Phonearena on Sony's 4K smartphone

I'm not sure what to think about this article from +PhoneArena

On one hand, they tried to illustrate their point with pictures which is great.

However, showing what you see on screen in photos is very difficult.

Video would be a better medium, since the viewer can build a better visual representation thanks to the multi-frame interpolation operating in our brain.
Also, high resolution photographs is not the best medium to highlight the usefulness of high resolution displays, since depending on the content and capture, fake details coming from sharpening can appear better than higher actual resolution.
Small text or diagrams with a lot of details benefit from high resolution displays more.

With the current state of technology, I will take a Quad HD smartphone over a sometimes(rarely)-4K one any day anyway.
And please, don't kill it with sharpening: halos and artifacts mask and destroy the resolution advantage over 1080p most of the time.

#supercurioBlog #press #critic #display



Kill it before it lays eggs: On the Z5 Premium’s 4K UHD display and why it’s useless
When it comes to display resolution, the law of diminishing returns pretty much renders any discussion moot. In essence, it states that, in most things, at some point further increases in X will results in smaller and smaller gains of Y. Put otherwise, the more you increase pixel count given an identical panel size, the less and less every other pixel will count, as you’ll be reaching a fundamental limit—that of your eyes’ finite resolving power…

Source post on Google+

Interesting video by +Russell Holly​​​​​​ for +Android Central​​​​​​

His initial approach in the video is to comfort people wondering if the +Nexus​​​​​ 5X, they might have just ordered is actually slow.
What I got from the video however is that a difference in performance between the 5X and the 6P is much larger than I expected.
Like 1-generation gap difference of real-world performance.

In the attached article's comments, there's a link to this other video made by +Android Headlines​​​​​​ which doesn't show as much gap apparently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WS01o-1zl0
It's interesting as second take.

Watching this new type of videos becoming popular, evaluating the amount of time you wait when using your phone and multitasking capabilities makes me wonder about the possibility to replicate those in an automated way.
It might be possible to script all that, and get some quite valuable metrics allowing to compare phones quickly.

Maybe a few Android publications could team up and fund the development of such evaluation tool.

#supercurioBlog #press #Nexus #video

Source post on Google+

A few notes about +Ars Technica comments on +HTC One A9 Audio

There's also a 24-bit DSP on-board, which upscales audio to 24-bit, as well as 24-bit DAC.

Fact is you'll be hard pressed finding a DAC installed in a phone during at least the past 5 years that are not accepting 24-bit wording on their bus, with at least 24-bit fixed-point DSP & oversampling, then converting to analog in 24-bit as well (some in 32-bit now as well)

There's no such thing as 24-bit "upscaling"
Or if you wish, everything audio out here already does that with a simple integer multiplication, you just didn't know about it.
But it's just an arithmetic operation, it doesn't improve the quality in any way.

However, does the system preserves this resolution from the audio player API, through the software mixing and processing and eventually to the Linux audio driver, that's something else.

iPhones benefit in dynamic range from 24-bit audio, when playing 24-bit files or even with 16-bit at lower volumes thanks to the volume mixer, but not many Android devices do even since Lollipop that adds 32-bit floating point audio.

Concerning what the marketing material and PR people say, I learned to not trust any of it regarding audio, you can only rely on measurements, they'll say whatever buzzword – sometime in good faith with no correlation whatsoever with reality.

My advice, as usual: measurements 🙂
If you want to know how to do that for your next article: let me know, I'll show you.

#supercurioBlog #audio #quality #press #critic



HTC One A9 hands-on: A midrange smartphone that feels like a flagship | Ars Technica
A solid, aluminum unibody paired with decent internals and a nice display.

Source post on Google+