Vik

I really need to give this another try. Any games you’ve tested this with in which gyro aim works particularly well?

yes

Safteynet is now more or less deprecated anyway. I shared this concern until I reached out to the team, mind you.

I also only recently learned that microg can run unprivileged

What binary blobs does microG download from Google? If you’re referring to safetynet, this is opt in and deprecated now anyway.

MicroG can also work unprivileged though that is contingent on your ROM

Damn, had no idea about this.

Hahaha I like the idea of that

I’ve been looking at several powered adapters as well as Bluetooth receivers with aux output. I’ve also considered a low power dedicated music system, problem for the garage is no wlan access.

No worries, I’m just ranting at this point.

The headphone jack is a sore spot for me, I have a few speaker systems around the house and garage with 3.5mm. I use an adapter but wired audio over USB C on android has terrible UX; it’s treated as a generic USB device, so it carries the same security implications (can only route audio with the device unlocked, can cut out if you lock the phone shortly after). Audio quality over type C + adapter has been worse in my experience but this will vary by device.

The displays are kind of a multi faceted thing for me. I can always see the impact of the pentile sub-pixel layout on text regardless of pixel density. I cannot unsee that sort of screen door effect.

Compared to LCD IPS, you might notice a smearing effect with UI animations on oled, I believe the same can be observed with desktop displays (in addition to VRR backlight flicker on darker content)

There’s also the faster rate of degradation it carries as a technology, which has prompted mitigations at the OS level.

The infinite contrast / per pixel backlighting is nice for sure, though it’s led to AOD replacing dedicated notification RGB LEDs (which feels sort of inelegant; that’s additional content to render on display and it’s generally less functional than addressable RGB at a glance), has enabled under-display fingerprint readers (which pale in performance to conventional sensors). Rounded corners aren’t intrinsic to oled but camera hole punch designs seem to be. Those camera holes will never not look like a design concession to me. 18 months with this and I still think it’s dumb.

The phone feels pretty solid but the back is glass, the sides are slippery without a case, and the glass on both sides protrudes past the bezel, making it a bit more damage prone.

None of these things are intrinsic to the pixel, it’s sad to see so little variation out there though.

how much time do you have 😓

The pixel security model makes secure, privacy respecting custom ROMs like GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, DivestOS more accessible.

My issues with the P7 are more like generic hangups seen with most phones today, and are not necessarily specifc to the phone itself. This is bearing in mind that my prior phone from 2019 (SD855 SoC) featured an LCD FHD display (without rounded corners or cutouts), headphone jack, notification LED, SD card slot. I had a lot of the hardware amenities that were already being phased out around that time.

I’ve made peace with the idea that I won’t get these back (I’m not going back to vendor ROMs), it’s just a shame that vendors can cut away at everything nice to have in the pursuit of cost optimisation.

similar boat. the pixel security model is tough to move away from. I dislike practically everything else about my p7.

I’m familiar with those releases. We also saw Bioshock, GTA etc come over several years ago. It’s great to seem them ported over but they are still few and far between. It’s not like we’re getting the equivalent of your entire steam library as native apps on mobile. Native ports feel less likely now considering you can just cheese it with translation layers.

Streaming to phones is video decode, you don’t really need performant graphics for that. I’m a little on the fence about streaming though it can definitely work well for certain types of games.

if you mean displays having rounded corners, I’m inclined to think about production cost, wastage, complexity, durability. Also tends to feature with front camera cutouts, under-display FP sensors.

I wish we didn’t go this route. Sony xperia phones still have a top and bottom bezel, the top accommodates the camera, they still have a dedicated FP sensor etc. they still have a 3.5mm jack, sd card slot lol

shame you can’t use them with graphene, calyx, etc.

That’s a fair point. Mobile gaming is a fairly broad spectrum and perhaps I should have differentiated casual, lower demanding games from high fidelity ones.

Like, I know cod mobile was decently popular (and maybe still is), I would consider this one higher fidelity. I would be quick to question whether these games are actually good, though. The flappy birds of the segment on the other hand probably dont need much graphics throughput.

Both types of games are brimming with predatory monetisation. The only value I personally see when it comes to gaming on a phone is via emulators, source ports, indie gems like shattered pixel dungeon etc.

Though, on the topic of emulation (and to contradict my earlier comment about the need for higher perf) you can leverage box86/64 and Winulator to play fairly recent desktop windows games on your phone.

A key caveat is that the experience is contingent on the gfx umd quality for the SOC vendor (Qualcomm seem okay here but others may suffer - the state of Vulkan on Android still isn’t great right now), but it seems we’re gradually reaching the possibility of having phones as our primary computing devices.

are mobile games actually good or are you referring to emulation?

Thank you so much! will make a note of this

can you tell us how you got this running with an encrypted SD card?

It’s also possible to relock the bootloader on a handful of Motorola and fairphones, at least as part of the Calyx install procedure

they sometimes retail at a loss around the holiday season.

Since this is GCN based, you may be able to use the newer AMDGPU kernel driver? I’m not sure about that specific SKU, however. I remember that using AMDGPU on, for example, Hawaii (like the R9 290) was particularly finicky

From what i understand, they’re not transitioning to open source usermode drivers, just FOSS kernel modules for newer GPUs.