phones – Page 3 – Wolfgang Lonien

March 4, 2023March 4, 2023

Why do things have to grow?

Look at our phones:

The size of our phones according to phonesized.com

In case you can’t read it: from the left, we have the Google Pixel 3a (from my late brother), my Google Pixel 4a, then our kid’s Pixel 4a 5G, and at the right Mitchie’s Pixel 6.

And with their latest line, even Apple now left away the “mini” version of their iPhone, so in case you want small, you’re left with the 13 mini, or on Android, with the Asus Zenfone 9 (which even still has a headphone jack).

The Pixel 7 is a bit smaller than the Pixel 6, and the (to be announced) 7a and 8 are – like the 6a – also a bit smaller than the Pixel 6 (at least, we hope so). But that 6a still has a 6.1″ screen just like a now “normal” iPhone 14 or 13, so the question is: why do they have to grow all the time? Are our pockets getting bigger as well, like our garages and even roads for the ever growing cars? Are we humans getting bigger and taller all of the time?

Some things are hard to understand for my (small, pun intended) brain… but I don’t think that bigger equals better. My 4a has about the perfect size, and the guys over at XDA Developers wrote in their “best phones” article:

“Many of us at XDA actually think the Zenfone 9’s 5.9-inch screen is the perfect “small” size, as the iPhone 13 mini’s 5.4-inch panel is just a bit too cramped for most modern content.”

And that’s what I think about the 5.81″ screen of my Pixel 4a as well. Just right for my hand and eyes… and if “modern content” means more whitespace, well I could do as well without…

Like always, thanks for reading.

P.S.: just checking on the battery of my Pixel 4a – last full charge was exactly 48 hours ago, and my gsconnect (kconnect but for the Gnome desktop) shows it with still having 31% of its charge:

phone status on my desktop

So far so good…

February 28, 2023February 28, 2023

Cookie with “Eiffel” preset, and from raw file

When I got up today, my chair at the computer desk was occupied already. So I let the guy sleep and took some photos of him with my phone, first a black & white “portrait” which I changed to the built-in “Eiffel” preset, and which looks like this:

PXL_20230228_084047362.PORTRAIT~2 — Cookie with “Eiffel” preset from Google Pixel 4a phone camera, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023

But I had set the phone’s camera to also save raw .dng files, so I took one of that format and converted it with RawTherapee 5.8 on Linux – looks like this:

PXL_20230228_083937568 — Cookie from raw phone dng, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023

Such photos have of course a much larger dynamic range in case you need that – but that takes some space as well… anyway, here you’ll have all the possibilities of your favourite raw converter(s) (I used nothing here, just a conversion without changing anything).

Just to compare, here’s a straight out of camera photo from my Olympus camera, with a Panasonic Leica 25mm/1.4 lens:

7e7_2285109-sooc-cookie — Cookie with my Olympus straight out of camera, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023

Like always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.

February 20, 2023

A reason to say “Goodbye”

Our old Google Nexus 5 phone concerns me a bit. Look:

This must be the battery swelling up, and it’s getting worse – so much so that by now it’s hard to even switch it on or off.

And since that’s a Lithium based battery, this could mean danger – we’ve heard often enough that these things can catch fire. I’ve looked up spare parts, and while LG doesn’t sell original batteries (or whole phones for that matter) since a few years anymore, 3rd party offerings at Amazon & Co. start at around 20€. Which means that it’s probably not economically viable anymore to invest that much into a 10-year-old phone, even if with LineageOS it has the latest and greatest Android 13 on it.

Too bad. But I think this one has to go into recycling then. Can’t give it away to anyone else, and probably endangering them…

Like always, thanks for reading.

February 3, 2023February 8, 2023

This is really secure…

I can’t reuse my deceased brother’s mobile phone. He set up a secure code and/or fingerprint, and that cannot be removed except by himself – which is of course a problem.

I have written to Google about it, because although I’m really not a beginner in putting other operating systems on a phone, to do so you still have to unlock the bootloader first, which cannot be done if you can’t log in into the device. No way, and I’ve tried several times to factory reset it – still the security wants Willi’s secret number and/or credentials after rebooting it. And Google wrote back that they are sorry for our loss, but cannot help – they don’t store copies of your device passwords and/or fingerprints.

And that seems to be pretty secure indeed. In fact, in 2018 they were proud to announce their new ‘Titan M’ chip, and the media was full of praise, since while not perfect, that is a better and more secure setup than even Apple’s, as some wrote. Google even went so far to offer a reward of up to 1.5 million dollars to anyone who could hack the chip, and although that was done by three capable gentlemen, it took them a year and a half to fully understand what’s going on. Google thanked them and removed that possibility, giving the team some 75,000$ as they wrote.

So for me/us, my brother Willi’s device – a Google Pixel 3a which he got from us (I bought it for my wife originally) – is what you call a ‘landfill’, which is too bad considering the hardware being not even 4 years old. Maybe we could trade it in with our next purchase, let’s see. But hats off to Google as it really seems to be practically impossible (read: 4.5 man years worth only 75k$) to hack these devices.

What does that mean for me and for you? Well our data – at least the one on our phones – is pretty secure indeed (assumed you’re not too sloppy with security yourself). But if you want to have your relatives backed up in case of your own demise, you should probably consider to set up Google’s ‘Inactive Account Manager’, and probably send your secret code to your family if you don’t want your phone buried together with you… (this is a joke of course, these devices should at least be recycled).

Like always, thanks for reading.

Edit/update, from 3 days later:

[x] done. Guessed the right number, installed LineageOS 20 which is Android 13. Cool – this is a much better device than my old Nexus 5 which I still had in reserve and/or for development.

It’s astonishing by the way how close the look and feel can be to Google’s interpretation of Android on their Pixel phones – even the Easter eggs work in LineageOS as well, like the one simply called “13”. And once you have that, you can hold one of these bubbles to change that look. Funny:

13. Or, better said, LOS20’s view of it.

Edit/update, from 5 days later:

That Pixel 3a is still a wonderful device, especially with that inofficial LineageOS 20 image I have on it right now. That even came with the Pixel Launcher, so it almost looks like my 4a with Google’s version of Android on it. The only difference is that I didn’t set up an account on that 3a, so I also don’t have Google’s weather applet but a free one from OpenWeather instead. Look at them side by side:

Pixel 3a with LineageOS 20 left, Pixel 4a with stock ROM right

Like always, thanks for reading.

January 12, 2023January 12, 2023

Android 13 on the Google Nexus 5

When both my wife and daughter got newer devices one day, one of the first mobile phones I kind of “inherited” from them was the Google Nexus 5 – a truly wonderful device in my opinion, with a just right 4.95 inch screen size. When it came out it had Android 4.4 codenamed “KitKat”, and Google officially supported it until their version 6.0.1 “Marshmallow”.

LineageOS prolonged its life until Android 7.1 (LineageOS 14.1), and sometime last year or so I’ve found inofficial images on the XDA developers’ site for versions of LineageOS 18 (equals Android 11). So up until a few minutes ago, my device looked like this:

Today I changed it to the newer and of course also unofficial version 20 of LineageOS which equals Android 13, so its operating system is now newer and more recent than even that of the Google Pixel 3a which we gave to my brother (tho an image of LOS20 for that exists as well, it’s also still not an official one). Here’s how mine looked after the first reboot, with a check on the version number:

The standard and unaltered start screen of the “Trebuchet” launcher of LineageOS20 looks like this:

LineageOS 20 (Android 13) on the Google Nexus 5

This time I haven’t installed any of the more or less free Google services, so no push notifications, no location or “Play Store” services, and so on – I can do without. This device hasn’t even a SIM card, and I use it over WLAN and for development/testing purposes only.

Anyhow, this is also a proof of concept that you don’t really have to throw or give away older hardware even if you want to or have to stay current because of security considerations. All you need is a computer and a bit of time to restore your devices to newer and still updated versions of a truly free (as in freedom) operating system. Only works with Android or Linux tho, Apple users sadly can’t do this.

My Pixel 4a will officially be supported until August of this year, after that I can decide about the right time to upgrade it to a free version of Android 14 or whatever is to come.

Like always, thanks for reading.

Update: like always, first things first – I installed F-Droid and after that (and from it) also the Aurora “store” (which is only a proxy to the Google Play Store, you need it for apps like Firefox et al), and then the Zapp app (also in F-Droid) which lets you view German live and “Mediathek” (streamed) TV from our public (“Öffentlich-rechtlich“) TV stations. Plus I copied over some music from my computer to which the device is still connected. So the list of apps now looks like this:

while the screen in the integrated Music app looks like this now:

Music app in LineageOS 20 showing my albums which are on the device now

That’s hardly different from what my Pixel 4a has – which shows that this is truly a usable device still. I can listen to music both on- and offline, watch TV, I could also send email if I wanted to, so that was my point…

Again, thanks for reading.

November 3, 2022

Some phone shots from today – and some screenshots

At the moment, all three neighbours’ cats are here, and all are sleeping. Two (Wilma and Crunchy) on my bed, and one (Cookie) on the sofa. Earlier, I caught Wilma on my lap with the phone in my hands:

PXL_20221103_131652928.MP — Wilma on my lap, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

I had been trying different versions of LineageOS on an older Google Nexus 10 tablet device which we had laying around unused, and after trying some unofficial ones I decided to try the latest official build which you can get from Lineageosroms.com, which is LineageOS 13.0 – [ Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) ] as you can see here:

That is some years old already as well (the tablet is about 10, this image more than 4 years old), but it is still a nice compromise between speed, stability, and features. Being the equivalent of Android 6 under its hood, I could even install the Zapp app from the F-Droid store, and so now we can watch Live and/or streamed TV on it, like so:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52475045170/

News (via Zapp app, see F-Droid.org) on a 10 year old Nexus 10 device running LineageOS ‘Marshmallow’, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

I had to interrupt my activities to send Mitchie to work with the car, and when we came down to the garage I saw that some neighbour had parked a nice new Honda motorcycle right in front of their partly covered Fiat 500 and beside our car. After coming back, I took a quick pic of that as well:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52474579011/

A brand new motorcycle, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

Oh, and when looking into my blog software today I saw that I’ve got a new version of that as well:

So I’ll have to see what’s new, and whether any of the also new templates (2022 and 2023) are looking good…

So all photos in this article came from my Pixel 4a phone, and the screenshots from my computer. As always, thanks for reading and for viewing.

October 31, 2022

Almost…

This could almost win me over – but it didn’t; the headphone jack is missing (and as a musician, I demand near real time; sorry). So my ageing Pixel 4a (or 5a if you live somewhere where you can actually buy these) is still the far better option.

September 30, 2022

A supermarket in “Vista” b&w

Taken with my Pixel 4a phone this morning, and edited it with the “Vista” b&w preset which is very contrasty:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52394941140/

Lidl supermarket in “Vista” b&w, Mörfelden 2022

Taken from the (our) small car which you see reflected there. And like always, thanks for viewing.

September 16, 2022

OTA update for a 9 year old device…

… how cool! Just got an over-the-air update of LineageOS on the Nexus 5, a mobile phone from 2013:

It’s still based upon Android 11 – but considering that Google stopped supporting this device with Android 6 or 7, this is still worlds apart. Gotta *love* open source! Thanks to everyone involved, you guys & girls help saving the planet!

And like always, thanks to you for reading.

P.S.: A few days ago I’ve read that Android 13 – the version we currently have on our Pixel devices – needs at least 2GB of RAM to be installed, even the open source AOSP version. So I guess that would be borderline compatible for this older Nexus 5 device, but let’s see – Android 12 could still be coming in open source form for it. Love this…

August 23, 2022

“You must use Linux”

Made me smile:

“This section describes how to set up your local work environment to build the Android source files. You must use Linux; building under either MacOS or Windows isn’t supported. Keep in mind the important change to the /usr/bin/python binary as well.”
https://source.android.com/docs/setup/build/initializing

And yes, that’s Google, on how to build your own version of Android for phones or tablets…