Ever since the Huawei P20 Pro came out with its 40 megapixel main camera, Huawei has been killing it with some of the best cameras on phones since the Nokia Lumia 1020 from 2013! How's that Mate 40 Pro camera doing these days?
The post The Huawei Mate 40 Pro camera is great with a few gotchas appeared first on Pocketnow.
The latest word on the street is that Microsoft's new Windows 10X operating system has been put on the back burner for now or maybe cancelled completely. That's probably a good thing.
The post Windows 10X was probably going to suck anyway appeared first on Pocketnow.
Microsoft released a beta of their web-based xCloud game streaming service recently. It would seem that this version of the service will work with any web browser that supports WebRTC, so let’s see how that works.
I decided to plug an Xbox controller into the USB port of my Pinebook Pro running Manjaro Linux and the open-source Chromium web browser.
If you have an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, you can try the new beta web-based streaming service at Xbox.com/Play as well. The system requirements say that you need a Windows 10 PC or an Apple iOS 14+ device, but… guess what… Linux works, too.
Of course, you’ll also want a high-speed 10Mbps+ internet connection for the streaming, and an Xbox controller plugged in via USB or paired via Bluetooth. Microsoft mainly built this version because Apple won’t let them make a game streaming app for the Apple App Store, so the web-based method is a workaround for that. The bonus is that this web-based version happens to work with a lot of other platforms too.
This Pinebook Pro has extremely low specs by the way. It’s a six-core, 1.4GHz, Pine64 ARM processor with only 4GB of RAM and 64GB eMMC storage. If that was running Windows 10, everything would be laggy!
See below for how Xbox Game Streaming actually works on this very inexpensive Linux laptop running Manjaro XFCE Linux.
As you’ll see, the simple games work quite well, while more action-oriented games are probably going to need a bit more processing power on the client-side. Outriders worked ok, but there was certainly some latency, and Halo 5 Guardians turned out to be practically unplayable.
The post Here’s how to play full Xbox games on Linux with xCloud (video) appeared first on Pocketnow.
Earlier this week, Apple announced a bunch of new stuff on a video live stream. We’ve got new commercials for Apple TV shows, a purple iPhone, Podcast stuff, an Apple TV remote that actually makes sense, some AirTags, new iMacs, and a new iPad Pro.
The first really new Apple product for 2021 was the AirTags, and I immediately said, “Welcome to 2013!” AirTags are little battery-powered Bluetooth things that connect to your iPhone and help the iPhone’s “Find My” software keep track of the locations of the tags. Sounds familiar because these kinds of things have been around for many years. A company called Tile was one of the first to release this type of gadget back in 2013.
Nokia released a similar Nokia Treasure Tag in early 2014 that had similar functionality. I had a bunch of Nokia Treasure Tags attached to my Nokia Lumia 1020 and they certainly worked as advertised… just the same as today’s Apple AirTags. I stopped using them after getting a new phone because they were kind of a hassle. I mean, how many batteries do I have to keep around and keep replacing? Sure, the removable battery can be replaced pretty quickly, but still, it’s another thing to manage, and I never lost anything while I was using the Treasure Tags anyway. So what’s the point? It costs more cognitive energy paying attention to the battery levels of all of these tags than it costs to remember where whatever it’s attached to is in the first place.
The new iMacs are bringing back a rainbow of color options like the original iMac had in 1998. It has Apple’s new M1 processor, an extra thin form factor, and it comes in 7 colors. That’s cool and all, but the front has a big pastel-colored chin and a white bezel that looks really bad to me. What’s more, is that the white bezel is going to interfere with your white balance perception since that will reflect the color temperature of your ambient lighting instead of the color temperature of the display. Looks like the display is still pretty reflective too, so glare will still be a problem. That’s not so good for creative professionals.
Having the computer really thin is nice I guess, but how much does that really matter? The stand is still pretty thick, so it’s not going to save a whole lot of desk space. Maybe it makes the iMac easier to move, but if I’m going to put a computer on a desk, that’s probably where it’s going to stay until I replace it. That being said, I have seen iMacs that need replacing kind of frequently, so maybe that is a good thing since we’ve had to carry them to the car and then to the Apple store for repair kind of often. That’s in contrast to the HP workstation where a repair person just comes to the office and replaces parts right there under warranty the next morning.
Apple’s new Center Stage feature for video calls on the iPad Pro is probably the most impressive feature, but again… “Welcome to 2010, Apple!” This awesome feature was something that first appeared 11 years ago in Video Kinect for Xbox. Honestly, it makes way more sense having this feature plugged into a big screen TV than it does an iPad. You’ll need to set the iPad on a stand to make any use of it, and as you move away the people on the screen will look so much smaller. With Xbox Kinect and a big TV, I could walk around the whole room and the video call camera would follow me beautifully. It was even cooler when the person on the other end had the same thing in their living room… we could both walk around doing other stuff and it was like there was a camera crew focusing on our faces on the TV.
The iPad Pro does have a new mini-LED display now that’s supposed to display color better, but it’s still a glossy screen that’s going to have a lot of glare when using it in real life. Apple’s video looks to be extremely processed to remove or hide the glare of the environment completely. It looks super fake because it is. That’s not how the screen is going to look in real life.
I’ve never thought that the iPad Pro deserved the “Pro” moniker. It’s not great for creative pro stuff anyway. See “13 Reasons why I don’t use an iPad Pro & Apple Pencil for graphic design“. The M1 processor and 16GB of RAM options in the new iPad Pro seem like kind of a waste since it won’t run really high-end programs like those available on macOS.
The post I have no interest in the new iPad Pro, iMac, or AirTags appeared first on Pocketnow.
The latest Google Android app to drop the hamburger button is now the Google Play Store. Thank goodness Google is finally learning about better smartphone user interface design. Google Photos removed the design element last year and Google Maps removed it in 2019. The YouTube app removed it as well. Hopefully, the Gmail app, Google Drive app, and Google Calendar apps are next. If only we could get that awesome experimental Google Chrome user interface back too!
Oh my! There are so many reasons! Your first clue is in the name. If we have to make up a ridiculous name to describe an interactive element, that means the designer failed miserably in creating a button that clearly communicates its function. Every time you call it a hamburger button, you’re insulting whoever put it there.
We’ve actually talked about this before numerous times, (see: What’s wrong with hamburger buttons?), but we can summarize again.
Our 2014 & 2015 articles about this were mainly targeted at Microsoft for implementing hamburger buttons in Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10. I believe this poor design decision is part of what contributed to the fall of Windows 10 Mobile as all of the data seems to show that hamburger button-based user interface designs have reduced engagement and reduced usability. See:
Okay, okay… I know what you’re saying, “But Adam, the Pocketnow mobile website has a hamburger menu at the top! Hypocrisy much?” I know, I know, but my excuse is that I didn’t design this site, and the person who did doesn’t read my articles about user experience design or the advantages thereof. It looks like Google does read them though since they’re definitely moving towards a better user experience design among their apps.
The post Google’s starting to learn about Smartphone User Interface Design appeared first on Pocketnow.
I hear some graphic designers have started using an iPad for creative work. But why? I guess it might be okay for drawing since it’s thin and light and you can buy a stylus for it, but there are so many other pen-computing options available, and there are so many other aspects of graphic design that software available for the iPad seriously fails at.
A couple of years ago, there was a lot of hype about Adobe bringing the real Adobe Photoshop to the iPad. When it was released every article about it had the “Adobe brings real Photoshop to iPad” headline, and then in the first paragraph explained that it was not the real Photoshop and only had a limited subset of features compared to the Photoshop version that one would normally use on macOS and Windows. There are so many features missing! It doesn’t even have the same menus. Forget about anything advanced like channel operations or custom plug-ins.
It’s not easy to get your font collection into an iPad. I have fonts from the ’80s that still work on macOS and Windows, but getting them into an iPad is not an easy thing to do. We switched from QuarkExpress to InDesign around the turn of the century and InDesign has been essential in the Graphic Design business for just about anything print-related. I create data merge templates that interact with database tables for creating automated print layouts all the time. I use global regular expression print programming styles to create formatting rules for typography across documents. None of that is remotely possible in any iPad graphics apps that I’ve seen so far.
Besides the big ones like Adobe CC, none of the other high-end design programs that I normally use or would ever want to use are available on an iPad. Affinity Designer might be one exception, but still… What about 3D animation/design programs like Maya, Lightwave, Blender, Dimensions, etc.? Could I design 3D exhibit mockups, environmental design sculptures, product packaging, or signage on an iPad? Not likely, and certainly not easily.
Often in web design or electronic environmental design displays or kiosks or social media posts, I’ll want to create some animations to help display the information. Adobe AfterEffects and all of those 3D programs are great for this too. So again… not really possible on an iPad Pro.
As a graphic designer, I do a lot of photography too. I may need to set up still life photos of food products in a shooting tent, or any kind of package products, or I may photograph events, or building interiors/exteriors for signage mockups, or people interacting with each other, or people headshots, or emergency response set-ups for the American Red Cross during the aftermath of 9/11. Websites and printed products rely on photography. Often I might be on location and need to do some photo editing right there during the shoot.
Maybe my client wants to post articles during a conference right after a session ends, or maybe we want to do some culling right away. Adobe Lightroom on the iPad is actually pretty good, except it still has limitations. The most annoying one is that you have to “import” the entire library before you can start doing anything. With the Wacom MobileStudio Pro that I usually bring on remote shoots, I can open Adobe Bridge, point it to the SD card slot, and start culling & editing right away. And it’s the same interface as on my desktop workstations!
I’ve been using Bridge since before it was announced by Adobe, so that’s one reason I like it over regular Lightroom. The other reason is that it’s faster for me since I don’t have to import files into a database. The second most annoying thing with Lightroom on iOS is that you can only work with one photo at a time whereas, on macOS or Windows, I can apply changes to huge selections of RAW files at the same time. On Linux, I’ve been enjoying Darktable and RawTherapee as well, and again those don’t have iPad equivalents.
When it comes to tethering for photography, iOS is kind of weak as well. The Nikon Camera Control app that I would use on iOS is kind of awful. On my Windows tablets, however, I have a fairly awesome qDSLRDashboard program which works pretty beautifully. qDslrDashboard is open source as well and there are versions for macOS, Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi, and Android… There was an iOS version, but it was removed by Apple.
Illustrator Draw on iPad is nothing like Illustrator on Windows & macOS and neither is the other Illustrator app called Illustrator for iPad. Why do we need two again? I’ve been using Illustrator for decades, and the iPad versions are nothing like what I’m used to. It’s completely different and most of the features I rely on are completely absent.
Why should I invest in learning iPad apps when their capabilities don’t come close to desktop apps?
Illustrator Draw also depends on non-discoverable gestures, which are known to require more cognitive energy to memorize versus a more-obvious user interface design which requires less cognitive energy. That being said, Illustrator’s interface on macOS and Windows has remained very consistent since Illustrator 7.0 in 1997. I can switch between macOS and Windows all day and the Illustrator user interface has been the same between the two platforms for 24 years. Illustrator Draw and Illustrator on iPad however, are completely different. What’s more… Illustrator on Windows has a “Touch” workspace that enables a nice touch & pen-friendly user interface. Do you think that UI would be the same as the touch UI in Illustrator on iPad? Well, it isn’t. Not at all.
This is true for Photoshop for iPad as well as Premiere Rush and every other Adobe app on iPad. I found the Photoshop for iPad use interface to be terribly designed in the “easy to learn” sense. Even though I’ve been using real photoshoots for 26 years, the iPad version’s interface is unrecognizable. I couldn’t even tell how to paste an image. What the heck is that big white circle button supposed to be? Why should I invest in learning these mystery-meat user interfaces that break consistency when the app capabilities don’t even come close to their desktop equivalents anyway?
Being a bit slower at doing everything I need to do is better than being faster at doing nothing.
I hear that some people justify using an iPad for graphic design as a companion to a full desktop Mac or PC. It can be used as a pen display for a desktop computer with some extra software, but I already have much better pen displays on my desktops. It can also be used to do some things locally while syncing your files to the desktop computer for more-complicated tasks. That’s all well and good, but I can do that with a Macbook or a Windows tablet/laptop too… AND, if I use a Windows tablet as my companion device, I can have exactly the same full-featured graphic design programs installed.
That also means I don’t have to waste cognitive energy learning a foreign interface for the “lite” versions of graphics programs that are available on the iPad. Nor do I have to waste cognitive energy memorizing which functions are possible on the iPad vs. which functions are possible on my desktop computers because my “companion” device would have exactly the same functions (just a bit slower perhaps). Personally, I think being a bit slower at doing everything I need to do is a lot better than being faster at not doing the things I need to do. That is unless it’s unbearably slower of course.
While to me it doesn’t make much sense to invest cognitive energy in learning an iPad app that only has a subset of features of what you can do with more powerful desktop software… it does make sense to invest in learning new programs that do provide additional features and capabilities that expand my skill set. I have yet to see an iPad app that does anything better than what I can already do. However, I do frequently see new Windows, macOS, and Linux programs that I certainly would like to learn and maybe add to my toolbox. Things like Sketch, Lunacy, Affinity Publisher, Zbrush, Sculptron, Unity, Darktable, Davinci Resolve, Renderman, Foundry Katana, Houdini, etc. might currently be over my head, but if I want to keep growing, a lot of those programs might be good to learn. None of them are available on an iPad. If you use only an iPad for graphic design, your ability to expand your skillset will probably be very limited.
I’m sure people can get used to it, but after using Wacom Cintiq displays and tablets for decades, the Apple Pencil and the iPad’s glass display just don’t feel like a comfortable drawing experience. I really don’t like the screen glare either, but that can be remedied somewhat with some antiglare screen protectors. Screen protectors can also modify the feel of the pencil on glass experience, but I really don’t enjoy trying to install screen protectors either.
I suppose this one depends on how you hold the stylus/pencil while drawing. I like to rest the side of my hand on the drawing surface for more stability and accuracy. If you use the stylus like an Asian calligraphy brush or oil painter, then maybe you don’t rest your hand against the surface. Anyway, thin bezels kind of suck for pen interaction because then the side of your hand that’s resting on the drawing surface for stability is going to fall off the edge. This is especially annoying when accessing user interface elements on the edges of the screen, and they’re all on the edges of the screen. Professional grade drawing tablets and displays have wide bezels that give your hands a lot of room to stabilize your drawing fingers while being able to reach every part of the active area. This is the same reason that your desk in school is wider than the sheet of paper you might be writing on.
It’s cool that Apple added a double-tap gesture that can be programmed to switch tools on the Apple Pencil, but Wacom’s programmable hardware buttons and eraser end tip are so much better. Firstly, Wacom’s pen buttons can be programmed for modifier keys that can be held down while using the pen. You’ve also got more programmable buttons. The Wacom Pro Pen 2 has 2 programmable buttons and a programmable eraser tip in addition to the drawing tip. The Wacom Pro Pen 3D ads a 3rd programmable button which helps a lot for additional modifier keys that are certainly going to be useful in many 3D programs. Plus the buttons are easy to find and differentiate by touch, and they can be invoked with a simple squeeze. A double-tap on the Apple Pencil requires a lot more finger movement which reduces the stability of the pencil in your fingers. It requires more physical movement, which is less efficient.
I’ve used battery-powered pens plenty of times in the past and it’s hugely annoying when picking up the stylus and it doesn’t work because the battery is dead. Some pens have an extremely long battery life that lasts for months or years, but the Apple Pencil only lasts 12 hours before needing a recharge. It does recharge pretty fast and the new one can charge while it’s magnetically attached, but still… I’m way happier with the battery-free Wacom Pro Pens and Intuos and ArtZ pens that I’ve been using for decades.
Over the decades, I’ve grown used to seeing a tool indicator on the screen beneath my pen tip when using a pen display. This is extremely useful! While looking at the content I’m working with, I can instantly tell what tool I’m using. I don’t have to look around for other “selected tool” interface indicators. It’s right there at the end of my stylus! Furthermore, when I have a brush selected, I can see an outline of the brush’s shape that indicates which brush I’m using as well as the size of the brush. I swipe a touch ring in the bezel or hit a keyboard shortcut to change the size of the brush while I’m looking at it hovering over the content I’m working with. In some programs like Corel Painter, the hover indicator even shows me a representation of the angle that I’m holding the brush at. Apple’s Pencil doesn’t work that way.
Graphics programs on iPad tend to have very weak keyboard shortcut support. Photoshop for iPad only has a small list of them. None of the iPad apps have discoverable keyboard shortcuts and I haven’t seen one app with customizable keyboard shortcuts. On macOS and Windows, we can easily see what the keyboard shortcuts are because they’re listed in the menus or the tooltips. Plus, we can program keyboard shortcuts for things we do very often.
Why are keyboard shortcuts good? Well, they speed things up a lot. With an iPad Pro, you’re probably holding the iPad in one hand and using the pen in the other hand. That’s a waste of the other hand that’s not interacting with the software. Okay, maybe you’ll get a stand or something so you can poke the screen with one hand and use the Apple Pencil with another… that’s better, but it’s still not very efficient since you need to move your eyes around the screen in order to look at what each hand is going to poke at. With keyboard shortcuts or hardware express keys or a programmed remote for my non-dominant hand, I can build tactile motor memory for my preferred functions and activate them by touch WITHOUT looking. I can keep my eyes on the content and my dominant hand on the pen, while controlling the pen’s behavior using my non-dominant hand and tactile controls instantly without moving my eyes or losing the spot I’m working on with my dominant hand. It’s much more efficient.
Maybe if you only ever want to do sketches and drawings and paintings digitally on a fairly small iPad screen, then an iPad would be ok. If you ever want to grow to do any other aspects of graphic design like UI design, 3D design, environmental design, web design, print design, signage, animation, etc. It seems like the iPad is going to be a very limiting factor.
Does Apple even really care about creative professional fields anymore anyway? Sure, in the ’80s, Macintosh computers were great for graphic design since they had good support for postscript printing and fonts and a great graphical user interface for the time, but today there are just as many if not more professional creative tools on Windows and Linux with just as many if not more professional creative hardware options. I still think Adobe, Wacom, Autodesk, should make a Creative Pro Operating System so that creative professionals and the software/hardware developers that support us won’t have to be a slave to Apple’s demands.
Have I just not bothered to use an iPad & Apple Pencil long enough to see the advantages? Let us know in the comments below.
The post 13 Reasons why I don’t use an iPad Pro & Apple Pencil for graphic design appeared first on Pocketnow.
Earlier this week, Facebook decided to block the ability to share news articles for people in Australia. This is in retaliation for Australia’s proposed law to require Facebook and other tech platforms to pay news sources when articles are shared on their platform. The law is an attempt to bring support to journalists and news sites since posting content on Facebook gives Facebook more of the profits and traffic than the original source might get. So now Australian people can’t post news articles on Facebook and no one in the world can post news articles that were published on Australian news sites. Sounds a little extreme, but when you’re the emperor of a massive community, anything goes I guess.
This should show you how much power Facebook really has over the internet population of humans. Content creators, businesses, and consumers might be getting a little too dependent on the Facebook Empire. It should be clear by now that Facebook can affect a country’s economy pretty heavily. Using Facebook to gain/keep customers is very lucrative. If they decide to cut you off, you’re probably going to struggle.
As a user, are you getting paid for all the data you’re giving Facebook? All of your Messenger conversations and articles and likes and comments and interactions? No, you’re not. But Facebook certainly is profiting off of it! Facebook isn’t just Facebook either. It’s also Instagram and WhatsApp which increases their surface area for data collection and manipulation significantly. If any of those Facebook properties are part of your business, things could get pretty rough if/when Facebook decides to take more advantage or cut you off.
A couple of years ago, in response to one of Facebook’s founder’s suggesting that Facebook should be broken up, you may remember that I wrote, “Facebook should be broken up and Federated.” What is the Fediverse though? Basically, it’s a collection or network of other social networks. There are some that focus on videos like Peertube, some that focus on images like PixelFed, some that are a lot like Twitter such as Mastadon. The brilliance of it is that they all work together though. I can have a Mastadon account where I can follow other Mastadon users as you’d expect, but I can also follow Peertube accounts, PixelFed accounts, Pleroma accounts, Friendica accounts, etc. It’s like a bunch of little countries getting together to build a global economy, but everyone still has their own autonomy and independence.
What’s more… in the Fediverse each type of social network (see a list here), is open-source software that you can install on your own server or rent from a hosting provider. Here’s a hosting provider you can set up your own instance on right now. Each server installation is called an “instance”. You can make one instance only for yourself if you want, or you can make one for a whole group of people to use. For example, if you were a big business, or a big family, or a sports fan community, or a government, you might want your own instance for like-minded users. People already do that kind of thing with Facebook groups, but the difference is that with a Fediverse instance, you can “own” the whole thing. You’re the one who decides what the policies are and you don’t have to depend on someone else who may not have your best interests in mind.
The Fediverse is very small at the moment, but the concept is huge. It may sound familiar too. The internet was built as a network of connected networks. The World Wide Web is a network of connected web servers & web browsers. It makes a huge amount of sense to make a diverse network of interconnected social networks that all work with each other. This page has a list of instances and indicates which ones are open to new users if you want to join one without learning to make your own instance.
The potential for a federated social network that supports local economies instead of pouring all the money into the Facebook empire has a lot of possibilities. It would probably take a big marketing budget to get users to switch to any specific Fediverse instance or set of instances and educate them on the advantages. The free open-source software community has a budget of about zero, so it’s not going to come from there. However, if a country like Australia wanted to promote their own alternative to Facebook, with incentives and perks for local businesses, plus the global connectivity of the Fediverse, others might follow. Maybe Twitter will become part of the Fediverse too (their Bluesky initiative is exploring implementing the ActivityPub protocol that the Fediverse uses.)
Is there anything stopping a single Fediverse instance from conquering everything like Facebook already has? Sure… diversity & freedom. People are diverse, our technology should be diverse too. The Fediverse is already a very diverse place with a wide variety of different types of social networks and different types of people. Encouraging that diversity on the internet encourages positive progress the same way biodiversity has encouraged evolution on Earth.
The post Facebook’s Empire shows Australia who’s boss (why you need the Freedom-Friendly Fediverse) appeared first on Pocketnow.
For creators these days, a pen-based interface is pretty important. It has a much more direct interaction method versus traditional mouse or trackpad interactions. The old mouse and trackpad are disconnected from the information that you’re actually interacting with on the screen. Touch displays solve that to some degree, but fingers are big and clunky. A more-precise stylus provides much more accuracy. We’ve covered some Wacom displays here on Pocketnow before, and I’ve personally been a big fan of since starting as a graphic designer in the late 1900’s. Today, we get to review a competitor to Wacom’s high-end pen displays in the form of the XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro. I’ve always sworn by Wacom pen tablets/displays, so it will be very interesting to see how the XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro compares, especially since its price is considerably less than a comparable Wacom pen display.
The Artist 24 Pro’s screen size is about 23.8 inches diagonally which is 20.74 x 11.67″. The display resolution is a nice 2560 x 1440 pixels. In terms of the whole monitor’s size, it’s 24.88 x 14.57 x 1.76 inches. For color gamut options, we’ve got an awesome 90% of Adobe RGB color gamut! You can also use 88% NTSC or 120% sRGB with a color depth of 16.7 million. The contrast ratio is 1000:1 and the response time is 14ms. The viewing angle is about 178 degrees and you can get a brightness level of 250 cd/m2. There’s a 100x100mm VESA mount, too. The stylus doesn’t require a battery and supports 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity as well as 60 degrees of tilt sensitivity.
The XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro includes a slew of wires and accessories for connecting the display to your computer.
If you have a display port capable USB-C port, you can use the USB-C to USB-C cable in the middle of the above photo to connect the pen display directly to your computer. This works really well and supports the full resolution of the display. If you don’t have a USB-C display port, you’ll have to use the USB-A to USB-C cable on the left to connect to your PC for data transfer AND you’ll have to use the HDMI cable on the right to connect to your GPU. If you have to use the HDMI cable, then you’ll probably only get a 1920 x 1080 pixel display resolution, so it’s better to have a USB-C display port.
You actually get two pens for the Artist 24 Pro! There’s a big cylindrical case to use to keep one safe as well.
The other end of the pen case also unscrews to reveal 8 spare pen tips for when you wear out the one that’s already in the pen.
All of the ports you’ll need are on the back in the above inset area. You’ll need the DC power whether you use the USB-C display port or not. There are two additional USB-A ports here (labeled “Host”) which you can use to connect other peripherals such as a keyboard or whatever.
First of all, the 90% Adobe RGB color gamut is beautiful. Getting as close to 100% Adobe RGB as possible is very important for photographers and graphic designers. It’s a wider color gamut than you would get with other monitors or laptops. The Adobe RGB color gamut is an improvement over Apple’s DCI P3 color gamut as well.
The Artist 24 Pro ships with a screen protector over the monitor display area, and that screen protector sheet was very reflective. I was much happier after peeling off the protective plastic which revealed a beautifully anti-glare screen. This is so much better than using iMac’s or Macbook Pro’s which have extremely reflective screens. The Artist 24 Pro diffuses ceiling light reflections really nicely. It’s a joy to work with. Still, I like to keep the ceiling lights off and use a well-placed lamp for room lighting in order to avoid glare completely.
The display looks great, but what about the pen interaction interface? Well, that works great as well. Windows 10 has pretty good inking and pen interaction usability, except for a few bugs that were added in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. The Artist 24 Pro software driver has some good workarounds for Windows 10’s problems, and we’ll talk more about those in the Software section below.
Let’s talk about those express keys and roller dials in the bezels though! There are 10 express keys on each side! That’s 20 programmable hardware buttons. Twenty!! There’s also a dial on both left and right bezels and this too can be programmed to control whatever you want.
The bezel buttons feel great. Not only do they have nice tactile feedback, but they also have some texture differentiators. As seen above, one button has a dot protrusion while another has a dash protrusion. This helps you identify the location of your express key buttons simply by touch. You can keep your eyes on the display and what you’re doing with the pen, while feeling for the programmed controls you’re looking for by using touch alone. This is a huge efficiency booster. Most people use regular keyboard shortcuts for this kind of thing, but being able to program your own hardware buttons to do the things you want is a huge advantage. If you’re left-handed, you can program the buttons on the right side to be your most-used functions, while if you’re right-handed, you can program the buttons on the left side to be your most-used functions.
Wacom’s Cintiq Pro 24 doesn’t have this many programmable bezel buttons at all. It doesn’t have any. Instead, they sell a separate programmable remote that you can hold in your non-dominant hand. Personally, I kind of like the bezel buttons since they’re built-in, don’t require charging, and won’t be as easy to lose as a wireless remote.
20 programmable express keys to memorize is an awful lot though. Some people make stickers to place on the buttons so it’s easier to remember what they do. I might start with programming only 5 of them since that would be easier to memorize and personally, I was really happy with the 6 programmable bezel express keys on my Wacom Mobile Studio Pro 13.
Pen accuracy is quite good as well. It’s very precise and very smooth. The pen has two hardware buttons that you can program as well, but it does not have an eraser on the back end. Also note, that XP-Pen includes a nice drawing glove for resting your hand on the display without getting sweaty hand grease all over. Excellent touch including this!
The included stand attached to the back is very robust. There’s a lever at the top that unlocks the stand’s angle.
It’s easy to pull the lever forward with one hand and lift or lower the display to whatever angle you want. Release the lever to lock the stand in place at the desired angle.
The top right corner is where some normal monitor controls are located. The button on the right is the power button. To the left of that is a display settings menu button that looks like a hamburger. Then there are + and – buttons for navigating the settings menu and changing things like brightness or contrast.
A small clip style pen holder is included, but it’s not so obvious how to use it.
It turns out there are two little rubber circular insets on the left and right sides of the monitor. If you pry the little piece of rubber out, a screw hole appears behind it. You’ll need a flat head screwdriver to screw the pen holder clip into the side.
Even though I tightened the screw, the clip still spins and wobbles, so maybe I didn’t install it properly. I didn’t see any instructions about this aspect of the tablet. Anyway, you might want to buy a different kind of stylus holder. I think I would prefer a desk-top stand that holds the pen upright for me.
There are two driver versions available for download from the XP-Pen website. At first, I tried the “Official” driver and later tried the “New UI” beta driver. The normal official driver software is shown above. It’s not terribly customizable, but certainly good enough.
The dialogue for programming the bezel express keys and dials is not super intuitive. The keys are labeled with numbers and drop-down menus let you add customized functions. At the top, there’s a row where you can add specific programs and when that program is in focus the buttons will use the customized functions for that program. One issue with this driver is that I can’t program the pen to behave differently in different programs. So for example, the “Windows Ink” option is pretty terrible in certain apps like web browsers, the Windows 10 Photos app, the Windows 10 OneNote app, etc. I would want to turn that off in those programs, and it’s not possible with this software. However…
Later on I decided to uninstall the official driver and try the “new UI” beta driver, and it was much better. The user interface design is obviously different, but my previous complaint about not being able to control the pen behavior on a program-by-program basis is fixed.
The interface for customizing the programmable dials and express keys is much improved in the new software as well.
The Express key customization interface now has labels for where the buttons exist on the bezel, but now there’s side-scrolling for matching the key numbers to new functions.
The new software even has the ability to disable certain aspects of the software completely. Thankfully an import/export for saving your configuration settings is here as well.
The interface for programming the Express keys is very extensive too. By default, one of the pen buttons was assigned to the eraser function, but I was able to change it to a “double left click” function pretty easily here.
The XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro is only about $899.99 USD which is less than half the price of a Wacom Cintiq Pro 24. That’s some significant savings. You can order the Artist 24 Pro from the XP-Pen online stores in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and Australia.
Pros
Cons
That list of “Cons” above are very minor nitpicks compared to the list of “Pros” which are pretty excellent. As a pen display, the XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro feels very similar to the high-end pen displays from Wacom. The Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 is probably a good competitor. Wacom’s Cintiq Pro 24 has a 99% Adobe RGB color gamut though, plus a higher resolution display, more ports, and there’s a version that also supports touch… but it’s more than double the price of the XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro! So yes, the Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 is better, but is it twice the price better? Maybe not.
If we look at how the XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro compares to something that’s closer to its price range, for example, the Wacom Cintiq 22 for $1200, the Artist 24 Pro still looks like a much better deal at $900 with its better resolution, better color gamut, better bezel buttons, and better stand.
If you’ve been craving a new Wacom pen display for graphics and drawing, but are still saving up for a good one, you just might want to consider an XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro instead.
The post XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro Review appeared first on Pocketnow.
With Facebook finally changing how WhatsApp works so that they can profit off of the users (as expected), many people are choosing to switch to other internet messaging apps like Signal & Telegram. We’ve already talked about how naïve that is given there isn’t really anything stopping Signal & Telegram from changing their policies or adding anti-features in the future (they have already). If you haven’t had your ear to the ground in places like the Fediverse or Free Open Source Software communities, you probably haven’t heard of Delta Chat.
Yes, it’s yet another internet messaging app, but it does things in a way that is much more “freedom-friendly” for users. It has an interface that’s almost exactly the same as what you’re used to in WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. It repurposed the Signal interface from Signal’s open-source client code, so if you’re familiar with that already, it’s going to be very easy to use.
Delta Chat is an open-source program that’s still in development so there are bugs, but it’s still very usable. There are versions of the app for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows, so practically every platform is covered. You can download any of the versions here, and you can communicate any bugs and wishes here. Meanwhile, let’s look at how Delta Chat is better than many of the other popular electronic messaging apps.
Delta Chat uses the most widely used international network of internet messaging in existence: email. If you have an Android device, or iOS device, or Mac, or Windows PC, or an Xbox, or a Playstation, or a Nintendo Switch, or a job, or a bank account, or went to school at some point during the information age, or ever downloaded an app from an app store, then you probably already have an email account.
Almost 4 billion people(1) have at least one email account already. That’s probably the entire population of the internet. WhatsApp’s 2 billion user base is dwarfed by the number of users with email accounts. Delta Chat works with all of those people out of the box with no need to pressure them into installing a different app and building another network silo. There is no messaging network silo here, and that’s a huge advantage. But if your friends do want to use Delta Chat, they might like it better than their default email apps.
One of the worst things about WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram is that all of them require your phone number to create an account. This can be a violation of your privacy since your phone number can be associated with your real identity, bank accounts, address, place of work, etc. It can also be used to create relationship maps. If you give any of those apps access to your contacts list, it will scrape the phone numbers and match them with phone numbers in the service’s centralized server database in order to tell you which users have accounts on the platform you’re using. That should be recognized as another privacy violation. I can easily tell who has what app by matching their phone numbers without their permission or knowledge. In the case of Facebook, they can probably match your WhatsApp contacts with Facebook contacts and create an even larger relationship map thus making manipulation via advertisements even easier. Also see: Why are we still using phone numbers?
Delta Chat doesn’t need to create relation maps in order to tell you who else you can chat with because you can chat with literally everybody. You just need to know their email address which is probably already in your contacts list. No server side contact matching required.
What’s more, you already have a server! Delta Chat works with any email server that supports open standard IMAP protocols. It probably won’t work very well with more proprietary security-focused services like ProtonMail and Tutonota. Practically anything else can be set up within Delta Chat. Of course, Gmail and many other free consumer email services work right away via OATH 2.0 authentication, but if you really care about privacy and security, you’ll want to use your own self-hosted email server or at least a more trustworthy one. There are many ways to build your own email server in your home. Many big businesses run their own servers (which will also work with Delta Chat). There are thousands of paid email hosting services as well. Email hosting often comes free with website hosting or internet service. You can even buy a pre-made email server to use privately (See: Helm).
The ability to use your own servers or any server you want is very important for longevity and stability. Remember when the Signal servers went down in January? That meant no one could use it. This single point of failure should be a clue as to one reason why centralized services are potentially bad. With Delta Chat, if one person’s IMAP/SMTP server goes down, the people who use that server are the only ones affected. Everyone else using the thousands and thousands of other servers on the internet are all still functional. And if your server goes down permanently, you can easily switch to another. If you control your own domain name’s DNS mail exchange records, you can switch servers without changing your account address.
Another important feature of decentralized servers, especially when you host your own, is the issue of who controls your data. If you own the server, you decide what the policies are. If you use WhatsApp, Mark Zuckerberg decides. If you use Signal, Moxie Marlinspike decides. If you use Telegram, Pavel Durov decides. You’ve already seen what happens when WhatsApp changes things, what’s stopping Signal & Telegram from adding anti-features, too? Nothing? In fact, there has already been a case of Signal changing things for the worse… see the disabling of federation capabilities in 2016. The precedent has been set with Telegram as well. In 2020, Telegram agreed to allow Russian government agencies access to user data and added moderation capabilities in return for lifting their ban on the app. With the ability to make your own server or choose a server/service that you trust, you have much more freedom and potentially better privacy & security.
Along the same lines as “You control your data”, the Delta Chat app doesn’t take your conversations hostage either. You can still access all of those messages from any other email client that connects to your server (as long as you don’t delete them). I can reply to messages I get in Delta Chat from Gnome Evolution or FairEmail or Mutt or webmail or any of the hundreds of other email clients out there. That’s a huge advantage over particularly WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Apple iMessage which all require the company-dictated software app. While the Signal client app is open source, Moxie does not allow any forked/modified clients to connect to the Open Whisper network, so you won’t get any flexibility there. Telegram technically allows 3rd party clients as well, but they are very primitive and not nearly as diverse as the ecosystem of email clients available.
One “gotcha” here is the issue of message encryption, however. If you want to read your encrypted messages on other clients, you’ll have to copy your encryption keys over and the other clients will need to have message encryption support installed. Having the option is a huge advantage, but it’s not completely fleshed out or easy on Delta Chat just yet.
IMAP and SMTP can’t really do video/voice calls though, so Delta Chat solves this in another really smart decentralized manner. In the settings, there’s a field to add your own Video Chat Instance! That’s right, you’re not stuck with using whatever someone else chooses for you. That’s even more freedom! If you don’t have your own Video Chat server instance, you can use the free open Jitsi Meet hosted instance by typing in https://meet.jit.si/$ROOM. When you send a Video Chat request to a user, it will create a link to a WebRTC room that the other users can click on to join. WebRTC video chat rooms are supported by most modern web browsers these days, so people can join from phones or larger personal computers. On Android and iOS, in the case of Jitsi Meet, you can also join the calls from the also open-source Jitsi Meet apps which work quite nicely. In the future, Delta Chat should be able to recognize the video chat requests and load a more “phone ringing” style notification.
Yet another disadvantage of centralized services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram is how easy they are to block. All you have to do is cut off the connection to that one set of server hostnames or IP addresses. China, for example, has blocked all three of those messaging apps. Signal had a clever workaround for this called domain fronting, but that no longer works either and Signal continues to be blocked in these countries. Telegram is also blocked in many countries and as a previously mentioned example of policy changes and adding anti-features on the fly… Russia lifted their block on Telegram in June of 2020 when Telegram agreed to “help” the Russian government read encrypted user messages moderate content (1)(2). So much for security and privacy, right?
IMAP & SMTP email servers, on the other hand, are more difficult to block since there are so many of them and so many of them are actually used by businesses, educational, and government institutions. Email even works in China (except Gmail). Blocking email would mean basically shutting down everything on the internet. In fact, the internet’s global eCommerce ecosystem depends on email. Even if a country blocks all external internet traffic, an email server would still work within that country or within any kind of internal network that you might have. For example, a business can have its own internal network where email messages never even leave the premises when sent between employees. That kind of high security is not really possible with centralized chat apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.
Delta Chat has gained some popularity in countries like Belarus and Russia with people fighting against the dictatorships there… and partly because the governments tried to block downloads of the apps in the smartphone app stores. Delta Chat is available through FDroid as well as an APK download and you can even build it from the source code, so the workaround for an app store block is easy.
On electronic messaging apps that use your phone number as an identifier, you really don’t have much control over who can contact you. Anyone can put any series of numbers into the app, verify which sets of numbers have messaging accounts on which platforms without the recipient’s permission, and start sending them messages. Since Delta Chat uses email as the backbone, you have way more control over who can contact you and how. First of all, the built-in options let you completely ignore emails that aren’t sent from Delta Chat on the other end. That kind of breaks the open nature of email messaging, so I would say that’s an extreme solution. You can also filter new emails as “contact requests” and choose to create chats with them on an individual basis. That’s just what’s part of the app though.
Going back to the “you can use your own server” feature, that means you can also add any number of other spam filter protections on the server. If you don’t have your own server, you can use all of the capabilities on the server that you already have. You probably have some very robust filtering capabilities already, even on free consumer email services like Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, AOL, etc. If you do use your own server or a different type of host, then your options open up even further. If your current email account is just overrun with spam, another easy fix is to create a new address for actual communications and only give the new address to people you want to communicate with. (Keep a separate spam account for the shopping, newsletter, app subscription garbage.) It’s not so easy to do something like that with a phone number since the new one you’re getting is probably already attached to a ton of spammer databases.
Bonus! This one doesn’t really apply to Telegram, since you can set up as many as 3 Telegram accounts with different phone numbers on a single app. WhatsApp and Signal do not allow multiple accounts in a single app though. You’ll have to do some crazy workarounds if you want to do that. Delta Chat implements multiple accounts with an account switcher command in the three dots menu. It’s not the same as other email apps that can combine messages from all sorts of email accounts for a “unified inbox”. Each account is basically in its own silo in this implementation. Still, that’s better than not having multiple account support at all.
A lot of people are often skeptical about the security of email and that was certainly a valid concern back in the late 1900s when email was only a couple of decades old and all we cared about was transferring information electronically instead of shipping it through the postal system. Email is like the World Wide Web though… it hasn’t stood still… it keeps evolving openly. There have been many upgrades to the protocol over the years, including server-side folders, instant push delivery, transport encryption, meeting requests, HTML formatting, and the latest open standard is called Autocrypt. This is a method of exchanging security keys for end-to-end encryption that’s much more user-friendly and open than previous encryption methods.
If two users send each other a message using Delta Chat, the client will automatically start sending encrypted messages by default (after the first two messages are exchanged). If one user is not using Delta Chat, the conversation will remain unencrypted in order to ensure compatibility since the person on the other end may not be using a program that supports Autocrypt encryption. However, since Autocrypt is an open standard, it is possible to enable encryption with other email clients, though this is not completely fleshed out just yet. Here’s a list of other email programs that have started implementing Autocrypt encryption and will probably be compatible in the future.
This only works if the other person is also using Delta Chat. You can specify a certain amount of time that the message remains visible before it gets auto-deleted. If the other person is using a different email program, they can copy or forward it still. This limitation gives the recipient more control, but there are ways around disappearing messages on any platform.
A trendy feature in modern instant messaging apps is the little double checkmark icon that shows a sender that the recipient has received and read the message that you sent. Of course, certain email systems (such as Exchange Server) have had this capability for decades. Delta Chat’s implementation does this in a pretty obvious way without any sneaky image links or proprietary methods. It simply sends another email saying that the message has been read. If you’re not using Delta Chat, you’ll see the note as a regular email message. If you are using Delta Chat, you’ll see the little double checkmark icon.
All of the fun things you associate with instant messaging apps have been possible in email since the late 1900s. It’s just that whatever app you were using didn’t have them as part of the user interface. Delta Chat makes sending voice recordings to people easy again (Pocket Outlook on Pocket PC 2000 also had a nice voice message email feature). Emoji and attachments are there too. The group messaging interface is very similar to other chat apps as well. Group messaging in email is, of course, just adding multiple email addresses in the “To” field. Delta Chat makes the “reply all” function default in group messages and thus makes it more difficult to break the group chat accidentally. There is no “reply only to sender” button, in fact. You’d have to specifically start a different conversation with a single person if you wanted to separate from the group messaging thread… and that’s exactly how the other messaging apps work, so this is probably a good thing.
Delta Chat also has a location-sharing feature, but this is still a work in progress as it doesn’t seem to function perfectly just yet. The idea is that you’ll be able to send people your location so that they can find you more easily. I use location sharing in mapping apps all the time when friends are trying to meet up in a specific location (such as Central Park) and there isn’t an easy address to point to. Currently, this feature sends the location of your choosing as a standard KML file attachment. That means non-delta chat users can still open the data, while a Delta Chat user will get a special location-indicator in the chat.
Delta Chat currently doesn’t have a “stickers” library for sending to others, but stickers are really just images and animated GIFs, so there’s no reason these couldn’t be added in the future with plug-ins. If you save whatever “stickers” you like to your device’s storage, you’ll still be able to send them.
A “channels” interface is also missing, but channels are just a public version of group messaging. This could easily be implemented with email list servers… something that’s been around for decades. In fact, Delta Chat works fine with existing email list servers already and the Delta Chat development team uses one.
There aren’t any built-in chatbots either, but again this is something that would be very easy to add. Chatbots can easily be programmed to respond via email, so if there’s one you want to use, all you have to do is add its address to a group.
Live typing indicators are not part of Delta Chat yet either. This is kind of a controversial feature anyway and many people don’t want the other end knowing when they’re typing something anyway. It is technically possible to implement this kind of thing with the use of a secondary server.
You might remember back in 2017 when I wrote “Hop: How instant messaging should have been done decades ago” which was about an instant messaging app (now called Spike) that didn’t lock you in and force you to peer pressure your friends or colleagues into using the same app. Delta Chat’s concept is similar, but the approach is different. Delta Chat takes a completely open and honest approach to messaging and puts the user in control as much as possible. You can lock it down as much as you want, put everything behind a VPN, make it all work only within your business’s building, or share messages with the entire world. You can also copy the source code and make your own version of the app with different features for free. You have complete control! That kind of freedom is especially important for users in countries where people have been burned by technology dictatorships.
You can download any of the versions here. If you decide to try it out, you can communicate any bugs and wishes here in order to help contribute to the growth of technology freedom.
The post 10 Ways Delta Chat is Better than WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram appeared first on Pocketnow.
Chromebooks and Chrome OS are continuing to evolve to be more like more powerful desktop computer operating systems. Today, Wacom announces that the “One by Wacom” graphics drawing tablet is now certified with the “Works with Chromebook” program from Google. The “One by Wacom” tablet is a small inexpensive $59.95 pressure-sensitive graphics tablet that can be plugged into other computers via a USB port in order to add drawing capabilities. Wacom’s Intuos, Intuos Pro, Cintiq, and Cintiq Pro will receive The Works With Chromebook certification in the coming months as well.
The Wacom graphics tablets will work in Chromebook drawing apps such as Clip Studio Paint, Concepts, and IBS Paint as long as you have Chrome OS version 87 which was released in November of 2020. All pen-pressure sensitive Android apps on Chrome OS should detect the Wacom tablets as well. It’s unclear if Google’s Chrome Linux subsystem also includes Wacom drivers for Linux-based graphics programs.
While Chromebooks don’t have nearly the amount of high-end graphics programs that you’d want to use a high-end Wacom pen tablet with, the “One by Wacom” and its Chrome OS support is mainly aimed at students and teachers. The pen can be very useful for drawing diagrams, illustrations, writing out math equations, etc. It will also be very useful for pointing out items in a presentation during a remote learning session.
The post Wacom Now Works with Chromebooks appeared first on Pocketnow.
The trend today has been to stop using WhatsApp ever since the policy was updated to allow sharing your personal information with Facebook. Some are recommending switching to other centralized messaging systems like Signal or Telegram, but there’s a problem with that too. Read on to learn how to recognize when a messaging app is out to profit off of and control you versus enabling better communications between people.
Personally, I specifically never became dependent on WhatsApp because 10 years ago I knew something like this would happen eventually. I mean the clues are pretty obvious; it’s a closed system, every app has to connect to the same centralized servers, it requires your phone number… it was clearly designed from the beginning to:
Embarrassingly, hundreds of millions of people keep falling for this scheme. I hear that in some countries, people even do business through WhatsApp.
Switching to another messaging service might seem like the solution to Facebook’s monetization of your privacy, but be careful as you’re probably just trading one dictatorship for another dictatorship. Maybe the new dictator seems like a better dictator?
Telegram founder and chief. He’s right. pic.twitter.com/Q45xv0rr8y
— Vlad Savov (@vladsavov) January 9, 2021
Pavel Duroc, the founder, and chief of Telegram may say things like “respect users”, but how long is that going to last? Whatsapp’s founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton were originally good dictators who respected users, too. They even promised to protect user data after the Facebook acquisition! That didn’t last very long now, did it?
Why is it so easy to predict that all of these internet messaging apps aren’t going to last? It’s because none of the other practically exact same messaging apps have lasted. All of them do very similar things and generally fail the same way. Let’s look at a few:
ICQ
AIM
MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, Live Messenger
Yahoo Messenger
Skype
Facebook Messenger
Anything Google (Sorry I don’t have time to list all of the failed Google messaging apps)
Today we have dozens and dozens more internet messaging apps/services, and just about all are repeating the same mistakes of the ones that have failed. Personally, I’m getting pretty tired of recommending instant messaging apps to friends and family or coworkers only for them to eventually become awful or shut down. That appears to be how things go.
Will Signal or Telegram ever become awful or shut down? Probably! Both actually promote an open-source nature whereas the code for the Telegram client is completely open to forking and both the Signal server and client are open source. However, both are still centralized. With Telegram, you’re at the mercy of Pavel Durov deciding how things work with their centralized servers. With Signal, you’re not allowed to create federated servers. You’re only allowed to connect to the Open Whisper centralized servers which are under Moxie Marlinspike’s control. Both dictate what’s allowed on their respective networks and thus could change the rules at any time.
So has anyone done internet messaging right? There is one internet messaging system that does NOT use centralized servers, and it has been very successful because of that. In fact, it has outlasted all other internet messaging systems in longevity as it continues to evolve. Here are a few differences that make this one successful.
If you can’t tell what we’re talking about here, the big one that has been around the longest and is in use by more people than any other internet messaging protocol (4 billion people and growing) is called Email. Practically every internet connected electronic devices that you buy today asks for an email account for identification or offers to create one at first use. How many Apple users don’t have an iCloud email account? How many Android users don’t have a Gmail account? How many Windows users don’t have a Microsoft account? There’s no reason to pressure people into using email to send or receive messages, because they already have the app, they already have the accounts, and they’re probably already using it in at least some capacity. If you’re in grade school, or high school, or college, or you have a job, then you’re probably already using it there as well. That means the barrier to entry is very low.
When every chat app in the world has died off, email will still be here.
— DHH (@dhh) December 11, 2018
Some people may not want to use it because they don’t like their default email client’s interface, or they get too much spam or whatever. Well, because this protocol is completely open, you can literally change anything you want. You can install an app like Spike that makes email feel exactly like WhatsApp. You can subscribe to a completely fresh messaging experience like Hey.com. You can encrypt messages using the Signal protocol with Criptext (in fact there are dozens of ways to secure email messaging.) You can add universal voice/video calling with dozens of WebRTC options. You can add animated cartoons and emoji. You can add typing indicators and read receipts or new ways of file sharing. You can make temporary alias accounts to hand out if you want to have more control over who can contact you. You can block everyone except people in your contacts list. You can set up automatic rules or actions that process messages for you. If there’s anything you don’t like about email, someone has probably already made a fix for that and there’s nothing stopping anyone else from innovating on the platform.
That’s another huge difference from all of the centralized messaging services… there is no “Email Emperor” that can make sweeping changes the way the bosses of Open Whisper, or Telegram, or Facebook, or Google can do. The ecosystem is built like the internet… You can start your own business selling better email apps like Em Client, or you can sell secure email services like ProtonMail, or you can sell server software like Microsoft Exchange or Blackberry Server, or you can sell private email servers like Helm, or you can give email service away for free and scrape user data to sell ads like Gmail. The possibilities are endless.
Just because email is one of the oldest forms of internet messaging, doesn’t mean it’s obsolete, quite the opposite, it’s mature and robust. The oldest road in the world has been around for 5500 years, and it still works.
It boggles my mind that so many people are clamoring for a new internet messaging system to replace WhatsApp as Facebook continues to make it terrible, while completely ignoring the smartest solution that they’ve always had. That’s not to say email doesn’t have its problems. The fragmentation of the system can be considered a weakness, but in the same way, the diversity of the system can be considered a huge strength. Regardless of how good/bad YOUR personal experience with email is, the decentralized, cooperative system of communications is clearly the smartest way to go when developing communications systems for longevity into the future.
While personally, I believe the email system can be upgraded further as it has many times over the past few decades, there are some other decentralized communications system in development that follow the same decentralized, cooperative architecture. The Matrix Protocol, which is still quite young with not nearly as diverse an ecosystem as email, is a good one to keep your eye on. XMPP is another standards-based messaging protocol that has been around for a while and can truly be federated. XMPP also has a good number of client options and extensions.
The post Stop being naive when it comes to things like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc. appeared first on Pocketnow.
Privacy and security are increasingly becoming a concern among average smartphone and computer users. Even if you have nothing to hide and aren’t doing anything illegal, the things you do can still be used to take advantage of or manipulate you. That’s the whole point of collecting data for advertisements; targeting people who may be susceptible to buying certain things. That kind of manipulation doesn’t have to stop at convincing you to buy things and it doesn’t have to stop at the company that’s doing the data collection.
You probably don’t, but there are some ways to get a clue. Personally, I’ve got a Pi-hole DNS server on my network so that everything connected to my WiFi router uses that to resolve the external websites that my devices want to connect to. By using my own DNS server there, I can see which devices are trying to access which servers. I can also block the ones I don’t want collecting data or sending me content. That kind of set up is pretty awesome, but it requires building a cheap little Raspberry Pi server or a Virtual Machine of your choice. More information about Pi-Hole. Normally, by default, all of your internet connections are resolved by your internet service provider’s DNS server. That means your ISP can see all of that information and maybe they’ll use it to sell advertisements or something else.
Mind you, the DNS queries we’re talking about are not necessarily representative of actual internet traffic. Apps or operating systems could be hardcoded to connect directly to external internet protocol addresses or they could be hardcoded to circumvent your DNS server or they could encrypt their DNS queries themselves. In most cases, everything is going to use regular DNS queries though.
My Pi-Hole server doesn’t work when I’m not on my WiFi network and instead am using my phone’s data connection over LTE or 5G or whatever. In that case, my cell phone carrier’s DNS server is the thing that sees all of the other server names that my phone is connecting to. Unless, of course, I also create a VPN to my internal network and then route all of my phone’s traffic through that (which I did), but this is getting pretty complicated for a normal person, and there’s an easier way.
Android is a bit more open than iOS, so it’s easier to get more freedom-friendly software for it. On the down-side, it’s also much easier for phone makers to build privacy violating tracking software into their versions of the operating system. I mean, Google does it, but so can lots of other companies who make Android smartphones.
Download Personal DNS Filter for Android
There are a number of DNS filter programs available for Android, but I’m going to recommend an open-source one called Personal DNS Filter because open-source software tends to be more trustworthy for the main reason being that you (or anybody) can actually look at the source code and verify that it does what it says it does.
Once you start Personal DNS Filter, a log at the bottom will appear listing all of the internet hostnames that your phone is trying to connect to as they happen. The green ones are allowed and the red ones are blocked. If you read them, you’ll see most are recognizable names. The Office365.com one is my work email, the outlook.com one is my Hotmail account, etc.
If you tap and hold on one of the internet hostnames listed in the log, “Add filter” and “Remove filter” buttons will appear. Tapping “Add filter” will add the selected hostname to your personal blocklist, while tapping “Remove filter” will unblock it. This way, if you see your phone connecting to something you don’t trust, you can block it for the future.
By default, PersonalDNSFilter is going to use your network’s regular DNS server. That means whatever you don’t block within the app will still go to your regular internet provider. If you tap the DNS field in the app, you can turn on “Disable DNS server discovery” which will make your phone use the DNS server listed in that configuration window. By default, there are a good number of them already listed. You can add ones you like and you can prioritize DNS servers that support DNS over HTTPS (DoH) or DNS over TLS (DoT) if you want your upstream DNS queries encrypted for even more privacy.
In the Advanced Settings > Configure filter update section, you can see the default real-time block lists that are already added, but you can also add your own block lists or other block lists from the internet. These are the same type of text file listings that Pi-Hole uses and there are many to choose from on the internet.
In Advanced settings > Configure additional hosts, you’ll see a list of all the server hostnames that you’ve blocked. You can manually type or copy/paste others into this list as well, and you can do the same for the “allow” list. This listing also supports the asterisk (*) wildcard character so you can block everything under the facebook.com domain like so “*.facebook.com” Or you could block everything and then edit the allow list to only allow connections to very specific servers. That would be useful if you have a very limited data plan on your cell phone, but maybe you still want to get emails from a couple of accounts… simply white list the email server names you want to use.
This app uses Android VPN APIs to route all of your phone’s internet traffic to itself. That way the things you block don’t use up your data plan. If you’re going to use this all the time, remember to check your phone’s battery restriction settings and remove all restrictions in order to keep your operating system from shutting it down.
With iOS, there isn’t an easy way to install a local DNS server and you can’t even change the DNS server on cellular connections. You can change the DNS server on your own WiFi connections though. So, at home, you can change where your DNS queries go and point them to your own internal DNS server as I do with a Pi-Hole.
There is an app called DNS Safety for iOS which might do something similar, but there are a number of significant limitations. You’ll have to switch your phone to supervised mode (which hard resets it), you’ll have to use Apple Configurator on a Mac in order to install a configuration profile, and you’ll have to use Test Flight for the software in the Apple Store.
On Android, it’s super easy to see all of the external internet servers that your phone is trying to connect to in real-time. Even if you don’t really care about privacy or security, it might be nice to just take a look in the interest of transparency or curiosity. And if you see that your phone is doing something suspicious, maybe you’ll want to do something about it.
The post How many servers is your phone connecting to? appeared first on Pocketnow.
For most of us tech enthusiasts and tech journalists, mobile phone reception isn’t much of an issue anymore. We kind of have to live in an area with good reception, and sometimes we forget that not everywhere has decent coverage. Everyone’s hyping up 5G as the next big thing, but take a drive to northern Maine or something and you might not even get EDGE 2G data speeds. Holidays at my aunt’s house in central Massachusetts are like that too. She has to go outside on the porch just to get one bar of signal on her iPhone with AT&T. Forget about getting calls or text messages in the living room.
The Cel-Fi Go X booster comes in a very large and heavy box. That’s because there’s a lot of hardware here and it’s going to be a bit of a project.
In the box, we’ve got:
Read the instructions! This is very important as set up and installation is fairly complicated. The installation guide is very helpful for getting you up to speed on what’s involved.
I used the Network Cell Info Lite app on Android to measure signal strength a bit. There’s barely one bar of signal strength near the door in my aunt’s house. I have to go outside and down the driveway a bit to get a better signal.
Knowing where to find a better signal outdoors is going to be important for installing the outdoor antenna, so walking around with the Network Cell Info gauge on your cell phone is a good idea.
First, find a good spot to place the Cel-Fi X Go amplifier box indoors. It has mounting screw holes so you can bolt it to a wall if you want, but I’d say just lay it down somewhere first in order to test it. You’ll need to plug it into a power outlet to turn it on and then on each end, there are antenna jacks for screwing the antenna wires onto. They’re clearly labeled. One is for the outdoor antenna, and one is for the indoor antenna.
To test, we just screwed all the wires together and put the outdoor antenna outside, with the indoor antenna inside, just laying on a table somewhere.
You’ll want to install the Cel-Fi Go app on a phone at this point in order to see how the signal strength is getting boosted. Software setup is pretty simple. It should detect the booster within a few minutes or so and start showing some more information.
The Cel-Fi app also has an antenna position test utility that will let you test the signal strength of the outdoor antenna’s position. Run the test and then change the position to see if you get better results. You’ll want to point the outdoor antenna towards the nearest cell tower.
You can also use the phone software to change which carrier you want to boost the signal of. It can’t boost all of them all the time, so you’ll have to choose one. Hopefully your whole family can agree on one carrier. It takes a few minutes for the booster to switch over to different carrier bands, too, so be patient.
We found a pretty good place to put the outdoor antenna on a metal fence outside. The phones get about 2 bars of signal strength in this area, and that’s probably the best we can do considering the 30 foot length of the included wiring.
The included lightning surge protector didn’t seem to fit any of the included wires. It just wouldn’t screw in to anything. This is supposed to go between the 5ft wire and the 30ft wire outside and then another grounding wire is supposed to go to the ground in order to keep lightning surges from going into the house. We may have to call an electrician to install this properly or unplug everything when it rains.
For the indoor antenna, the idea is to run the wire through the walls or ceiling and mount it somewhere towards the center of the building. We were too lazy and unskilled for that, so the indoor antenna was just hung on the wall inside next to the booster.
By the way, there are two indoor antennas to choose from, a cone-shaped one and a rectangular one. You can’t use both at the same time as this particular booster is only made for one indoor antenna, but you can choose the one that works best in your building.
After everything is installed and turned on, you’ll see some new boosting signal strength indicators in the Cel-Fi phone app.
More importantly, your cell phones will now actually work indoors! Above, you can see my aunt’s iPhone now has 3 bars of signal reception on AT&T in her kitchen which is a lot more than the zero bars she used to have.
The Cel-fi Go X booster can be found at Amazon or on Waveform.com for $1000 with one indoor antenna port. For $1150, you can get a version with two indoor antenna ports for extending signal through larger buildings. You can find a number of other distributors on the Cel-Fi website here.
Pros
Cons
This signal strength extender/booster is absolutely legit. You may have seen cell phone booster scams before, but this one is the real deal. It certainly works as advertised, and for $1000 it had better. Of course, the downside is that it’s quite a lot of work to install it in your home or business. Especially with larger buildings, you may want to route the wires within the walls and mount indoor antennas to the ceiling. Still, that’s the cost of doing it correctly. Obviously, this isn’t a complete solution to rural areas with no cell network reception at all, since it requires some cell tower reception somewhere in order to be able to boost it into a building. Still, for improving cellular network quality for indoor dead zones, the Cel-Fi Go X is gold!
The post Cel-Fi GO X Reception Extender Review appeared first on Pocketnow.
Many of you may not have heard of the Infinix brand of smartphones before. The company has been around since 2013 and is based in Shenzen China, but their smartphones have become popular in some Middle Eastern and African countries. Today we’re looking at the new Infinix Zero 8 which is the flagship phone for these emerging markets. In many countries, when you hear “flagship”, you’re probably thinking that the price will be $1000-2000 USD. That’s a lot of money! Infinix’s flagship costs around the equivalent to $250 USD.
The Infinix Zero 8 starts off with a Mediatek MT6785 Helio G90T chipset, with an Octa-core (2×2.05 GHz Cortex-A76 & 6×2.0 GHz Cortex-A55) CPU and Mali-G76 MC4 GPU. We’ve got 128GB of storage space and 8Gb of RAM, and there’s a MicroSD card slot that accepts up to 2Tb of extra storage. For a display, we’ve got a 6.85″ IPS screen with 2460 x 1080 pixel resolution. This is not a 5G phone, but it supports the following 4G/3G/2G bands: GSM:B3/B8, GSM: B2/B3/B5/B8, WCDMA: B1/B8, WCDMA: B1/B5/B8, FDD: B3/B7/B20, FDD: B1/B3/B5/B8, TDD: B38/B40/B41. Those do not include T-Mobile USA’s LTE bands, so for me, I was stuck on 2G. There’s WiFi that supports everything up to 802.11n, so that’s missing 802.11ac support. Bluetooth is there along with a USB type C data/charging port. The battery has a 4500 mAh capacity that can provide about 31 hours of talk time. There are four cameras on the back with an LED flash, and two cameras on the front.
The design of this phone looks great. Our model is the silver version which beautifully refracts light thus showing different colors. There’s also a matte “v” shape that adds to the unique design.
The diamond-shaped camera bump contains four camera lens/sensor combos along with an LED flash.
On the top edge, there’s nothing but clean chrome finished rounded plastic.
The bottom edge shows the speaker grill, the USB-C data transfer and charging port, as well as a microphone hole and we nicely have a 3.5mm headset jack, which is also important for the FM radio antenna.
The left edge holds the SIM card and MicroSD card tray. This phone supports two nano-SIM cards so that you can have two cell phone connections at the same time. MicroSD storage expansion is great to have too. Something that is missing from many much more expensive flagship phones these days.
The right edge is where you’ll find the power button and volume up/down rocker. The power button doubles as a fingerprint scanner for quick unlocking. Its also indented on the edge so that the fingerprint scanner is easy to find by touch.
There’s an oval pill-shaped punch hole area in the screen that houses two front-facing cameras.
The Infinix Zero 8 includes Android 10 and a customized XOS Dolphin 7 user interface along with a good number of pre-installed applications.
One part of the XOS interface is that there’s a “Smart Panel” that appears with a left edge or right edge swipe. It’s customizable so you can choose tools and apps to have quick access to. That’s pretty nice, except the left edge-swipe gesture interferes with other apps that also use edge swipe gestures.
Another part that I really like is that when you open a folder of icons that you may have on one of the home screens, you can swipe down from the middle and move all of the icons to the lower part of the screen. This makes them much easier to reach while holding the phone in one hand. There are also a few useful utilities that can protect against viruses, clear out memory, keep the CPU from overheating, translate languages, etc.
There are also two other app stores installed beside the Google Play store. There’s the Palm Store and the AHA Games Store. Both are made by Shalltry Group in Shanghai who also made the XOS launcher and other utilities. One thing that’s a bit suspicious about these app stores is that they’re set by default to auto-update apps that you may have installed from other stores. For example, I installed Pulse and Jitsi Meet from the open-source F-Droid repository. A little while later, they were both updated to different versions that didn’t exist in their open-source project repositories. Jitsi Meet had a higher version number than what existed. Pulse was updated to require signing in and creating an account.
Beyond that, there are a lot of bloatware apps and games included. They’ll often fire off notifications to get your attention too. Most of them are removable though, so that’s good.
The biggest issue I had with the software was that I couldn’t find a one-handed mode. The screen on this phone is so tall, it’s impossible to reach the top edge in order to open the notifications tray while holding the phone with one hand. Some Android launchers get around this by making a “swipe from the middle on home screen” gesture shows the notifications, but not here. My favorite is Huawei’s 5 button bottom navigation bar option which has a button next to the task manager button that shows the notifications tray with one tap. It’s so much easier that way.
The Infinix Zero 8 has 6 cameras on the phone in total. As a photographer, I’m very interested in having an increased range of photography capabilities that I can carry around in my pocket. With smartphones, the easiest way to do that is to add multiple cameras with different lenses or sensors that are useful in different scenarios. My favorites are the ones with different focal length lenses so that you can compose different viewpoints without using digital zoom although the different focal lengths are often attached to completely different image sensors. None of the cameras are compatible with Open Camera and the Camera API2 at least for RAW DNG output, so we were unable to get unprocessed versions of these photos. That’s unfortunate, but for this price, you can’t have everything.
Let’s see what each one is capable of…
64Mp Rear camera
The “normal” 1X lens/sensor camera combo on the back is technically 64Mp, but it mainly outputs to 16Mp JPG images. Below is a series of 100% crops of some photos from a few other phones as compared with the Infinix Zero 8. As you can see the detail and color production of the Zero 8 is not the best, but it’s not terrible either, and personally, it’s preferable to the image from the $1400 Surface Duo.
Below is a gallery of software-processed JPG samples from the 64Mp rear camera. In some cases, the HDR mode is a little too obvious, but still, the images are certainly acceptable for social media sharing. The night photos tend to fall apart though.
8Mp Rear ultra-wide angle camera
Having ultra-wide-angle lens cameras on smartphones is so awesome. I love being able to get a nice wide distorted view of the world once in a while. It’s excellent to have this camera as a choice for reframing your view on the Infinix Zero 8, but it’s certainly lower quality than the 64Mp camera. Other much more expensive phones have better quality ultra-wide cameras as well, but again… this is about 1/4th the price of those phones.
2Mp Macro camera
One of the cameras is dedicated to extreme close up photography. You can hold the lens about an inch away from something and it will be able to focus on it. Below is an extreme close-up sample of a post card. You can see the printing ink dots and even a tiny eyelash. Personally, I rarely need a camera like this. It’s nice to have, but I would have rather have a 70mm focal length equivalent lens instead.
2Mp depth camera
The fourth rear camera is only used for depth sensing in those fake-background filter portrait photos. The fake background blur looks ok if you down-sample the resolution far enough to not see any details, but at full resolution, you can certainly see mistakes. This is true with all of those fake-background blur filters though. You’re better off not using them at all unless you’re down-sampling your photos for something like a 630×480 pixel resolution screen.
48Mp Front facing camera
Of course, we need decent selfie cameras on a flagship phone. The Infinix Zero 8 has a 48Mp wide-angle lens/sensor combo on the front that’s generally used by default. The dynamic range on this one is not very wide at all. That means bright sun-lit areas are going to get washed out very much. You need to find the perfect lighting in order to get good pictures out of this one. See below for a few samples.
8Mp Ultra-wide Front facing camera
Having an ultra-wide-angle front-facing camera is a pretty excellent option. Being able to switch to a different focal length so easily adds so much more flexibility to your photography. I love it! The ultra-wide front-facing lens/sensor combo doesn’t give you great image quality, but the ultra-wide view is certainly worth having. You can see a few samples below:
The 4500 mAh battery works quite well for keeping the phone running for about 2 days. For talk time it’s rated for about 31 hours. It will certainly get through a weekend.
The Infinix Zero 8 is mainly only available in offline brick & mortar stores. There is a store finder on their website. Their stores mainly only exist in African and Middle Eastern countries, so you may have difficulty finding this device in other countries. The price should be approximately the equivalent of $250 USD.
Pros
Cons
Usually, we think of flagship smartphones as being very expensive these days. Samsung has flagships in the $2000 USD range. The Infinix Zero 8 is only $250. That’s a huge difference. For me, in New York, this phone only works on 2G EDGE with my T-Mobile account, so missing 4G LTE internet speeds was pretty frustrating. That’s probably one reason the phone isn’t sold here. I’m sure in the African and Middle Eastern countries where this is available, users will have a much better connectivity experience, and given the low price, I’m sure many people will find the features of the Infinix Zero 8 to be quite satisfactory.
The post Infinix Zero 8 review: budget-friendly flagship approach appeared first on Pocketnow.
I’ve been a huge fan of the Surface devices ever since I first got the original Surface Pro after waiting in line during a snowstorm at the Microsoft Store. The mall wasn’t even opened, but I had the manager’s cell phone number and called while waiting with a bunch of other people looking for the same thing. That was 8 years ago, and the Surface devices have grown significantly. As a Windows Phone user and fan, I had also often wished for a Surface Phone designed by the team that makes all of the other Surface devices. Today that wish is granted, but instead of running Windows as we wanted, the Surface Duo runs Android with a customized shell/launcher from Microsoft. Read on to see how that turned out.
The Surface Duo is a dual-screen hinged Android phone with two 5.6″ AMOLED 1800×1350 pixel screens which adds up to a 2700×1800 pixel resolution. The unfolded dimensions of the entire device are 5.72×7.36×0.19 inches and when closed, the dimensions change to 5.72×3.67×0.399 inches. The weight is about 8.8oz or 250g. For a processor, we’ve got a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855. For storage, there’s 128Gb or 256Gb depending on the model you choose and there’s 6Gb of RAM. There’s only one camera and it’s 11 megapixels, but it does have an LED flash. Of course, there’s WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and LTE radios for connectivity. There’s also a fingerprint scanner on the edge and a 3,577 mAh battery to power it all. It’s also running Android 10 with a launcher made by Microsoft and lots of bundled Microsoft apps. There is no 5G data connection support and there is no NFC either (which means no tap-to-pay options.)
The Surface Duo hardware really is unique and beautiful. The outside is two blank white glass panels with a reflective silver Microsoft Windows logo. It doesn’t make sense to have a Windows logo on this thing though since it doesn’t run Windows. So, that’s a mistake. I suppose maybe the four boxes logo is supposed to be more representative of Microsoft as a whole instead of just Windows now?
The Surface Duo doesn’t feel like a phone. It feels like an electronic notebook made of glass.
The panels are so thin that it’s just about as thick as a normal phone when folded. On this edge, you can see the SIM card tray pin hole, indented fingerprint scanner, power button, and volume toggle buttons.
The spine edge is where the 360-degree hinges are. It’s totally straight and smooth curved chrome metal with two double hinges at the ends. The hinges have the perfect amount of friction where you can easily unfold the device, but the two screens will stay put in whatever position you stop moving them at.
The Microsoft Windows logo is shiny chrome as well which matches most other Surface devices. This is the only identifying mark on the device and it looks super clean. There are no other logos or IMEI numbers.
The Nano SIM card tray pops open with the usual pin or paperclip tool, but this one’s tray seems a little loose. There’s a tiny bit of play if you poke it with a fingernail. It doesn’t fall out, it just jiggles a little.
A microphone is hidden very well as a tiny little slit in the edge of the glass and plastic of the Surface Duo’s body. The edges are pointed right angles, not smooth, and you can see a little bit of a ledge on the edges.
The power button and volume toggle buttons feel exactly the same as the ones on other Microsoft Surface devices. This is a great move for user interface consistency. I love it! Unfortunately, this might be the only thing that provides user interface consistency, but we’ll get to that. The fingerprint scanner is nicely indented so that you can easily feel for its location while holding the Surface Duo.
The tiny dual hinges are beautifully designed, but I’m afraid dirt will get in there pretty easily.
We’ve got Surface Pen support too, but the Surface Duo doesn’t quite match the nice magnesium alloy of the Surface Pro.
The Surface Duo ships with Android 10 and a custom launcher from Microsoft as well as a bunch of Microsoft’s Android apps. Most of Microsoft’s Android apps are set as defaults too while the Google Equivalents are hidden in a folder. So you’ll have Microsoft Edge as the default browser, Outlook as the default email/calendar app, etc. Office, OneNote, ToDo, LinkedIn, Teams, etc. are all there too.
As you open the Surface Duo, there’s a nice “peek” mode that shows the time and date. I wish that this could display some recent notifications too as that would be way more useful when you hear a notification sound. As it is now, after a notification sound, you have to open it all the way, unlock the screen, swipe the top edge, then try to figure out which notification there is the one that made the sound.
The awesome part of having two screens and a hinge in such a thin and light device is the multitasking. I can be on a video call with someone AND be taking notes in OneNote at the same time without making the other person disappear or shrinking them to thumbnail size.
You can check the weather and read the news at the same time.
You can browse web pages and read your email at the same time. Microsoft’s Edge browser is nice and it syncs with the desktop versions of Edge, but the Android version uses an old rendering engine that doesn’t support newer technologies like CSS backdrop filters or dark/light mode scheme preferences. Sometimes I was able to get two instances of the Edge browser to load in each screen, but there’s no obvious interface for doing that. Edge is also supposed to have support for some dual-screen javascript and/or CSS media query programming. I tried to implement some of that on my personal website, but it didn’t work immediately, so I gave up.
Outlook for Android is probably the worst version of Outlook, too. The Windows 10 x86 version of Outlook is my favorite PIM (Personal Information Management) program. It’s extremely feature-rich and capable. The iOS version is pretty nice too, though not as great as the Windows version. The Android version is frustrating as heck. It’s got these ugly distracting useless colorful circles next to each email in the list and you can’t remove them like you can on iOS. What’s worse is that it can’t connect to my personal IMAP account even though I’m using the exact same settings as in the iOS, Windows, & Mac versions of Outlook.
The Surface Duo is fully compatible with all of the Microsoft “Your Phone” app features, which is pretty nice. Setting it up takes kind of a long time. There are lots of permission requests happening every time you go to a different section.
You can only see 2000 photos on the phone via “Your Phone”, but I don’t really need this since my Android phones sync all of their photos to OneDrive anyway and that’s accessible via Windows 10, too. The “Your Phone” app enables phone notifications and SMS messaging on Windows 10 PCs as well, but personally I don’t like that feature at all as the double notifications become annoying quickly. I already get email notifications on my PC. SMS messages I’ve turned off about 5 years ago since everyone has the internet now. So, the extra notifications are just extra noise.
The screen mirroring is pretty nice though! This feature shows the Surface Duo’s entire two screens on the Windows 10 PC and you can interact with it using your mouse, keyboard, pen, or touch screen. The gestures are terrible to use this way, so it’s recommended to switch to the 3-button navigation option. The screen mirroring reminds me a lot of the SOTI Pocket Controller software we used to use at Pocketnow all the time for Windows Mobile and Pocket PC devices 20 years ago. That feature stopped being a thing when Windows Phone came out, so I’ve been living without it for 10 years and don’t really miss it anymore. It’s nice to see that the feature is back though for those who never had it in 2001. Still, it’s a nice way to multi-task with your phone while using a real hardware keyboard and a mouse. Apparently, Windows 10’s handwriting recognition panel and Windows Ink do not work though.
If you have Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you can play any of about 186 Xbox games on one screen and do whatever else you want on the other screen. This is actually really useful when you’re waiting for a game to load.
The Surface Duo has some of the most basic user interface design problems. Just look at the home screen above. Why are there 6 icons at the bottom that don’t have text labels while all of the others above do have text labels? Why should users be allowed to understand the icons in the middle part of the screens, but not the icons at the bottom? Every time I have to support clients, I have to describe unlabeled mystery meat icons to them by their shape and colors. It would be so much easier for everyone if people could read the name of the button and instantly know what it does.
Normal people aren’t going to understand many of the icons at the bottom and that’s not even the taskbar like on Windows 10. There’s no congruity with Microsoft’s Surface devices in this design. I get that these are similar to the bottom row of icons on most other Android launchers as well as the iPhone OS, but the Surface Duo is more like a tablet than a phone. The necessity for a row of persistent icons is lower.
Another feature that normal people will have trouble finding is the ability to group two apps into a single group icon on the desktop that will allow you to launch both apps at the same time in the two separate screens. This option requires a tap-and-hold on an icon, then choose “Groups” and it will then show you a whole list of the installed apps that you can group that icon with. One bit of disconnect with this feature that doesn’t seem to be well thought out is that when the screens are folded backwards so that only one is showing, the group icons are still there but only load one app in the one screen. Opening the device to show two screens doesn’t necessarily show the second group app on the second screen. It’s very confusing.
The Surface Duo’s default Android Launcher (basically the graphical user interface shell) was customized by Microsoft and it is measurably worse than the interface you may have hated in Windows 8 and Windows RT eight years ago. Normal people are rightfully going to be frustrated with this (see: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think).
First let’s look at the tablet Interface for a Surface Pro running Windows 10. The Start screen takes up the full screen in tablet mode and everything here is basically point and poke. You can read the names of the icons and poke them to open the programs. It has smooth scrolling which is great because you can manage the speed of scrolling yourself and you don’t have to re-orient your fingers or eyes as you would if these were full-screen pages.
The Windows 10 tablet interface also has some hidden gestures. These are completely undiscoverable, but once you figure them out, they’re very useful. A swipe from the right edge shows your notifications and action center. A swipe from the left edge shows the multi-task interface where you can choose an open app to switch to. Swiping down from the top essentially grabs the window’s title bar and then you can swing the gesture to the left or right in order to enable the split-screen snap mode. If you swipe all the way from the top edge to the bottom edge, this will close the foreground app. If you have two apps in split-screen mode, you can drag down on the title bar of one of them and then move it to the top middle to expand it to full screen. So that’s what, four hidden gestures that you need to learn in order to use a Surface Pro’s tablet mode? Now if you rotate the tablet into portrait mode, all of these gestures work the same (except there’s no room for split-screen mode.) Four hidden gestures to learn is not that bad. It does not take up too much cognitive energy to learn 4 or 5 gestures.
Now let’s look at the Surface Duo. The home screen is similar to the Windows 10 full-screen start menu in that you can launch programs from here and also customize it with widgets that show information. A big difference is that it scrolls in pages as opposed to a user-controllable smooth scrolling list. That means there’s more work in reading each page and re-orienting your finger to poke the things you want. There’s also a dock of shortcuts at the bottom and these really aren’t necessary since the home screen is also customizable shortcuts. Also, why should I be able to read all of the icons on the homescreen, but the ones in the bottom row don’t have text labels? It doesn’t make sense that I should be able to understand the functions at the top, but not the ones at the bottom. I get that this is something Apple and Google do, but it still doesn’t make sense. There’s plenty of room to label the functions so that people can understand them. There are some fairly intuitive gestures to control the homescreen. A swipe from the right edge inwards scrolls a page to the right. A swipe from the left edge inwards scrolls to the left.
A swipe from the top edge reveals the notifications and action center just like Android and iOS do, but completely different from how Windows 10 does. This is obviously a problem if you use other Microsoft Surface devices, but at least this top edge gesture works in all scenarios and it’s familiar from other non-Microsoft platforms. However, if you miss the top edge while you’re on the home screen and do a top-down swipe that does not start at the very top… then you’ll get the search interface.
The next problem is when you install new apps. The icons for new apps don’t appear on the home screen and there is zero indication of where to find them or how to launch them. There is no button for an app drawer that lists all installed programs! Seriously! Maybe the tutorial at the first boot covered this, but I’ve forgotten that already (as will every non-tech enthusiast that tries to use this). It turns out you have to figure out a hidden gesture where you swipe up from the bottom middle of the touch screen and this reveals the full list of programs. Unlike the home screen, this listing DOES smooth scroll so that you can easily choose the speed and movement of the list thus reducing eye and finger movement.
While all of these hidden gestures can increase efficiency for power users who have memorized them, they certainly increase frustration for people who use other Surface devices or do not want to waste their cognitive energy memorizing them. In fact, Android users prefer the on-screen buttons interface over hidden gestures according to Google.
Launching an app loads it in whichever side of the split-screen that you poked it in. That makes sense. The other side of the screen still shows a portion of the home screen and allows you to launch another app on that screen.
Now that we’ve got two apps loaded and both showing in both screens, the gesture controls are going to be completely different. Now instead of a taskbar or any system control buttons, you’ve got absolutely nothing except two white wiener bar lines at the bottom. They look like scrollbars, but they’re not. Tapping the wiener bars don’t do anything. Swiping the wiener bars outwards towards the edge of the screen doesn’t do anything. Swiping it inwards towards the spine flips it to the other screen. Swiping it upwards minimizes the app and reveals the home screen again. Yes, that’s the opposite of the gestures that you may have learned by using other Microsoft Surface devices. Sometimes if you drag from the bottom edge upwards long enough to feel some haptic feedback, you’ll get a list of open apps instead which you can then scroll through in order to switch apps. Confused yet? It gets worse.
When you have apps opened, the left and right edge gestures are different now. Both the right edge or left edge gestures invoke the “back” function. This is something that’s normally a dedicated button on the taskbar in Windows 10, but now on the Surface Duo, we have invisible back buttons. In some apps, they don’t even work and will often just minimize the app and show the home screen. These gestures also heavily conflict with apps that also have side-edge gestures. For example, many apps have a left-edge gesture that reveals a panel of other options. This doesn’t work if you have the app loaded on the left screen on the Surface Duo.
Now if you drag the bottom edge wiener bar and hold it in the middle of the screen, you can then drag it to the center spine of the split screen in order to make the app span both screens. Again, this is a completely different gesture than what was used for the same function on Windows tablets since 2012.
So we’re up to about 10 non-discoverable hidden gestures that you need to learn in order to use the Surface Duo so far. That’s too many already, but guess what, it gets worse…
If you rotate the Surface Duo so that the spine is horizontal, both screens will change their orientation, and now… all of those gestures you just learned are completely different. Well, the only one that’s the same is the top-edge gesture which still shows the notifications and action center. The right edge gesture no longer functions as the back button. It now minimizes the app because now the white wiener bar is on the right edge instead of the bottom where it was before. The left edge swipe gesture does still function as a back button, but it still also conflicts with the in-app left-edge swipe gestures that some programs depend on. The bottom edge swipe up gesture now does nothing.
Let’s go back to the home screen in this landscape layout. Guess what, everything is different here too! Instead of horizontally scrolling pages of icons and widgets, now we have vertically scrolling pages. Remember how before we had to swipe up from the middle of the home screen in order to access the full list of installed programs? THAT DOESN’T WORK ANYMORE!!! Instead, you have to use a “swipe right to left from anywhere other than the right edge” gesture in order to access the full list of installed applications. Now that the swiping up and down switches between home screen pages what happened to the search interface? The “swipe down from anywhere other than the top edge” home screen gesture no longer opens the search interface. It just scrolls through home pages until you get all the way to the top and THEN it opens the search interface.
So that’s 6 more new hidden gestures to memorize that we need to add to the other 10 from the book/portrait orientation. 16 hidden gestures to memorize! That’s 4 times more complicated than the gestures we had to learn for Windows 8 in 2012. Remember how everyone hated the hidden gestures in Windows 8? Making a user interface that’s four times worse than that is not going to help. That’s not even counting the hidden gesture to activate Google Assistant, which I never even figured out how to do.
Okay, the Google Assistant gesture is a swipe up from a corner. Completely not discoverable, and unintuitive!
You can, in the settings, change the UI to have a more point-and-poke type interface that has a triangle, wiener bar, and square button on each screen. This might be easier to use if you’re familiar with Android, but this all would have been much much easier if it used the same interface as Windows 10 already has. It’s certainly possible to make an Android launcher that’s similar to Windows 10 and that would have made the Surface Duo much more consistent with other Surface devices as well as with itself.
If you want a device to be easy to use, the interface needs to be easy to learn first. “Easy to learn” should always be the default. The ability to customize a UI for each individual’s preference for more efficiency in their specific use-case is absolutely important, too, but what’s efficient for you should not be forced on users who aren’t going to be able to figure it out.
What about the pen and input interface? Well, that’s a huge downgrade from what Windows tablets had in 2012 and even 2002, as well. The Surface Duo does support the Surface Pen, which is awesome, but the software support is pretty terrible. There is no system-wide pen support. It’s only useful in apps that specifically are made to detect it like Microsoft OneNote. There is no character recognizer or handwriting recognizer input panel for all input fields like we had on Windows CE in 1998-2010 or Windows XP Tablet PC Edition in 2002 through Windows 10 today.
There’s no split-screen keyboard either. You ONLY get a swipe enabled Qwerty keyboard that can appear on one screen at a time. There’s no option to detect a stylus and automatically switch to handwriting recognition as I had on my Windows Mobile 6.1 HTC Touch Diamond in 2008. How can you release a Surface device with hardware support for the Surface Pen, but not include a handwriting recognition input panel?! The version of OneNote on the Surface Duo doesn’t even have a “convert to text” command for converting ink to plain text. It’s embarrassing that Microsoft was such an innovator in pen technology 20 years ago, and yet the Surface Duo has practically nothing in terms of digital ink support.
The keyboard input is often frustrating too. If you’re in book mode and you want to type something in a field on the left screen, then the keyboard appears in the left corner. That really sucks because I’m right-handed and could have easily swipe-typed if it had appeared in the right corner. So then I have to flip the screen backward so that the left side switches to a full-width keyboard that I can use two thumbs on, but guess what… sometimes the act of flipping the screens over will cause one screen to turn off, and sometimes that screen is the left one that I was trying to type into. It’s hugely frustrating.
The only input method that’s actually pretty good is when you hold the Surface Duo in kind of a laptop display mode where one screen is on the bottom and the other screen is angled up. In that mode, the keyboard appears within the entire lower screen and you’ve got big buttons that you can either point & poke at, or use your thumbs while holding the device.
If you connect a Bluetooth keyboard, like my Microsoft Universal Folding keyboard, there are some keyboard shortcuts added. There’s a prediction row of words that will show at the bottom and each has a number above and to the right of it. If you type Ctrl + the number, that will finish typing that word prediction for you. So that’s pretty nice, but the rest of the operating system lacks keyboard access keys significantly. There are no keyboard shortcut indicators anywhere else like you would expect in Windows x86 programs from 1995-2015 (before UWP apps removed them.) So, hardware keyboard navigation on the Surface Duo is very bad as well, but at least you can connect a nice keyboard for typing.
Previously we were only talking about the design of the Surface Duo’s interface. In reality, it’s even worse since often things don’t work. Sometimes the orientation doesn’t switch, sometimes both screens don’t turn on, sometimes the screen switching doesn’t work, sometimes the complicated gestures aren’t recognized or invoked correctly. It’s a big mess.
Ok, so the software is pretty bad, but what about the camera? Oh, it’s kind of embarrassing especially since Microsoft used to have some of the best smartphone camera technology around when they had bought Nokia years ago.
The Surface Duo only has one camera and it’s on the inside. So if you’re holding it in book mode, the camera will be facing you. You can, however, flip the screens around backward and switch the viewfinder to the other screen in order to point the camera at something else and look through the viewfinder from the other side. This makes accessing the camera for quick photos terribly difficult. There is a shortcut that works a bit better if you can figure it out. Double pressing the power button will launch the camera, and that works well if you already have the phone’s screens flipped backward on the outside of the device. You’re still going to run into the problem of the shutter button not responding right away sometimes, and that’s not acceptable for a camera that doesn’t save RAW data and is such low quality.
Below is a series of 100% crop images of the same model using different camera phones to show how the Surface Duo compares to a few other phones.
The Surface Duo’s 11Mp camera is about on par with the Nokia N8’s 12Mp camera… from 10 years ago… although I still seem to see a little more detail in the hair in the Nokia N8’s example. Next, you’ll see the Microsoft Lumia 950 with a 20Mp camera and much better detail. After that is the old 2013 Nokia Lumia 1020 with its 41Mp camera and this one has the most detail of anything. I can practically see myself in the reflection of our model’s pupil! The last sample is from a 2020 phone called the Infinix Zero 8 which is using a 64Mp camera sensor (which subsamples down to 16Mp in hardware) and costs $250 or about 1/5th the price of the Surface Duo.
Above are a few full resolution sample photos from the Surface Duo camera. It’s ok in nice light, if not a little hazy, but in low light, the details become very blurry. The camera doesn’t support RAW output and doesn’t work with the Android CameraAPI2 via Open Camera, so we’re stuck with Microsoft’s noise reduction and post-processing.
The 3,577 mAh battery works well for keeping the Surface Duo running for most of the day. The 18-watt fast-charger should get things back up and running pretty quickly via the USB-C port.
The Surface Duo launched on September 10, 2020 for $1399.99 which comes to $1524.24 with tax. That’s ridiculously expensive for something who’s software is so poorly thought out and doesn’t replace my Surface Pro (which is less expensive).
Pros
Cons
As a huge fan of the Surface Pro since its first release and a huge fan of Microsoft’s previous mobile phone software attempts (Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, Pocket PC, Windows CE), I was very much looking forward to the Surface hardware engineers finally releasing a Surface phone. Other than the mediocre camera, the hardware is beautifully well designed and robust. Yes, there are bezels, but I prefer having those since it gives you someplace to put your fingers in order to hold the device without activating things. The 360-degree dual hinge is practically perfect.
The problems come when you turn it on. Yes, it uses Android, so the interface is going to be different from Windows, but Android is open-source and you can create your own launchers that change the system UI a lot. That’s what Microsoft did, but they did it in a way that makes no sense for Surface users or anybody who has never used the Duo before really. While Windows Phone was really well thought out and designed for ease-of-use, the Surface Duo’s Android implementation was not. With all of the overlapping, non-discover-able gestures, it seems like it was designed to be frustrating to use. It’s like the difference between learning pi to 4 decimals versus learning pi to 20 decimals. A lower amount of cognitive energy required to use the software would have been so much better. It’s not just poorly designed, it’s also buggy and often does not do the things you expect. That makes it even more frustrating to use. The lack of digital inking support is even more embarrassing since Microsoft was a pioneer of digital inking on smartphones and mobile devices over 20 years ago.
All of those issues would probably be acceptable and forgivable if this was an inexpensive $200 device, but it’s 7 times that price at $1400!
The post Microsoft Surface Duo Review: Beautiful Hardware, Terrible Software appeared first on Pocketnow.
