His handlers likely gave him 3 topics to remember and told him to otherwise just spew shit (act normal), knowing it would confound Biden.

Motorola released the Skip tag line around 2013, including a keychain battery that could charge your phone, and had Bluetooth and could use that service to locate whatever it was attached to.

…in 2013.

The rail route they’re trying to enable starts in rural east Utah, then heads into Colorado and travels mere feet away from the the Colorado river. Contamination of that water source would only affect Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico. What could possibly go wrong?

They don’t even need to push an update, they just need to send a kill command from their activation servers.

I want a metal back phone

Steve Jobs did too, they still needed a plastic window for some antennae on the OG iPhone, then went to full plastic. It has become worse now, the back isn’t just for wireless charging. It is also for NFC, UWB, and often cellular/gps/wifi/bluetooth may share antenna connections through the back.

Right there with you though. NFC could probably be packed in a band at the top of a phone. UWB seems of dubious value thus far.

Sounds like they may have set it up to wipe for security paranoia, and maybe not to be jerks?

That’s fascinating software! Thanks for the share!

Health Connect “beta” is a battery hog. Until they fix those issues, it’s a non-starter for anyone caring about battery life.

That OG Moto X with rubberized back was delicious. First phone in a long time that felt worse with a case, and fit so deftly in the hand. Camera was pretty amazing too for the time.

To be fair, the camera flash alert light was meant for deaf people. Others just chose to use it.

Sure would be nice to see status LEDs make a comeback though.

Would kinda work on T-Mobile but no 4G/5G band 71 as another commenter mentioned. Would work ok on AT&T but they probably would block it. Would be terrible on Verizon without band 13.

Would be a good Wi-Fi mp3 player though.

It started as a hardware problem and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. LTE needed more and larger antennae for lower frequencies than older tech. Four cellular antennae are now pretty standard. Then you have wifi, Bluetooth (which can share if they can TDM), wireless charging, NFC, ultra wideband, GNSS. Then the chips are so powerful they need heat dissipation systems installed (or just lame thermal throttling like what Apple does.)

The modems require more power, (especially at the beginning of LTE) which means bigger batteries. LTE and NR have reduced range compared to the older narrowband technologies, so the phone needs to use more power to transmit, especially when carriers like Verizon didn’t backfill cell sites to compensate for the reduced coverage.

Then, cameras, one wasn’t enough, 4 or 5 are very common now (usually 3 primary and depth or low res sensors for aiming.)

When tablets became popular, many people decided to just have a large phone screen rather than a tablet, further entrenching the size.

The tech is more mature now, a 2-antenna MIMO antenna for cellular would suffice, albeit at the expense of network performance. Likewise one camera with a depth sensor would work, although mobile photography would be more limited. Dropping some limited-use items like wireless charging and ultra wideband could further shrink space.

So it would be possible now, but as others here have mentioned, the supply side focuses on larger hardware.

Ironically, at this point I’d almost prefer a smart watch with LTE and stop carrying a phone altogether. However, the aforementioned antenna issue makes it so watches generally have poor to unusable signal, poor battery life in cellular mode, no camera, and the 5G NR low power spec/chips aren’t fully done yet, so it’s LTE only on them, which, with carriers transitioning to 5G will make it so watches can only access a handful of congested bands.

Also, that device manufacturers tend to design smart watches to be companion devices to a smartphone rather than primary makes that concept’s execution problematic.

Another idea I had that was anti small phone but huge battery boost was to just bring a backpack or a satchel or whatever. Carry a full sized tablet around, and use a Bluetooth headset for calls. However, tablets are also often crippled by carriers/manufacturers so they can’t do common things like SMS or voice calls, and Apple has basically monopolized that market.

I know how it is. Used to work on phone chipsets. That being said, I have no idea how pixel 8 is doing this, but likely the Bluetooth chipset has a mode it can go into to behave like AirTags and just pulse out a BTLE beacon occasionally with both the main OS and sub-OSes turned off and power just being trickled to VCC on the BT chip.

Edit: apologies, didn’t mean to sound so curt. Tl;dr: I know how bootloaders run to allow battery charge while off, not sure how pixel 8 is doing their magic-to-be but have a good theory.

That’s the bootloader. It boots when power is connected. It’s limited in functionality.

Personal responsibility has always been capitalism’s mechanism for normalizing corpo behavior. The fake Native American trash commercial in the 70s, banning home cleaners that business can still use at industrial scale, buying new electric cars being somehow carbon better than just not being a vehicle consumer every five minutes, there are examples going even further back in time, but my brain doesn’t currently have enough caffeine to dig further back.

has a role to play as a scaleable demand-responsive source

Nuclear is best used a base load, it scales in the sense that you can build more plants, but the plant output can’t be adjusted as rapidly as the tiny natural gas turbine plants, reservoir-storage, battery array, or other sources.

The best use for nuclear output in a surplus phase would be storing the energy (water reservoir pumping, battery arrays, etc.) or expensive wasteful processes (electric steel plant ovens, hydrolysis to generate hydrogen fuel.)

They can’t claim carrier compatibility yet before they even source the parts. (They’re in Japan right now sourcing Chinese parts, allegedly, and only have renders thus far.) Let alone until they have a working prototype to test against fyi.

Carriers may very well not certify the device due to compatibility issues. Or they won’t be able to afford the certification process.

Developers have and always will be parasites. They swoop in, swoon cities to get sweet deals and tax write-offs, rezoning, whatever. Then they short term profit, cash out and run. I’ve seen so many homes over the years with random design flaws, entire neighborhoods with design flaws. Developers are long gone and the homeowners get stuck with the bill.

They play the same game as oil drillers. Form an LLC, fly in, shit all over the place, dissolve the LLC, and leave a mess behind. Laws around development of any kind should be structured so they can’t cut and run, but since the rich write the narrative, they’ll keep getting away with it, with occasional feel-good fines to make it look like the system works.

Try the bank’s web site. Companies all push apps to harvest all your data. Very few compute services actually need them.

Can add too, until it can send in almost any wireless situation like SMS can, it isn’t worth bothering with. SMS can send on LTE even when a phone doesn’t have a data connection available to the userspace. (Bars but no G icon.) It can send on 2G or above practically instantly. (Although once T-Mobile turns off 2G next year, less of a concern in the US.) SMS is just a raw simple control channel message. RCS is, as others mentioned, just another over-the-top messenger with all the network stack overhead, and a buggy one.

One can fire off an emergency SMS on the side of a mountain with barely usable signal that won’t even work for a voice call. RCS would fail in such an environment.

MMS, of course, requires a carrier APN data connection to work, and is a bit slower and more finicky. RCS would definitely be an improvement there.