The size of things to come (updated)

Ultra everything

2020 has been a weird year, but thankfully, that doesn’t seem to have affected device release schedules too much. Can’t say the same for movies, but that’s another story.

There’s been an undeniable trend in the mobile space — after a period of shrinkage, flagship devices are getting bigger. This trend has been facilitated by several advancements in the space as mobile phones with screens we see today were simply not possible, say, 10 years ago.

  • Chips are faster, more parallel and more efficient
  • Batteries have more capacity in smaller spaces, and devices have more sophisticated power management
  • Screens have higher resolutions, higher refresh rates and better efficiency
  • Advancements in technology, such as flexible screens, under-screen fingerprint sensors, facial recognition in mobile, etc., have allowed for a higher screen-to-body ratio — bigger screens within similarly sized housing across the generations
  • For better image and video quality, engineers are not just cramming in bigger sensors – they are adding more cameras
  • More features

The only large phone that’s ever made sense to me is the ultimate large phone — the Samsung Galaxy Note. That’s because it has a stylus – the S-Pen. It’s easier to write on a screen that’s bigger, and the engineers at Samsung recognized this from the beginning. The first Galaxy Note phone had a screen that was a “whopping” 5.3 inches across – pretty small by today’s standards. The main criticisms of such a “monster” size were that it wouldn’t fit in most pockets and that one-handed use would be difficult. To put this in context, Apple just announced the iPhone SE, a compact alternative to their flagship phone that has a 4.7-inch screen…


Now I took a break after drafting the above. Now, four years later in September 2024, it’s fair to say a lot has changed!

Obviously AI Generated Image (OAIGI - I just made that up)
  • The Galaxy Note is dead, but its spirit lives on—the Galaxy S2X Ultras carry the Notes’ large screen and stylus.
  • Foldables are a major (expensive!) thing now—these are the new flagships, or rather alternative flagships, at least in the Android space; Apple hasn’t quite made the jump yet, but rumours suggest that will happen.
  • Generative AI is all the rage, and it’s in all the things!

I have thoughts.

I think the Galaxy S2X Ultras are among the top phones, true flagships each year. I get a sneaking feeling Samsung will drop the integrated stylus at some point though. It’s either you use the stylus or you don’t, and I get the sense most people buying the S2X Ultras don’t use it. I used to use the sylus daily, and I struggled when I switched to iPhone. I couldn’t imagine not having the stylus for input but I got used to it. The degrees of freedom, speed and overall flexibility of the stylus make it hard to beat. I’ve since found alternative devices for pen input (SuperNote A6 X2 Nomad and Boox Note Air 3C for instance) but having the option to use pen input on my phone any time is something I miss.

Foldables seem cool, but they cost a tad too much! Locally, the base level 256GB S24 Ultra is $2,450, and the base 256GB Z Fold6 is $3,050. The Ultra is already pretty expensive, but the Fold6 takes it up a notch. Don’t get me wrong, they are a lot of phone, but these sound more like high-end laptop prices. I do think the (full) folding phones are the new tablets – actual Android tablets feel like a neglected category, but the form factor and innovation continue to progress in foldables.

Like many have said, it feels like these are the early days of AI, akin to the early days of the web. There will likely be some kind of AI boom – I think the possibilities in the short term may be exaggerated but in the long term underestimated. We have no idea how it’s going to turn out, but it’s going to be something! AI is here to stay.

Fixing old posts

Ever since I migrated my blog to something self-hosted, way back when, I’ve hopped across a few hosts and domain registrars. In the middle of all that, at some point, I lost some content. I though it was at the old https://anphase.wordpress.com site where I tried to mirror all the posts but unfortunately most of those where only links back to this blog!

BUT! Thanks to the awesome folks at the internet archive I can restore a lot of the old content. I’ll be doing that over the next little while and replacing the placeholders with the proper articles.

Archive.org snapshot
A colourful past!

On that, note, where are my robots at? Oh wait, looks like I asked that question 8 years too soon, they’re on their way now.

Funny it never occurred to me that I could recreate/replace my posts using the internet archive until at all until today.

Tech overload

Overload!
Overload!

The tech space is one of the fastest growing and changing of all the spaces. The amount of innovation and courage in this industry is awe-inspiring to say the least. Staying on top of it has always been a challenge but it seems that the pace is not just increasing steadily – it’s accelerating.

Don’t get me wrong, overall, I think this is a good thing – technology enriches lives in so many ways and the more people are exposed to it the better. The difficulty is that with so much choice, a couple of issues arise:

  1. Analysis paralysis – there are so many things to think about and consider that it slows or even prevents the adoption of particular technology
  2. It’s a more complex space – it’s difficult to know where to begin or where to stop when so many products and services cover so many things, often with overlap
  3. Increases the barrier of entry – as a result of the above a lot of people would just rather not bother or get overwhelmed quickly because it all looks too hard
  4. Feature creep – with increasing competition and demands from people, the products themselves become increasingly complex (case in point, iTunes)
  5. More products are created to simplify the now complex ones (that’s the unbundling of Excel)
  6. …and on and on and back around we go…

So what can we do about this?

One realisation I’ve come to is that a lot of popular systems are good enough. So a good solution is to start with something popular and stick with it for a good amount of time. If it ends up doing everything that you need, that’s great, otherwise I just move on to the next popular thing. This strategy works because it gets your foot in the door, lots of help is available and mastering one thing will make it easier to pick up the next thing.

Of course there are numerous other strategies but in the spirit of keeping things simple (and without getting too meta!) that’s all I will mention. The strategy is good enough and its worked well for me so far but I will probably shake things up in time.

Blogging from a plane…

What a time to be alive! I’m on a flight to Bali at the moment and on the line! The 20 MB limit is not all that great, but enough for my needs.

This trip hasn’t been without incident though. For starters, my Windows installation is not booting all of a sudden. Haven’t really had enough time to figure out what’s happening between checking in and running to the gates… The boot process was taking a while – possibly the result of throttling when on battery power. Windows machines seem to be notorious for throttling on battery – Mac OS X doesn’t have that problem.

The laptop I’m using is the Acer Aspire S5 with 8 GB memory and a core i5 6200U processor. I have 3 OSes installed – Windows 10 on the biggest partition and Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (booted into this now) and Fedora 28 on 2 smaller partitions. This setup works well for me, I may end up wiping the Fedora partition as I don’t use it much – I boot into it to update it basically.

To get the tri-booting setup working was tricky – Acer seems to have hard-wired the Windows EFI boot directory into the boot process so I have to overwrite the Windows EFI file with a custom file with all 3 OSes. That’s complicated by that the partition is only 100MB and every big Windows update re-writes the file! I created a simple bash script that I run after every big Windows update that:

  1. mounts the EFI partition
  2. deletes the unnecessary language files (so my custom files fit)
  3. copies my custom boot file
  4. backs up the new Windows boot file – just in case.

It’s a long story, I’ll post the details and the script sometime.

Any way, hopefully this post can be published while I’m in the air – I’ll punctuate it with links etc. when I have a better internet connection.

Update: Published mid-air!