I don’t see the point in gigabit for a phone, unless you have several hundred gigabytes of data to use even then what is there that’s actually big enough to need that speed downloading to a phone.
you can pretty much watch your battery tick down at those speeds as high bandwidth long range at high frequencies uses a lot of power.
In the general case between the 5a, 7, and 10 yea I’m in the same boat. They’re pretty much all equivalent to each other. However there is one jump from the 7 to 8 that from what little I understand still isn’t used on the stock roms completely that can enhance security. Starting from the 8 onward there’s additional pointer tagging support in the CPU called MTE, Project Zero: First handset with MTE on the market . My understanding though is that it’s not used to it’s full power on stock roms (this might have changed as I’ve not kept up!) but will offer some better hardware protections, especially if you use an alternative OS like GrapheneOS that goes out of it’s way to enable the support more fully.
This really doesn’t affect the user experience in any visible way but it is something to consider for upgrading when you’ve got other reasons to consider replacing it. I’ve got a 7 Pro myself and am waiting a few months to see if the drama around AOSP, Google, and GrapheneOS settles down to a reasonable level before going for a 9 or a 10 finally for just the MTE bits to give me some nicer security assurances. Past that? everythign else is fungible to me and is just as good as the 7 Pro I’ve already got.
It doesnt actually change the power. Thats limited by the FCC. If you dont want speed then dont use it, but theres a lot of side benefits to moving to less crowded bands.
I suppose you also use only 2.4ghz wifi because what do you need extra bandwidth on wifi for 
no, i connect my UAV ground station to my phone hotspot and it can easily stream HD over LTE. My drones all use multi-network sim cards that work on almost any network in every country…
I never said RF power, I said it will use a lot of battery.
Hmm.
Interesting. When I think of noise cancellation the first to come to mind are those Bose headphones, and last I checked they were wired, but maybe not these days now that the wireless trend has taken over.
I guess I just don’t use headsets when I am out and about. I never listen to music or radio when I am in public. 100% of anywhere I go I take my car, and I will listen to music or the news on the radio in there, but I don’t think I have listened to any content while on foot since I was a kid in the 90’s.
Noise canceling headphones would be great on a flight or something though.
IMO this has been the case since like, the third gen of smart phones. Planned obsolescence is the only thing preventing phones from being as permanent as any other electronic device.
But then again all mine does is call, text, and order food.
The screen uses the lions share. More bits is inconsequential.
I don’t use the screen when using it as a hotspot. It will still drain the battery in about an hour if downloading at 500mbit non-stop.
I don’t know if this is still the case, but at least back when it was new, the 5G modems were surprisingly power thirsty. Which is kind of sad, because they generally only provide ~20% more bandwidth than LTE Advanced, unless you have signal in the millimeter wave band (and the hardware to use it) and the millimeter wave band is mostly useless in most cases as it is hopelessly short range, and requires clear line of sight. It can literally be blocked with a sheet of paper.
If it weren’t for the fact that LTE coverage has been reduced to make way for more 5G coverage, LTE would still be perfectly fine for 99.99% of users.
It’s kind of a shame that 5G was hyped so badly. We would all probably have been better off for less money if they had just focused on perfecting LTE coverage instead.
500mbit was interesting but you only got that speed once in a blue moon standing under the phone mast, I downgraded to a different network that was only up to 4g because they had much better coverage. 50mbit is more than enough for mobile.
Agreed. Heck, I’d probably be fine with 10-15. absolutely nothing I do benefits from more bandwidth than that.
You really aren’t missing anything at all. I reluctantly upgraded to a 9 Pro from a 7 Pro, and while I had both, I ran them through their paces to witness the performance difference. The reality was disappointing (7 Pro was roughly on par).
The 48mp wide angle/macro camera is a nice addition, though again, really not worth the price of admission unless the phone was free, or you had a cracked screen/dying battery and it would be cheaper to upgrade anyway.
The 9 Pro’s weight distribution makes it slightly less clumsy in the hand, and I like how the back glass and camera bezel is more resilient to scratches; but the rounded corners really eats into the screen real-estate in such an annoying way, that the phone mistakes deliberate taps by the top and bottom edges of the screen as unintentional, willfully ignoring your requests(not something I realized until after I traded my 7 Pro in).
The only reason I upgraded was because it essentially only cost me $130 after trade-in, and I had a ton of google store credits to burn so I went with it. Had it cost me any real money, I’d have stuck with the 7
This isnt true in any reality unless your phone is already on its last legs battery wise. Its fine if you dont want it, but you dont have to make up lies to justify not having it to yourself.
I travel for work a good bit and rely on both my work and personal phones in airports and rooftops during BAS commissioning. I know what its like to use these devices to their capacity on a regular basis.
In my experience a lot depends on signal quality too. With a spotty connection you lose a lot more battery. I don’t have a very modern phone (iphone 13 mini), but mine drains a lot when tethering on trains. Partly there’s bad connection and a lot of hopping from mast to mast. And maybe its age is showing (though it was the same when new).
The efficiency of more modern CPUs is a lot less apparent when burdened by googles shitware constantly phoning home.
Part of the reason I get pixels is the software support from lineage
From my 8 pro and 9 pro respectively
The 9 pro is stock but I have disabled most google services
It goes days without being charged but also its a dedicated modem for me basically. I use the 8 pro more primarily and that’s reflected in the usage estimates.
It will depend on the situation. if you’re in an urban area you are probably less than 100m from a mast at any point , once your out in the country the closest mast is probably miles away and to send data that far that fast takes a lot of energy especially on 5G.
5g is something like 20% more efficient per bit but when your transmitting at 10x the speed it drinks power.
I’ve had the same phone as my daily driver since november 2018. I thought the headphone jack port was going bad lately but it was just too much dust build-up preventing any plug from clicking in. As soon as I picked all of it with a toothpick it started working just fine. The battery though is its weak point as of now. The phone lasts through the day with light to moderate use (watching videos and some light multitasking) and that’s it, which I consider really bad in terms of battery life. I decided against replacing it since…well, I don’t feel like it (guess that’s on me), but other than that, it’s perfectly usable as a daily driver. The camera does its thing, it takes photos (they’re neither good nor bad) but I don’t use it that often so there’s that.
I know I’ll eventually have to replace this phone with something newer but to be honest, I don’t know what would I end up getting, what with the latest news regarding android and all that. I know I’ll be losing the micro sd expansion, which is a real shame (ads to the usable lifespan of a phone), I’ll most probably lose the ability to install custom roms since many devices don’t get many of those (another shame, since you can install a custom rom and choose not to integrate google play services, which makes the phone stay in idle for longer, is less resource-heavy, and in some cases it can also increase battery life a bit), but on the other hand…I don’t really want to think what will I go with once I have to replace my phone since like I said, I don’t know.
When you get further away there’s no magical gain involved, you just lose the bandwidth as the signal strength drops to the noise floor. When that occurs the band switches to a lower frequency with better propagation. They aren’t using more power just like your phone isn’t. LTE is capped at 400mW on the phone which is the same for 5g. At the tower they do constructive interference tricks but this is not changing power usage at either end. It does not ‘drink’ power as the power is capped by the FCC.
Much of the benefit to 5g comes from the differences in switching, not just upper bands. Lower frequency bands are now using the new switching technology offering better transfer rates at any distance versus previous technology. This was the whole reason 3g had to be axed.
The higher bands are only one of the benefits, and if you have the bandwidth available you’re going to spend less time transmitting at any given power level. At the end of the day radios are still radios and so power usage is a function of time spent transmitting. If you can send more of the bits in a shorter amount of time at the respective power levels you have used less power, not more. Any perceived differences in power usage between the 2 is mostly down to lack of initial coverage and phones trying to hold that band.
I dont exactly live in a major city and I hit these kinds of numbers on a regular basis. Are they on the more ideal side? sure. Its still miles faster than my previous pixel 7 and with a way better camera due to being a pro model.
As an aside,
Everyone is entitled to their opinions but this thread just sounds like this to me.
Ultimately I understand the frustration of comparing things on paper and seeing that not much has changed. I get being frustrated with the current state of things. Nothing infurates me more than the curved screen edges scamdung started and everyone else copied. I dont particularly care to give my money to google either, but it is the path of least resistance for modifying the garbage software out of it.
There are still some pretty stellar options for upgrades out there, and if you’re coming from something older than 4 years its a substantial leap worth considering.
Not so much here. My Moto E Stylus has spotty BT (I use it with a FM transmitter for music in the car, since the digitizer on my Android Auto JVC broke). I thought it was the car transmitter until I found the phone flaking out with other headsets just as much). I’ve tried USB BT 5.x transmitters in my laptop & desktop, undependable there as well.
I’ve added a PCIe BT/WiFi card to my desktop, and find the range is worse than what I used to get 10-15 years ago (well it is a MSI motherboard, so I have to ascribe some of the crappines to that).
Those are absolute, non-negotiable options for me. If the phone doesn’t have them, I wouldn’t buy it. Heck, the way the lack-of-choice in “smart”-phones is going, I may end up joining the feature/flip-phone rebellion.
