Excursions avatar

Excursions

This week’s episode of Reply All (#140) was pretty interesting. Of course, the issue being discussed itself was intriguing - Ben’s “car stereo completely breaks” when he listens to one particular podcast. And, of course as usual, it was produced so well - fun and exciting.

IPL matches are running too late into the night — I just can’t stay up late on the weekday. I’m sure am not alone and the broadcaster must be seeing the effect. What that also means is I miss some gem of matches, like yesterday’s one between MI and KXIP. This needs correction.

“Samsung’s Galaxy A80 is an automated notchless slider with rotating triple camera.” This is getting totally crazy now - that’s too many moving parts, 2 years out of this hardware would be a stretch. We’re going back to the times of absurd designs of pre-iPhone days.

Castro welcomed me today with this screen. Of course, they were expecting an “Aww thanks” from me. But that wasn’t the feeling I had. All I could think was “why”. Stop paying “attention” you guys.

If there’s a one feature on iOS that has remained in my wishlist for too long now is setting defaults. It was browser earlier, it’s tiring to use anything other than Safari. Plus since I started using Spotify more, I again feel a need for this. Am sure Apple won’t like that.

The Golden Age of Half-Truths →

I would argue that we are living in the golden age of half-truths, thanks in part to the evolution of media as a tool for inducing dopamine.

Om Malik says it well, half-truth allows media houses to keep their story engaging without lying.

I am a quarter into Lethal White. Intriguing as always from Rowling, the story moves as the mystery deepens. Of course, the master at work again, building characters that we care for while weaving mysteries that they care for.

When I watched the first couple of episodes of Brooklyn Nine Nine, I instantly gave up. I thought it was too childish — and I had very different expectation. But it has grown on me now, I have started digging the inherent goofiness of all the characters.

State of Mobile Imaging

There has been a lot of positive craze around Huawei P30 Pro’s cameras recently. For me it started with this Twitter thread by Vlad Savov of The Verge where he compared images from this latest phone from Huawei against Pixel 3. Especially, the pitch dark, night-sight pictures. Just look at this specific example from the thread.

That’s simply criminal. Here’s Vlad summarizing his observation in the article.

In the following example, featuring an unlit bathroom where my eyes could detect shapes but no colors, the P30 Pro does the unbelievable by actually focusing and producing a very respectable image.

So now these mobile cameras can do better than our eyes? Nice. And this positive view towards the P30 camera is shared by almost all tech reviewers. Here’s what Engadget says about this.

With less light, zooming, focus and detail should be a struggle, but the P30 Pro mostly shrugged it off. The combination of dual OIS on both the primary camera and the telephoto, in addition to the digital image stabilizing trick, gives the phone a better chance to capture images at reduced noise and do it all better.

Of course, this isn’t the perfect smartphone - far from it. It isn’t even the hands-down best camera quality and experience on a mobile phone. Rene Ritchie has a nice comparison video of the phone with the iPhone XS. It is good to be aware of the capabilities and shortcoming of the overall device.

But I am amazed at the speed with which the imaging technology on the smartphones are improving. It was only few months back when we were surprised looking at what the Pixel 3 could achieve with its night-sight feature. And we already have a device that, if not tops, matches that under most conditions.

The tech pundits always made us believe that camera tech will be the next big differentiator for the smartphones — something that will separate the big, serious players from the emerging ones. However, the way things are going, I don’t think that would be the case. The camera modules will again soon be commoditized and everyone would be back to the drawing board in search of that one differentiator.

This does not bode well for Google’s hardware efforts in smartphones. Apple and Samsung, for whom their brand is the primary selling point, would be pleased with this.

Most people have some filler word they fall back to during public speaking/presentation. I have worked hard to reduce my usage of “actually”. However, I came to the realization that “apparently” has to be one of the worst ones out there. Try it for yourself and you’d agree.