base

i dont get it. that kind of hardware could have been had for the same money 4 years ago. the only upgrade is the max brightness compared to back then. like yeah, i'm also surprised what you get for 200$ because there hasnt been a meaningful price/performance uplift in years.

Motorola G100/Edge S

Atleast here it can be had for under 200€ on the used market.

You need to unlock it via the motorola website. But then its fully rootable. Atleast with the retail unit i purchased.

Buildquality is good. Nothing fancy. Its mostly plastic. But it holds up quite nice after 4 years. The chromed plastic of the frame flaked a bit from my rough handling.

Removable sim and SD-card slot. Battery isnt removable. But its not the worst when it comes to repairability according to teardowns i watched.

But it has a headphone jack!(!!!!)

Runs officially up to android 12. Last time i checked it should get android 15 with lineage.

Security... well there is only so much lineage can do with the official vendor support beeing ended like 2 years ago. But its good enough i guess.

That 21:9 1080p 90hz LCD screen is solid. 500 nits brightness isnt state of the art anymore but its more than useable.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 combined with 8gb RAM is still performing well. If your into emulation it handles most of the consoles well. Even switch and pc emulation apart from the most performance hungry titles.

Cooling isnt the best. Its just a heatpipe from the SOC directly too the battery. SOC will heavily throttle as soon as the battery gets to around 40 degrees C. That nets you around 20-30 minutes of the SOC running at full tilt.

USB 3 5gbs with display out is a really cool feature. Sadly with going custom rom you will loose the great 'ready for' desktop mode from motorola.

Its a bit big and heavy for my taste though. I switched to a smaller device as my daily driver.

All in all its great device for screwing around imho

"Rumors suggest that Team Red was caught off guard by the aggressive pricing [...] , while Team Green priced the RTX 5070 Ti and 5070 'MSRP cards' at $749 and $549, respectively."

WTF are they smoking at Toms Hardware?

Its such a weird ass nothing burger of a product.

Like i get it why it exists. Display- and lenstech are getting at a point where textclarity is good enough. Mobile chipsets can provide enough standalone performance for most office workloads. If you need the added processinh power of a workstation wireless displaystreaming is at a fairly mature point for 2D content when it comes to the lack of compression artifacts and the latency is solid enough. Passthrough is at a workable state, too.

Gaming wasnt the killer feature for VR for several reasons. So parroting apple and pivoting to this whole AR computing device schtick is understandable(ish).

But i watched both the initial AndroidXR Google presentation last month and now the shitty influencer marketing video of MHKBD and their messaging is so weird. The big sellingpoints are: You have Gemini AI, the Playstore is preinstalled with which you can ask Gemini AI to install new apps, Gemini AI also works with the preinstalled Google apps. Did we mention Gemini AI yet? Chill the f- out.

Look i own and use VR-Headset for 6 years now. I follow the subject since the Oculus DK1 was first announced. I like the tech. But there is nothing coming from either Google nor Samsung which makes me excited for the future of AndroidXR. Because i tried to work with a VR Headset. My current one has enough pixel density, pancake lenses and is consired one of the most comfortable on the market. Its utter shit. Waving your hands around in a 3D space isnt a good UX for 90% of the time. Having a device strapped to your head isnt comfortable. Battery life of like 2 hours is a joke if you want to get shit done. Having a cable strapped to your head mounted device for added battery life is even worse. Do you remember how we all happily traded our audio devices for wireless ones because its soooo much more comfortable? Yeah... The resolution still isnt great enough to combat eyestrain over long periods of time. The list goes on. Sure there are obviously some usecases where hmds can provide a real benefit. But for now most stuff is pretty niche. But i'm pretty sure circling your hands in the air so you can ask a LLM about the shoes your wearing isnt solving problems we encounter in our worklife. As a life style product? Give me some fucking entertainment, man? But not a single word about that so far.

Then have you tried to actually work with Android? I tried it several times with the desktop modes like DEX or Ready For... Its not great for abundance of reasons.

Then there is no confidence in google left. Like we all know they will kill off AndroidXR in 4 years. If not before that. If you could bet on it the quotes would be so bad it would probably better to just invest the money in s&p500.

Also i see no attempts at establishing an open plattform like android used to be. Every big corp wants to be the monopoly holder of a closed gardedn of the next big tech revolution. So they can pump ads directly into our eyeballs. Fuck this shit.

Currently sporting a Pixel 7 with GrapheneOS but i only started to play with emulation this week on it. So i cant give you much of in-depth answer but just some observations. My previous phone had a snapdragon 870 which serves as kind of a reference point. IDK how i really feel about the Tensor G2 performance. It seems to be on par with the 870. Which is totally fine since the 870 was a pretty fast chip. But damn, with that Google is 3 generations behind Qualcomm atleast when it comes to emulation.

This guy on youtube has quite a few videos testing out the emulation performance on the pixel 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG6ayegaEzA&list=PLqTxux-zjFRO47ffNrC0ixA6WCSdd9viq I think he even plays the games long enough for throttling kicking in and then mentions it in the comments. I wouldnt click on his links in the descriptions though.

Besides that i couldnt get to run Burnout 3 and Legends on Aethersx2(in menu but crashes before any race starts). Never had a problem with them on my old phone. But i havent looked further into it. Midnight Club 3 runs great though. 3x resolution runs smooth on the first race.

No experience with yuzu yet. Especially with Mali its just better to wait and let things mature a bit. But i dont expect Tensor G2 to be ever good with switch emulation.

On the emulation for android subreddit Mali is a meme. Snapdragon is clearly faster. No doubt. But Malis reputation is almost comical there. Sure your average 5 year old 150$ Xiaomi has a really slow Mali gpu. But a modern flagship with like a Tensor or a Dimensity chip will be adequate for most stuff. No custom drivers for sure and worse drivers overalls. But its not automatically unuseable.