**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Thu Feb 28 02:59:57 2019 Feb 28 05:58:32 https://www.xda-developers.com/fxtec-pro-1-initial-review/ Feb 28 06:27:06 Paul: Yeah it's pretty great to see another landscape keyboard device coming out, maybe it's making a comeback :) (And nice that their specs list claims support for my North American carrier's frequencies! Although I still have my fingers crossed the Cosmo ends up doing so.) Feb 28 06:27:49 * keithzg[m] still can't find his Gemini, should apparently have covered it in bright, glow-in-the-dark paint or something . . . Feb 28 20:05:18 ((frequencies)) I was surprised to read >>We have selected a great world-wide 4G LTE phone modem<< which o me seems o eb a feature prety hard to find. The >>The LTE final band list is not finalised and we will publish as soon as we have it.<< probably is more to the point Feb 28 20:05:50 which to me seems to be* Feb 28 20:06:55 last time I checked, worldwide LTE compatibility would need support for over 50 bands iirc Feb 28 20:08:13 not completely impossible, but I haven't seen a modem with support for more than 20 bands so far Feb 28 20:17:51 It's a disgrace how carriers worldwide made a mess of band assignments. Once when there was 2G, we had a 1 then 2 bands worldwide, with only USA again inventing their own protectionism standard ofg 850/1900 instead the worldwide 900/1800. Them came 3G and I heard in USA you have to count yourself lucky when your phone still has connectivity after you traveled a 200 miles Feb 28 20:26:29 same spirit allows USA to completely stop support for 2G. At least in larger Europe you should see 2G for another few decades, as there are a few dozen millions of cars with 2G SIM, as well as lotsd of other M2M applications like vending machines, fleet tracking, whatnot Feb 28 20:53:29 Joerg-Neo900: 3G was bad initially but ironically prompted me to get on a good carrier, since the Nokia N900 only had solid 3G connectivity on T-Mobile in the U.S., or Wind Mobile in Canada (where I am). In retrospect that got fixed pretty quickly though, by the time the Nokia *N9* came out it was possible to have a 3G cellular modem that worked on all 5 worldwide 3G frequencies (other than some holdout weird U.S. and Feb 28 20:53:30 Japanese providers). Feb 28 20:55:19 Things have gotten a lot worse since 2011 though, not only with how hilariously fragmented LTE is (and some of that is fair, since different jurisdictions have different frequencies they've opened up to cellular usage), but weirdly, 3G support has also gotten worse! Few phones have been as good as my 2011 Nokia, and somehow that has continued to get worse (which is why I had to get the wifi-only Gemini). Feb 28 21:02:04 I feel with you, sounds about right Feb 28 21:06:20 the one thing that annoys me most is when they stop 2G support despite it would cost them only a 1 oe 2% of their effective air bandwidth to run a 2G compatibility mode in 3G/4G bands Feb 28 21:19:15 and they obviously need that only in 850 or 900 band depending on where they are, one single band 1% for keeping backward compatibility for legacy tech Feb 28 21:45:10 depending on the area, some are dropping 3g support but keeping 2g Feb 28 22:05:10 sounds strange. I guess there'S missing a part of info in it, like "droppong 3G *in favor of running 4G on same band*, but keeping 2G *on the band they always had for 2G*" Feb 28 22:06:11 or what exactly is it they're doing? I guess they don't drop a 3G band to reassign it to 2G, no? Feb 28 22:36:53 Yeah I'd certainly guess that's what's happening. Although as far as I know, here in Canada at this point 2G is basically dead in most places, and a lot of that was refarmed for 3G and 4G. Feb 28 22:37:16 Now, 5G . . . 5G is gonna be a whole 'nother level of ridiculous, I'd wager :D Feb 28 22:55:08 5G needs a base station every 50m or somesuch ;-D Feb 28 22:57:27 but then you could (literally this was an explanation why we need 5G) "send the sensor data from your VR goggles to the server and the server calculates and sends back the new display matching the direction you look at, without any delay" Feb 28 22:57:57 literally the only scenario where this is mandatory that I can think of is telesurgery Feb 28 22:58:58 and I'd probably refuse to suffer a surgery where a outage of wireless connection would possibly kill me Feb 28 23:35:23 in times of octocore smartphones with twice the RAM of what my PC had when I bought it make 5G look arther pointless unless you want to keep the core app functionality on centralized servers for conpletely non-technical reasons like copy protection and tight monitoring of each and every move your customers do Feb 28 23:37:16 I mean, why do I need to downnload a movie within 2s when it takes 15 minutes on a 'classical' 16/1 DSL and the latter still is just fast enough because the movie is 140 min long Mar 01 00:15:18 * Joerg-Neo900 wouldn't feel surprised if it turned out already today the computational grunt of the average top notch smartphone being hogher than that of the appserver it connects to for any arbitrary centralized service like speech recog or whatever Mar 01 00:22:00 speech recog done locally can't be as easily used to spy on you Mar 01 00:37:39 that's my point :-) Mar 01 00:38:15 technically the computational power of even cheap smartphones is sufficient since quite a few years Mar 01 00:39:43 no need to "store this on your google account", with a flah to tag it as "deleted" so it doesn't show to _you_ anymore Mar 01 00:39:53 flag, even Mar 01 00:52:12 then otoh I', in a crisis regarding my personal threat model **** ENDING LOGGING AT Fri Mar 01 02:59:57 2019