IAmAndre

I would say 100% Nothing 2(a). I'm actually getting it for my mom over the A55 for the following reasons: MUCH better OS. It's far cleaner than OneUI MUCH better battery and incredibly MUCH shorter charging times Much better design: thinner bezels around the screen, but also overall look and feel with the LEDs Now the other aspects are very comparable to the A55, including the screen quality and overall performance. Benchmarks don't mean everything and none of these phones are high performers. I would also take it over the Pixel 8a because if it's anything like the Pixel 8, we can expect a relatively short battery life and poor network performance. The SoC also performs poorly compared to other alternatives in this price range.

Hi, My PC is getting buggy and since I haven't done a fresh install since 2018, I'm thinking this could help. It's running Windows 10 and I would like to take that opportunity to upgrade to Windows 11. Would following the regular upgrade procedure be enough or do I have to actually wipe the old Windows installation? Thanks

Well you can use a power bank. I'm able to charge my MBA at 65W with my 20,000 maH power bank, which is around 75Wh. There are bigger ones out there. This same power bank is also able to charge my 2023 LG Gram, with its core i7 1360p and RTX 3050. The 2024 version is even more power efficient so it's a good time to be an ultrabook owner, whether it's a Mac or not. I don't find this particularly relevant. The Intel CPU is still more powerful and MUCH cheaper than the Mac Pro. Since none of them relies on a battery, it would take forever for the energy cost savings to make up for the actual price of the hardware. I would still consider Intel but more particularly AMD as the better option on the desktop side.

I agree to some extent. The battery life is usually better on MacBooks but Ryzen and even Intel CPUs have caught up a lot over the past few years. I'm getting 8 hours of use at work on my 16" 13th gen Intel laptop and I could get much more with less intensive use cases, and the results are better on the 14th gen. Still not Apple-level but pretty close and I would take that over the Apple tax and still enjoy the extra flexibility on the Windows side. The performance also exceeds what I would get on the M2 MBA that I was considering getting. In any case, as my colleague pointed out this morning, for us it just means that we can ask our employer to upgrade our work MacBook Pros as soon as the M4 chips become available if they don't want their "highly" confidential data to be compromised.

The Galaxy probably performs a bit worse but I would still consider it a solid tablet. The OnePlus Pad is also larger. I would recommend watching/reading reviews of each tablet and see which one you prefer, and also check the prices in your region. It doesn't really make sense to pay a lot more for any of these tablets imo.

The Xiaomi Pad 6 is an excellent tablet for the money. Another good alternative would be the OnePlus tablet. You can also consider the latest Galaxy Tab Fe. You can't go wrong with any of these, especially the first two, so I'd just get whichever is cheaper.

I would recommend checking the Feral Games ports. This includes the Grid series as mentioned earlier, but also the Life is Strange games, Hitman, Alien: Isolation, etc. You also might want to check the Ubisoft games (Rayman, Assassin's Creed...) and the Sega games (King of Fighters, Crazy Taxi, Sonic...). I'm also into the Odd World series, KOTOR, and the Warner games like Injustice. I personally like DS-like games, especially rhythm games, so that would include Beats (although it hasn't been updated in years) and a few others with a similar gameplay like Beatstar. Besides all that, I almost never actually play on my phone, and when I do, it's mostly casual games like Two Dots. Anyway, there's quite a lot to explore.

You nailed it. I remember getting downvoted just earlier this week for saying that maybe Samsung knew what they were doing and should be at least given the benefit of the doubt and the chance to show us what they've been working on. I also saw that modem argument being thrown here and there, which doesn't make sense because the other Exynos like the one in the S23 Fe don't have any issue like that. For many, Exynos had to be bad no matter what.

There are new benchmarks and articles popping everywhere and the results are quite impressive for the Exynos. For those interested, make sure to check this video and the other recent videos of this channel: I also came across this article (in German) yesterday, and I was particularly interested in the battery results: https://chip.de/news/Kleine-Schritte-nach-vorne-Das-Samsung-Galaxy-S24-Plus-Ultra-im-ersten-Testfazit_185114289.html Spoiler alert: the battery life is also pretty solid on all 3 phones. So the Exynos is overall a bit worse in terms of raw performance but very close to the SD, and it even beats it in many, many cases. The S24+ is the one with better cooling the S24 throttles more but I'm still going for this one as I've been waiting for a small phone for so long.

This gives me hope:

I do too. What I meant is that a 6.4" (not necessarily the OP7) in a modern design would be considered compact, like the Xiaomi 14. It would still be on the smaller end, one of the smallest phones on the market. It's hard to find anything under 6.5" nowadays. I agree but it's compact by today's standards. Again, it's one of the smallest phones on the market if not the smallest. I remember the Galaxy Note was considered a "phablet" not that long ago although it was just 5.5" even though it had a larger body. It's all about perspective.

That's my point, and I think the OnePlus 7 is too big. Never got used to the large size. The Xiaomi 14 is 6.4". So with a more recent design and thinner bezels the OP7 would be considered as compact because you can fit a 6.7" phone today in this body. I agree with that. I've seen that the chip itself doesn't support Wifi 7 so I'm wondering what else to expect. I'm just waiting for the reviews and decide whether to import a SD S24 or just get a huge OP12.

Exactly my opinion too. I've bought a OnePlus 7 back in 2019, which I'm still using. I thought I'd get used to it but I still think it's too large although it would be considered compact by today's standards with a 6.4" screen. Sadly we don't have that many options: the Pixel 8 with the lackluster SoC performance, inconsistent battery life and network issue; the Xiaomi 14 that might never come out in the West; the Zenfone 9 with only 2 years of software updates; and the S24 with the Exynos SoC.

Hi, I recently bought an LG Gram and I'm having battery issues that I suspect are linked to driver issues. So LG advertises 14 -20+ hours of battery life on the product page, and while I wasn't expecting to get these numbers, I'm getting surprisingly low battery life considering its 90Wh battery and low power CPU. The max I was able to get was a bit under 10 hours that was just web browsing. Doing anything else cuts the battery almost in half. For example, I can be at about 60% of battery with an estimated 6 hours left, and see this estimate fall to 2 and a half hours as soon as I start playing a video on YouTube. This morning, I had a Teams meeting for 1.5 hours and the battery went from 100% to 70%, which would mean 5 hours of battery life using Teams only. Okay I had Chrome running in the background and my Bluetooth headphones on, but still. I think that the video decoding process is consuming too much battery. After disabling the Bluetooth, the battery time left went up a bit too. All this makes me think that the Intel drivers for Bluetooth, WiFi, and potentially iGPU need to be updated. My questions are the following: The Intel website shows a message saying that updating the graphics driver might have an impact on all the optimizations made by LG. Should I still go for it or is it risky? I also noticed that there's a process called "searchhost.exe" that's been consuming more bandwidth than Chrome over the past week. That's very odd because I have Chrome running constantly so I'm not sure what this process is, what it's doing, and if this could be the issue rather than the drivers. Any clue?

Wouldn't a Galaxy Tab be a better option due to the OLED screen (and potentially cheaper price, especially refurbished)?

I hate the night light mode in general, but a huge part of the experience when reading comic books is the graphics/colors. Anything affecting the colors is a no-no for me.

The question is more about why 60Hz feels bad on this screen, whereas it's fine on my MacBook. When I lock the frame rate at 60, with VRR disabled, it's still uncomfortable on this particular screen and not on all the others. Is there a reason why?

I didn't know that was a thing. But still, when I lock it to 60Hz it's uncomfortable to use, at least when scrolling. But when I enable the variable refresh rate, it feels natural again but I think it's mostly running at 144Hz, at least when I'm scrolling. Am I missing something?

Hi, For many years I've been totally insensitive to screen refresh rate. I don't play fast-paced games, but I do have a 165Hz gaming monitor on which I usually don't notice any difference between 60 and 165Hz. The only times I do is when I use one of these online monitor test tools which show extreme cases, and when I scroll on a Word document, which might have something to do with Word itself. I also have a MacBook Air 13, with a 60Hz refresh rate and I never complained about that refresh rate. On phones, I also don't notice any difference between the refresh rates. I actually do notice a difference between 30 and 60Hz on any platform, but anything above 60 is usually totally fine for me. Now this week, I received an LG Gram 16 with a 144Hz and "variable refresh rate" option allowing the refresh rate to change based on the content. On this particular screen, 60Hz feels particularly jiggery and I'm not sure why that is. So my questions are: Is there more to it than refresh rate that could affect my user experience in terms of the display specs or technology? Is there a Windows setting that might be off and therefore make the experience this bad at 60Hz? Thanks!

Hi, I've been reading comic books on my laptops for quite a while, but I have to admit that the experience isn't particularly great. This week, I switched from a 13" MacBook Air to an LG Gram 16, and besides the larger screen that's about the same size as a physical book, the reading experience gets tiresome after a while. I think it has to do with the backlighting. I'm considering going back to paper books after more than a decade of on-screen reading. I'm still curious to see if I'm missing something on the digital side. I've seen that iPads are often recommended, but I don't think it would address the eye strain issue. There are a few color e-readers out there, but the colors appear washed out on those. So let me know if there's a track I haven't explored before going back to paper books.

I actually LOVED the first game. I didn't find it repetitive at all and got very hooked by the story. However, I played it in French, which is my native language, and in the French version at least Hugo's voice is pretty normal. It actually makes a lot of sense since the story takes place in French. The only issue is that the English soldiers also speak French, which doesn't make any sense. Call me a nerd but I play all my games in the language of the country where the story takes place. So I played the Assassin's Creed games in so many languages over the years...

I actually had a Samsung RBX SSD, but I think my swap partition was on one of the HDD's. So it looks hibernation is the way to go, at least when closing the lid for a long period.

What laptop was that? Was it running an update or something?

Yes of course. I meant I expected to take longer. With my old Vostro laptop from like 2010 it would take at least a minute. I also had a Huawei convertible after that but the battery drain would be quite noticeable in sleep mode. It was acceptable at the time, but your standards change after you start using a Mac.

That doesn't sound too bad. I haven't used a Windows laptop in a while, but I didn't expect them to take this long to recover from hibernation.