I'm so glad LG are sticking with a switchable battery - it's a must have feature for me. Lots of people have forgotten what it's like to grab a wall-charged battery, slip it in and run out the door with 100% power in a few seconds. Tethering your phone to the wall sucks. Clunky portable battery packs are the worst. I hope this phone sells well, it has my support.
Honestly that sounds rubbish compared to just having a phone with a decent battery life in the first place. I used to think it was impossible (I had a Nexus 4) but my Z3C has an impressively good battery life - so much so that I rarely think about it. I don't even bother plugging it in for satnav duties. Also it charges at a pretty decent rate - probably takes an hour to fully charge from 0%.
Battery swapping is a workaround for flawed phones.
Depends how long you plan to keep your phone. Lithium-ion cells have finite lifespans, and if you plan to keep your phone for years at a time, or if (like me) you tend to purchase slightly older phones, removable batteries are a godsend.
FWIW, though I'm not happy about the non-removable battery, I currently use a Nexus 4. It's gotten worse over time, but I used to be able to comfortably get about 2 days of runtime on a full charge. Now it's about a full day, though it sometimes needs a little help if I'm in an area where reception is weak.
I think this factor is more relevant today than five years ago. At least my upgrade cycle has slowed down, and I'm often subjected to poor battery life before the apps get too demanding for the hardware itself. Really frustrating with non-user serviceable batteries when this happens. How a phone feels like new with a fresh new battery, that "oh my god, how..." feeling with the battery life, just cannot be underestimated.
I agree - and I think most people's upgrade cycle has slowed. Most smart phones from 2012 onwards fulfil basic consumer demands (calls + messages, nav, apps, basic pocket camera).
You are able to get two days of run time on a Nexus 4?
I couldn't achieve this even when new.
Replacing the battery on a Nexus 4 is a trivial affair(I am not saying this to take away from your non removal battery point but letting you know its pretty easy).
Two days of battery life was while using Sailfish rather than Android. I'd imagine part of that is due to the fact that Sailfish doesn't have drivers for the GPS chip in the Nexus 4, and therefore would never power it up.
Aside from that, I still get decent battery life out of it even in Android by carefully policing what runs on it. I have very few applications on my phone that run in the background, and I don't have the Google apps installed - I use microG instead, which is a FOSS implementation of (a subset of) Play Services.
I'm aware that the vast majority of users probably wouldn't like using their phone the way I do. That said, this should make it clear that battery life is very much affected by the software you run.
Even if you upgrade your phone every three years, say, someone else will use it after that. Sometime back, I sold a phone that was 5½ years old when I sold it.
If phones had better battery life out of the box, it will help their current owner and the next owner.
Well, if you're talking about giving an old phone a new lease on life with a replacement battery as a once-in-a-lifetime service operation, it's fine to break out the tools to replace the battery.
If you do battery swaps as a nightly workflow so you can have a day battery and a night battery, then yeah pop-out replacement is the only option
Having disassembled the aforementioned Z3C a couple of times, I disagree that it's fine to have to break out the tools for it ever. It's a tough job, with lovely warnings like this one from iFixit:
"Warning first: Never try to move the battery unless it's broken and need to replace. Because there is very very strong adhesive sticker between battery and motherboard.And too much effort or careless operation will break the motherboard."
It's also difficult to maintain the waterproof seal when reassembling the phone. So while the Z3C has great battery life, you're essentially only going to have that for a couple of years.
This is, I suspect, a byproduct of the fact that they handle (the vast majority of) their own frontline customer support and repairs. The most commonly-repaired parts are designed to make the process as efficient as possible for the Apple Store techs.
That's exactly it. Apple Retail iPhone 'techs' are relatively low skilled and low paid, and have a very small amount of time to do what they do. The most common parts, like camera, speaker, battery, screen etc. are made like Lego to make it easier and quicker for them to do their job.
The phone isn't quite the same once an unprofessional like me has opened it without guidance. For instance this nexus 5 on which I replaced a cracked LCD now has a little bit of give when I press the back. It used to feel completely solid before.
While it is of course possible to replace the battery in most phones with specialized tools, for some of the newer models it's very difficult to do without damaging the device. When we're talking about a phone you just bought on eBay with the intention of making it your daily driver, that's a hard sell.
All other things equal, I will always pick the slightly thicker phone with a removable battery over the one that might have me breaking out the spudger.
The specialized tools are a tiny screwdriver and a plastic pry knife on some phones - the adhesive doesn't come in until screen replacement. You can buy battery replacement kits with that stuff included.
Being able to swap the battery has been a feature in mobile phones for decades, I wouldn't buy a phone without it. Same with laptops. My current Apple laptop is eight years old and still going fine purely because I was able to remove the battery when it started ballooning.
Seriously? I do not understand this logic. Having to plug my phone in and wait 10 mins for it to allow me to turn it on is a pain. Running out of power in the middle of the day is a pain.
Forgetting to plug it in overnight and having no power for the day is a pain.
The <1 minute it takes me to swap the battery, even with the pretty primitive mechanism in the S4, is a total breeze.
I don't even bother plugging my phone in at night anymore really - because I know in the morning I can swap batteries and be out the door with full power.
Except now, three years later my battery life is less than a working day and I can't swap it out without hot gunning the case.
The rest of my phone is perfectly fine but I can either keep it tethered to the wall or scrap it. That said, it would be dead already because I did drop it in water and the waterproof case saved it :)
> This means that batteries of mobile phones, or other hand-held devices in daily use, are not expected to last longer than three years. [1]
In the past, I had a phone with wireless charging, but mostly found it a pain. Putting it down slightly in the wrong position often caused the phone to not charge overnight, and the charging was just too damn slow in the morning when I realized that it hadn't charged overnight.
I had a very similar experience with the Nexus 4, but that was a known bad implementation and I wouldn't go for a phone without wireless charging like my Nexus 5 and my LG G4 with a sticker that enables wireless charging.
My Nexus 7 also has wireless charging which has been great because the USB port is broken, so I have no other way of charging. The lack of moving parts in wireless charging does mean less chance of breaking.
Palm really nailed wireless charging with the Pre. Magnets ensured it lined up correctly. And allowed it to be mounted on a stand at a great viewing angle.
True. By the way, the Galaxy S7 is supposed to have a metal case but it still has wireless charging too so the engineering seems to be feasible.
In my experience the distance between the pad and charger receiver made a big difference, thus putting on a thick case made charging difficult to proceed quickly.
This might give people a taste for what really modular devices like Ara can offer, but the fact that it doesn't do battery swaps without powering down is going to make it far less interesting to people. An internal battery to give you 30-60s in an emergency hibernate mode would have been game-changing.
Kudos to LG for actually taking this step though. With luck this will whet the appetite for phones that are truly modular (and show manufacturers that there is a market for swappable parts).
Few people may _need_ for a phone to stay on while changing the battery, but is a huge plus. I spent over a year on a phone that could hot swap a battery if you do the swap smoothly, and avoiding the need for a reboot was definite pleasure.
Well as the article points out, adding modules involves taking out the battery. There might be other design options besides an extra battery/super capacitor, but it kinda weakens the utility of quick change modules.
> Well as the article points out, adding modules involves taking out the battery
Are those modules hot-swapable? If the hardware and/or software does not support hot swap, there is a distinct possibility that they intentionally designed it this way: i.e. you have to power down before replacing modules. It would not be much more difficult to switch to "push-to-eject" battery mechanism which would make powering down optional when changing modules. Food for thought.
I switched from Android to iPhone and hence had to switch from swapping out batteries to plugging in an external battery. Now I'd never go back, the whole reboot/swapping procedure is kind of a PITA
My lenovo x250 laptop has an internal battery that does exactly this, lets you swap the external one without interruption. I haven't used this much but I can see how important it is for someone on the go.
Capacitors are usually cylindrical to increase the available surface area whilst keeping the horizontal size down ( http://www.camion.com.tw/images/en_basic_structure.gif ), but they don't have to be designed this way. Here's an example of a flat supercapacitor:
It appears that LG is the only company to dare offer real innovation on its flagship models. I don't know how well this model will do but it seems it's not just a faster rehash of last year's model.
Still using G2 more than 2 years after I first got it. Battery life seems to be a bit less now than when I first got it but the phone still does what it's supposed to do without any issues. Only had to do a Factory Reset when it upgraded to Lollipop. I see me upgrading to the G5 since its closer to the G2 in terms of size. I found the 5.5 inch screen of G4 too big for my liking.
Agreed -- the G3 is the best Android phone I've owned in my 6 years of owning Android devices, and will be the first one I use until it doesn't work anymore, as opposed to upgrading on the 2 year cycle.
Exactly my same mentality for now, although I do want to get into Google Fi which only allows specific phones (due to how their network works) so I may have to try a phone that might have faults.
I have an LG Nexus 5 : common fault is that microphone stops working and power/volume buttons gets stuck (in my case due to case breaking near buttons from being in pocket). I have given Moto G phones to parents and friends - they seem more reliable.
To be fair, Samsung have offered some innovative features on their high end phones. Best example I can think of is the Galaxy Beam. The Galaxy Note was different when it was first released. The Galaxy Edge is slightly unconventional too.
At most, I think you mean specifically this year, for android phones. The iPhone 6S had some cool (hardware) updates, and I'd venture a guess that the iPhone 7 will, too.
Well, the only thing on the 6S that isn't an incremental upgrade is the force-sensitive touchscreen, which in my opinion doesn't really bring that much new to the table compared to this kind of modularity.
- Proper camera handle and better DAC too, but not as mutually exclusive modules
What I want is:
- A robust and replaceable bumper that integrates with the design (i.e. isn't ugly). The phone should not be designed as if the user isn't going to slap an ugly case on it.
- A hole for a wrist strap so I don't worry I'm gonna drop my phone. All cameras have one, but now that phones are taking over, none have it.
- An unlocked bootloader that doesn't void your warranty. Or even better lets you set the signing key on first use (a sort of Trust On First Use that the user is the owner).
> An unlocked bootloader that doesn't void your warranty.
I, like probably most of you, flash a new image to the phone when the stock software starts showing its warts. I agree with this idea but I do understand where phone manufacturers are coming from. You can obviously avoid the problem of software-bricked phones by having the factory image as a secondary ROM that can be hardware flashed with a button sequence.
The real problem is, I recall a bad Android kernel floating around for the TyTN II (a long time ago) that would toast the CPU after extended use. That's permanent damage that would be covered by warranty and would cost LG money. Maybe what they could do is only lock down the kernel. Who knows, it's a difficult problem to solve.
To add one feature:
- A slide-out tactile keyboard[1].
The TyTN II is the greatest smartphone that I have ever owned for this reason. Touch keyboards just don't cut it. The answer isn't to have predictive text (i.e. SwiftKey) but instead to not botch up the text in the first-place.
I think it's worth looking at desktops for flashability. You can install any OS on most desktops and there aren't that many issues about it. In my opinion, hardware shouldn't break because of bad software. That would mean that an exploit could not only brick a phone's software, but break the hardware beyond repair. What you mention sounds like bad thermal throttling, it's the CPU's job, not the OS's.
My idea of a fair compromise between manufacturers and customers is:
- Let the customer run any OS will full hardware warranty. If a problem looks like it's caused by software, require the customer to flash back to official software, and provide warranty if the problem persists.
- Bolt down the hardware to restrict use out of specs (no overclocking, no software defined radio, ...)
- Provide an engineering pin. When removed, the phone is out of warranty and you can flash any firmware (you can have OC, SDN, custom SSD firmware, ...)
Google really could show a whole more love for tinkerers. A better OS isn't getting made because it's so difficult to flash on your own device, let alone flash it on thousands of user devices.
Regarding your point about keyboards, I personnaly don't like typing without all my fingers, so what you propose wouldn't suit me. But do you think an addon that bolts to the back would be okay for you?
> Bolt down the hardware to restrict use out of specs
That's what I was thinking, require their signature to change bits that could harm the phone. You could even market this feature: most phones only have change-able back-plates. I'd bet that people would jump at the chance were they to see how drastically Cyanogen or MIUI changes their phone - don't just give people the chance to install any ROM, but actually provide a few of the more popular ones ready to go.
> But do you think an addon that bolts to the back would be okay for you?
With the module system of the G5 this seems completely plausible. When you frame it that way you can really see how LG [are trying to] shine in the blandness that is the current cellphone market.
Those are excellent points. Old small flip phones sometimes had a small place for a strap loop so you can fish it out of a bag by the strap, and of course also to hold on to it. Phone straps are popular in Japan, and I've seen some that connect to the headphone jack, but it doesn't really work well, so the sturdier ones connect to a bumper.
A bumper-design (maybe a groove to hold a bumper) is a good idea too. One can argue that making phones easier to damage encourages people to replace it with new ones so manufacturers have hidden incentive to avoid such safety features, but ultimately if someone comes up with a better design like you state, people will flock to it.
All agreed. I'd add that the market is slowing down, so bumpers could end up bringing more profits. First, customers would be more willing to invest in higher margin products if the device was more robust and likely to last. And manufacturers could sell official bumpers with advanced shock-proofing, a nice metal finish, perfect fit to the case, many different colors, ...
Good point about market maturity. If people are holding on to phones longer, sell them more accessories that people replace periodically, and make the base unit more also high margin (if they accomodate the official bumpers). But it's the consumer's choice -- they don't need to buy new bumpers if they are content with what they have. It's a variant of the razor & blades model.
It really bugs me when consumers ask for more features regardless of their feasibility, here we have a great phone with changebale batteries and yet we ask for it to be still on while we swap the batteries! Hasn't it occurred to us that maybe it's technically difficult to add in a supercap. Just be thankful. This is like constentaly asking for phones with more RAM and processing power, I am really glad Moore's law has come to end, maybe now consumers will be faced with the harsh truth that it is not simple to keep on creating more powerful devices for them to watch cat videos on.
To be fair, the Newton allowed you to change batteries with power still supplied. It used watch batteries. Switch one battery or the other and keep everything. People aren't asking for the world, they're asking for something that's been a solved problem.
I'm among those not in agreement with the rant. In the case of the battery swapping, there are plenty of obvious ways to get around the phone turning off while swapping batteries (i.e., capacitors or smaller batteries). Why does it seem that unfeasible to you?
People should be very thankful for these feats of technology, but their wants literally drive the innovation there. Until truly impossible desires start to become the criticisms, I honestly don't mind them.
I agree. With automobiles, people seem to be more aware of the constraints and the balance of capabilities to make a vehicle that fits a segment. I.e. sports cars aren't always comfortable. One day, people may understand tradeoffs in phones and realize that long battery life may require a thick phone.
>realize that long battery life may require a thick phone.
I'm pretty sure most people realize that, and everyone I've ever heard complaining about battery life also added that they wouldn't mind a thicker phone.
Of course no true sports cars have it, but some cars claiming to be sports cars have dial-a-mode for their suspension. Driving to work? Select smooth and comfortable. Driving for fun? Select performance.
Is it really technically difficult to add a supercap? I remember laptops in the 90s with hot-swappable batteries. The feature will add expense and bulk, and if people refuse to make the tradeoffs then that's worthy of complaining, but this particular feature seems totally reasonable to ask for.
Same deal with constantly wanting more RAM and CPU. Computers have been getting steadily more powerful at a nearly constant rate for maybe half a century now. Asking to keep that going is totally reasonable!
I dunno. But i recall reading about a Chinese phone that had two batteries. One was built in, another was sitting on top and was removable.
they both charged via a single USB port.
Yes, this made it bulky compared to most things on the market right now.
And frankly i would love to see less anorexic phones. Heck, my next one may well be the recently unveiled Cat model that has integrated FLIR. This time round it seems they didn't skimp on the internals while still retaining the rugged construction.
I agree, the obsession with thinness drives me batty.
My iPhone barely makes it through the day sometimes. I usually have no problem, but occasionally I find myself around 9PM and my battery is down to 5% and I have to plug it in somewhere. This leads me to plug it in more than I strictly need to, just to ward off these moments. This would all become a non-issue if the battery were twice the size. Then my phone might be 10mm thick instead of 7mm thick, and might weigh 300 grams instead of 200 grams. Not a big deal. But instead, thinness is maximized, and everything else is built to be just adequate based on that.
My daughter would disagree with you in re: thinness. The newer thin iPhones are easier to pocket - women's fashion being more form fitting than men's. It's a trade-off that she and presumably lots of other people are willing to make.
Which is why phone makers should make some variety here. Make thin phones for people who prioritize size, make thick phones for people who prioritize battery life.
I'm not saying every single phone on the planet should be the kind I want....
This is a real problem for me, as I've got small hands. The Xperia Z Compact phones are the smallest flagship-level phone I've found. I loved my Z3C, sorta-like my Z5C. They're still a little too big, especially with a case on them, but they're at least not monstrously so.
And now i remind myself that these thin phones are often a right pain to hold.
If i let it sit deeply in my palm, the outer joint of my fingers protrude over the edge of the device, and get in the way of using it.
But if i shift my grip so that the fingertips are resting on the side of the device, the only contact points are those tips, and the thumb area of the palm.
And holding it like that seems to always be on the verge of slipping.
Sure, but that adds substantial bulk, hurts efficiency, integrates poorly, and is stupid ugly. Not really the same as building a bigger battery into the phone itself.
Can't be that hard. With a cursory search I can find 3mm x 9mm x 10mm batteries with an order of magnitude more capacity and discharge rate than a sleeping phone would need.
I don't know. I consider this actually a good thing that we continue to push the envelope of technology. Yes it is technically difficult now to add a supercap. But who knows? Enough research and we might be able to do it easily. A lot of the phone technology we have right now is due to consumers asking for stuff regardless of feasibility. Sometimes it is better not to know the details but to dream.
Yes, this is my number one feature request as well. Well, something related. Stop charging the battery once the battery is full. Run the phone on external power when connected to the wall. Sorry of like how a laptop or notebook computer would work.
I agree with you in principle, but a hot swappable battery is actually a feature I'd really appreciate. I'd take that over more ram and a faster processor.
Say the new feature was a super accurate GPS, down to a centimeter so you could now find your way in a shopping mall. Oh and it'd report a position once a minute!
Modularity comes with a price in form of wasted space. Nevertheless, this is something completely fresh from a major smartphone vendor. And it is done with their flagship phone. That's the spirit.
Some phones are at the point where I am prepared to opt for something thicker/heavier in order to get a bit more out of it.
Longer battery life, swappable battery, greater durability, better camera, etc. I can absolutely handle the phone being a few millimetres thicker to get these things.
My "is it worth even thinking about a particular device" litmus test is "can it run CM". Unfortunately that's impossible to tell for future devices, most of the time.
LG's older LG G4 still only runs CM on two variants. The international one (H815), and the T-mobile (H811) models as these are the only ones easily unlockable bootloaders.
Totally agreed. Also it's hard to tell for current devices as reviewers, such as Engadget, Ars or GSMArena, never mention it. It's surprising given that tech review sites target many power users.
I wonder if the bootloader will be unlockable. I've been spoiled by Nexus devices for years and I remember how much work the Galaxy S3 I briefly owned was.
What's LG's track record like with releasing sources? Nexus devices don't count.
Looking around on forums like XDA, one sees that LG typically has different models depending on the market. The tech specs are identical, but it has more to do with carrier branding and lockdown. For instance, in markets such as the EU, LG G4 shipped with an unlockable bootloader while in the US and Asia it was not. Workarounds and custom ROMs exist, but you also see plenty of stories about bricked phones. Put simply LG simply does not have the friendliest attitude towards developers, as opposed to say HTC. They are compelled to release GPL source code for the device, but getting it to run on your device takes a bit of work.
I installed Cyanogenmod on my old S3 with minimal effort. Literally as easy as connecting to the PC via USB and running the installer. Wonder why you struggled?
I think its good of LG to design a phone that is good for the environment in the sense that users can swap the battery and upgrade the storage instead of having to buy a whole new phone when those run out of capacity.
Global warming dictates that we as consumers not only our politicians are responsible for the future we create. If manufacturers can help make devices that last longer I´m going to choose such a device the next time I buy a phone.
I think its bold of LG to think differently and stick out of the crowd of similar phones.
Like that you can upgrade the storage capacity via MicroSD cards.
I agree, I think phone manufacturers should be punished for not making batteries replaceable and contributing to waste. Having a few screws to get to a battery is OK but gluing it in such a way that it requires special tools is just idiotic. Same goes for laptops.
I've been a loyal Samsung owner since S3. Didn't upgrade to S6 because they dropped removable battery. Was waiting to see if it's brought back with S7 - it's not.
Will be getting this phone as an upgrade. For me removable battery and SD Card in a flagship phone are a must. Then comes camera quality, then price.
I was in the same boat as you (loyal Samsung owner, still using my trusty S3) until a few months ago when I decided to go for last year's LG flagship, the G4, and I gotta say I've been extremely displeased with LG. Particularly, the way LG Mobile has handled the many problems that have plagued the G4.
Apparently, catastrophic bootloop failures of the G4 were such a widespread problem, that a petition has so far gained a couple thousand signatures [0] to get LG to officially recall the bricked phones. I personally experienced the bootloop of death on my G4 only a couple of months after getting it, and their customer service has been atrocious - even refusing to fix my phone after they've now admitted its due to a known hardware defect [1] because mine was the international, unlocked version. So, just a heads up to beware LG's "Caveat emptor" practices.
Funny enough I experienced a similar issue with my S4 a few years ago. One day it just died - no messages, no nothing. Completely out of the blue, no falls or anything.
I took it to Samsung repair, they sent it off and returned it to me in a few weeks. I looked on the forums and apparently it was a fairly common (ie thousands of people affected) issue. Same reason - a random hardware chip malfunction that manifests itself after 6-9 months of use.
Random note, I recently used an old Nexus S as a mp3 player. I was surprised by the sound texture of crappy mp3 over my 10$ panasonic earclips... I started to wonder if the hardware wasn't responsible. According to some people it embeds a Wolfson DAC (of Wolfson DAC fame ~_~). It does makes a significant difference.
Yes, even to someone that barely care, while on a bus ride, it makes that much of a difference that I suddenly enjoyed some mid-fi mp3 in an entire new way.
Press a tiny button on the G5's edge and the bottom and battery easily separate from the phone.
Incidentally, several years ago Chinese manufacturer Jiayu made an iPhone-looking phone also called the G5 and having a dedicated button to release the back cover:
I want a better ADC, even more than I want a better DAC (though both would be best). I'd like a high quality recording device for the field...a phone or tablet would be perfect, but there's no good way, that I know of, to get the signal into the device at high quality.
Yeah, I've seen that one, and it's a clumsy solution, at best; it has a custom USB driver and only works with that one piece of software (or did, last time I looked at it). It's certainly better than nothing, and it's cool that something exists, but the lack of general purpose USB audio interface support in Android is frustrating as hell, especially since iOS has had it for so long.
I guess the battery swapping could be useful, but I'd rather spend the money on quality components in it from the get-go than have the option to buy extra, replaceable components.
I had a LG Nexus 4 and the battery got bloated after a year of use. When I tried to get help, LG just ignored me even though that was a safety issue. Thumbs down on it.
Because (at least on my Moto X 2012, Android v5.1 Lollipop) rebooting can take upwards of ten minutes. Some OTA updates apparently trigger an 80-some-odd module "optimizing" run, which I presume is ART doing its AOT thing. If you're in a hurry to use your phone this can be maddening.
My Windows Phone is only 3000mAh and has a decent battery life (2-3 days for my usage). Admittedly, USB-C charging makes me worry about it less (completely dead phone to 50% charge takes 45ish minutes).
I wonder if we'll finally get sub 2ms audio latency from an android device via this dac, or whether its just going to be very nice quality audio with 100ms latency.
Interesting phone, horrible article. Typical of the modern Engadget, the article is light on facts and heavy on superlatives. For instance, I had to head over to some random Android website (androidHeadlines) to find out that yes, it does have Micro SD card support, and that it has 32GB of built-in storage (pathetic, Engadget). I do really like the idea of extensive expandability, but I wish it could be standardized somehow (admittedly difficult in a mobile form factor). I think this would encourage the creation of interesting devices by interesting startups, which is something that would probably get everybody here excited.
If you want a decent article by a respectable pub, check out the Ars version (linked below). It has all of the technical info that Engadget missed, minus the comments on how 'fantastic' the device feels.
The specs can be found anywhere and will be the same everywhere - or alternatively they might not be set in stone for every region or SKUs for different carriers not commented on. What someone on the ground in Barcelona offers readers isn't a spec list (though the specs would have been covered in the liveblog) but hands-on commentary - superlatives and cautions both. Calling the article "horrible" and "pathetic" and Engadget not "respectable" seems kind of blustery!
Couldn't agree more about the standard. The iPhone accessories market has been huge for many years now, solely because of standardized connections. I think what LG is doing is exciting, but I fear that if its not standardized it will be yet another Android phone with a cool feature that doesn't gain wide adoption.
More likely than not, Ars is likely to piss all over the device because it uses that "fragmented" Android. This even though they hired an Android guy to write about the topic some years back. He seemed to have fallen in with the party line quite quickly.
I realized the irony of complaining about Engadget going inappropriately off-topic and then doing so myself, and edited that out. Trying my best to stay on the rails :). I do stand by my opinion that even their tech-focused articles are horrible these days, including this one. To anybody reading this now -- klausa is not just writing crazy replies, I did previously have a blurb about a graphically explicit non-tech Engadget article in the parent comment.
Not 5.0, and it's the applications, not Android. Things like the Kindle app and most Google apps refuse to run from, or store data on, the SDcard. My Galaxy S5 is constantly full, so full that the OS can't upgrade, even after I clear 5GB of space. I have a an SDcard where 100GB of 1TB is used, but am always running out of space, even after all of the apps that allow being moved the SDcard are moved there. It's a real problem.
In Android 6 (the version of Android that is installed on the device this thread is about) SD cards with high enough speeds can be adopted onto the system storage and the combined size appears as a single block of internal storage to apps, they don't know they're running off an SD Card.
I'm iffy about that adoption system, as it also makes the cards useless as removable/swappable storage.
This because the adoption process formats and encrypts the card, thus anything stored on it can only be accessed from within the device that adopted it.
