🌲 Good morning! Keep reading for weird redwood leaves …
Pebble-guy: Who else wants a little Android phone?
Eric Migicovsky is the founder of Pebble, who made nice smartwatches that presumably kickstarted the entire smartwatch industry.
- He is also 6’6 “.
- And despite being a great device, he wants to make and use a small Android phone as his daily driver.
He says, on his website smallandroidphone.com, quote:
“I love small phones because they:
- match [sic] nice in the pocket
- is much easier
- are easy to use with one hand without losing
- does not fall out of my pocket while cycling ‘
Eric Migicovsky also dislikes iOS, preferring the flexibility of Android, which excludes the iPhone Mini. And he basically wants an iPhone 13 Mini, but which runs Android, and says that a price of around $ 700-800 is the ballpark.
- Maybe you agree with this. Maybe you’re fine with a 6.8-inch phone, of which there are many.
- But if you do, Eric takes names.
- For this project to get underway, at least 50,000 interested buyers must show up – a number he says will be enough to convince a manufacturer to build and sell a small Android phone.
- If you are interested in expressing support, there is a form you can fill out that is just looking for some basic, non-binding information.
- Apparently, 6,000 people have already signed up.
Takeaways:
- The biggest problem with smaller smartphones has been battery life: less space means less space for all the mAh you need, even on the iPhone mini.
- Migicovsky acknowledges this: but size matters most. Quote: “The disadvantages of a small phone (smaller screen, smaller battery) are fundamentally less of an issue than the size, at least for me.”
- My short comment is that it is possible that Eric is aiming too high.
- He wants a small flagship smartphone with something like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 that drives it.
- Realistically, it’s a problem. There is a trade-off between advanced flagship processors and battery life.
- It’s possible that something like a slightly lower Snapdragon 7 Series (which might be announced in China on Friday?) Would offer a better deal on performance versus power consumption.
- But it’s all very early: The most important thing you might want to take away here is that Eric has a pretty good reputation in the industry, including former Pebble employees who said he was a good guy.
- And this kind of completely from scratch approach to a new phone returns to the early smartphone and connected device industry.
- But there are far from a lot of risk-free sign-ups for a really good device at a reasonable price.
- Last thought: at least two of the reasons Eric wants a small phone are solved by foldable clams like the Samsung Z Flip 3. It fits pretty well in your pocket! I would like to hear why a foldable does not work (apart from the cost, which is reasonable!).
Round up
📳 Vivo X80, X80 Pro launches globally: Still waiting for final prices in several regions, but it rolls out … (Android Authority).
📞 “When looking at the disk space a video game uses, what kind of data typically takes up the most space (ie textures, geometry, binaries, etc.)?” (r / askreddit). (Answer: textures!).
Strange Wednesday
At times like these I would like to go back and study biology to find out what’s going on, but here’s the crux: Redwoods grow strange leaves to suck water from the air (Scientific American).
- Trees that manage to get some water from a humid environment have been considered a fact for some years.
- But as one of the team behind a new study said, “No one has ever really figured out how the water gets in there.”
- What a study published in the American Journal of Botany seems to show is that redwoods grow special leaves that absorb much more water, and the trees adapt depending on their environment.
- “The study showed that redwoods in drier, southern areas have more axial shoots located higher up than on northern trees, helping the former to draw extra water from summer mist and light rain. Other tree species may have similar specialized shoots; pine trees; , for example, has two types that may be analogous to those on redwoods “
In the image below, the asparagus-like leaf on the right absorbs water “at about four times the rate of common-looking” peripheral “shoots.”
Tristan Rayner, senior editor