux retro colour palette to the mix and voilà, everyone thinks it's a magic camera.

1-2 MP cameras can make decent images, sure, and for many uses they're fine. But to say "It is a stupid metric which bears no relationship to picture quality, so long as you have at least 2 megapixels." is just wrong. Pixel number is just one of several factors that contribute to image quality.

[Draegan]

Apparently rumors are all over the place for the release date of the S3.  Everything from next week to July.  I've made up my mind to wait for this phone. 

Twiddling my thumbs in the mean time.

[Yegolev]

I found my Nokia 8260!  Any idea if it would work?  I might assume so but before I buy a power cord I would like to know.

[Lucas]

I finally ushered into the wonderful Android World 

Yesterday, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Next Turbo: since I never owned them, I can't compare it to "monsters" like the last Nexus or the iPhone 4G, but to me it seems pretty fluid and quite easy to use. Very satisfied, so far :)

[Draegan]

I just rooted my KF with Energy's CM9 and it's sooooooooo delicious.

[fuser]

God I hate Rogers, still stuck on 4.0.1 on the Nexus with no upgrade in sight. Ended up just unlocking the bootloader and pushing the system up to 4.0.4 to get future updates straight from Google. The phone is noticeably faster wish I did it sooner to 4.0.3.

Speaking of which anyone headed to IO this year?

[Ozzu]

I got a Galaxy Nexus three days ago since I was due for an upgrade on my Verizon account. It's definitely a beautiful phone, but I'm having pretty bad signal issues. I guess maybe my last two phones being Motorolas spoiled me, but man it's frustrating.

I've updated to the latest leaked baseband/radio and that has helped some, but I'm starting to think I might take it back and exchange it for a Razr Maxx.

[Thrawn]

Trying out HTC for the first time, just picked up a Rezound for me and my wife for a grand total of about $20.00. (with contract renewal of course, but we've been with them for like 8 years so it doesn't bother me at all)

[01101010]

Finally got beta build of ICS on my Incredible 2. Other than some annoying bugs, I likes.

[MuffinMan]

I tried everything I could to try and get decent battery life out of it but I had to downgrade from CM9 (ICS) back to CM7 (Gingerbread) on my Epic. I could barely get 9 hours out of ICS but can get 24 hours with GB, both with light usage.

[luckton]

I'm more than content with CM7 right now.  I just put the new 7.2 RC1 on my boss' Fascinate, which self-bricked itself after three months of running 7.1 (the first official release support for the Fascinate).  It's much improved and bug-free compared to before, and he's a much happier camper, which makes my employment a much safer situation 

As for me myself, still rocking 7.0 on my Incredible 1.  Will deploy 7.2 once it's final, and I'm in no rush for ICS.  It'll get here when it gets here.

[01101010]

I tried everything I could to try and get decent battery life out of it but I had to downgrade from CM9 (ICS) back to CM7 (Gingerbread) on my Epic. I could barely get 9 hours out of ICS but can get 24 hours with GB, both with light usage.

When I first dropped ICS on my Inc2, it raped my battery to something like 10hours with moderate use. Read a bit more, and for my phone, one of the bugs is having the wifi basically on all the time unless toggled off. Even doing that, I could still only top 12hours. Found a thread on it and one suggestion was to use a different governor. Did that and today I pulled it off the charger @ 7:30a and am sitting at 50% right now ~12hours without toggling the wifi. I am impressed.

[climbjtree]

I just picked up the Galaxy Nexus after having been an iphone 4 user, and 3GS before that. I,m beginning to think that this phone is just an all around better smart phone.

I've got two gripes though. Battery life is way shittier, but still totally managable. My biggest gripe is probably a small one to everyone else: it takes way to long for me to switch between different keyboard languages. Press, hold and another toggle as opposed to the dedicated button on the iPhone. Trivial, but annoying.

[Amarr HM]

Currently looking out for some automation tools for testing Mobile apps on Android (& iOS) and wondering if people have come across any that are good. One that looks promising is 'Robotium' but there's also a built in module to the Android SDK 'Monkeyrunner'.

[eldaec]

So the Galaxy s3 launched.

http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxys3/gallery.html

4.8" 720 pentile screen, 1.4 quad core cpu, 1Gb of RAM.

tbh for me, lack of a bloatware UI  and faster software updates make the nexus still more attractive than the extra hardware on this.

[Pezzle]

I saw the launch material for the SIII at work yesterday.  The capabilities do look impressive, but do I care if my phone knows I look at it? 

My Droid may be dying.  Application hangs and crashes, not responding at times etc.  I really like an actual keypad, though going without seems inevitable eventually.  I also like removable batteries.  Guess I could pick up a Nexus for cheap now and adjust? 

[01101010]

So the Galaxy s3 launched.

http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxys3/gallery.html

4.8" 720 pentile screen, 1.4 quad core cpu, 1Gb of RAM.

tbh for me, lack of a bloatware UI  and faster software updates make the nexus still more attractive than the extra hardware on this.

All we really want to know is: How does the porn look on it?

[Draegan]

S3 has a removable battery.

[Salamok]

Anyone here tried an android watch yet?  I am considering getting a WiMM One.

[Tebonas]

So, the Wildfire S of my better half is about to die. Which is the current small form Android handy with a good battery time to own?

[eldaec]

Anything by Samsung that is the right size I guess.

Barring the brand new (large) HTC phones, everything worthwhile seems to be made by Samsung atm.

[Tebonas]

Thanks, thats what I figured. But she seems to like the HTC UI (for whatever reasons), so I guess I'm stuck with finding her the latest Wildfire successor.

[01101010]

Thanks, thats what I figured. But she seems to like the HTC UI (for whatever reasons), so I guess I'm stuck with finding her the latest Wildfire successor.

Sense UI  stuff was rather clean and useful at times. But I haven't been back to it since I rooted back in August.

[Quinton]

Thanks, thats what I figured. But she seems to like the HTC UI (for whatever reasons), so I guess I'm stuck with finding her the latest Wildfire successor.

The HTC One S is not that huge (4.3" display, 5.15" (L) x 2.56" (W) x 0.31" (T)) and the Qualcomm 8260A is a nice, fast SoC).
http://www.htc.com/us/smartphones/htc-one-s-tmobile/

Don't have direct experience with this one, but Qualcomm's single chip solutions have traditionally had pretty impressive battery life.

[Draegan]

Pre-ordered an S3 from Verizon and I get to keep my grandfathered unlimited data plan.   They are telling me it'll ship on July 9th which sucks, because Apple is trying to steal my phone away from me.

Fucking asshole hipsters at Apple need to suck a dick and stop cock blocking patents.

[01101010]

Pre-ordered an S3 from Verizon and I get to keep my grandfathered unlimited data plan.   They are telling me it'll ship on July 9th which sucks, because Apple is trying to steal my phone away from me.

Fucking asshole hipsters at Apple need to suck a dick and stop cock blocking patents.

I hear Verizon is going to eventually kill that grandfather'd unlimited plan very soon so that the next round of renewals you will be forced to choose a plan. I am considering jumping to Sprint if that happens.

[Draegan]

Maybe in 2 years Sprint won't suck in my area.

[Salamok]

So the wife just picked up an Evo and switched to Virgin Mobile.  I have been on Virgin Mobile since December and the triumph is a borderline piece of shit (worth the $120 I paid for it on sale though).  Service for Virgin is pretty decent in Austin and the Evo really does reveal that, it fixes nearly all of the concerns I had with the Triumph (call volume level, call quality, crappy GPS, buggy as shit touchscreen).

So if you do not absolutely have to have the latest most awesome phone and live in a decent coverage area, $38 a month 300min/unlimited text/data w/o a contract is a pretty sweet deal.  Even with my crappy Triumph I am happier with Virgin than I was with Verizon or AT&T, albeit mostly because I do not feel like I am getting robbed.