I got my phone today, took it to TMobile to get a new nano SIM, and now I'm all set up!

I really like the 5X. The screen is actually a good deal larger than the 5, which was unexpected but nice. The 5X is quite a lot taller than the 5, but that's a dimension I don't mind. It's only a little wider and I think it's slightly thinner. They weigh the same.

So far, it seems a little faster, but I don't know how much of that is the new phone effect and the fact that I haven't loaded it up with as many apps as I had on my 5. I decided to take this opportunity for an "app audit" of sorts, and I think I removed about half of what I had. There was a ton of junk I didn't need or use anymore.

The giant advantages over the 5 are clear: the camera and the fingerprint sensor. I'm getting much better photos with this thing, and the camera app has some big improvements over the old one (I like swiping between photo and video modes). The fingerprint sensor is long overdue, and is finally a feature that iPhone users can point to and say "haha we've had that for years." I'm loving it, especially because the sensor on the phone can wake and unlock the phone at the same time. There's no button to be pressed. I've already set up Lastpass to use my fingerprint instead of a code, so it's even easier to log into every app on my phone.

I'm definitely going to need more USB C stuff. I'm also a little disappointed in Google for shipping such a short cable with this thing. It's only about 3 feet, and it's not going to be enough to route through my nightstand's wire management system, which hasn't been a problem for the charging cable of the last 5 devices I've kept on that stand (Nexus 4/5/6/7 and Moto 360). All have come with far longer cables. Considering how few of these cables exist in people's homes today (this is my first one and probably will be for most Nexus 5X/6P users), it's annoying that they didn't put a 6ft cable in there.

I definitely hope that USB C takes on quickly. I had just reached travel charging nirvana with these wonderful chargers replacing every single adapter in my travel bag. I was able to charge every device that my wife and I brought with us at the same time from one charger (I actually got a second one so she could have one by her hotel nightstand too). Now I'll be headed to California on Friday with one of those multichargers and this other USB C adapter in my bag. I just know that it's going to be years until I replace all my micro USB stuff with USB C gear, and hopefully by that time they'll have a multi charger like that one on the market.

*edit*
To be clear, I know I can get an A to C cable and still have my single charger, but then I'm charging slowly, and we can't have that! Except that we can, because I usually only charge my phone at night anyway... Still, it's the principal of the thing Anyway, I do have an A to C cable arriving tomorrow so I'll decide whether I only bring that or if I bring the official charger with me on the trip. Dan, do you know if this no-name cable will work for me? That's the one I ordered. I should have checked with you first to see what you were getting...

I bought a different no-name cable from CableMatters. We'll see if it's any good or not. I wanted something that's definitely a USB 3.0 cable, which can do 5V/3A, versus 5V/2A on the older USB 2.0 version. That will, hypothetically, let any USB3 hub give the full 5V/3A charging that's available in USB 3. This predates USB-C. Now, whether anything actually implements it correctly or not...

My phone is also here now. I have to get the damn nano-SIM, so it's not exactly fully functional yet.

New gadget alert: here's a four-port car charger that claims to support the USB3 charging spec (5V/3A) and has four USB-A ports, (EDIT!) although "claims" might be a bit strong of a word. They suggest that they support it. I've asked a clarifying question on Amazon. The vendor appears to be directly answering questions there. We'll see.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YIVCWNK

I did finally get hdparm onto my Android handset (1+1), and it claims read speeds in excess of 160Mbyte/sec fom the internal flash, way beyond USB2. Now if only the write speeds were in the same ballpark.

Edit: Actually, some test runs were yielding 240MBytes/sec. So decent for a previous gen handset.

Flash is rapidly getting to the point that you could just treat it as physical RAM and run programs directly from it, assuming the hardware is set up right to have the Flash chips on the memory bus. The MRAM people claim that they'll eventually obsolete both Flash and DRAM, so we'll eventually get there, one way or another.

The iPhone 6s hit >400MB/s in anandtech's tests !

http://anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-review/7

It will get there in all tiers quickly looking at how adoption of better flash and controllers is going across the industry.

Been following the NVMe news? Good to see a new approach taken to get beyond the bottlenecks seen in AHCI when used in the SSD space. AHCI was a pretty forward looking spec, it's impressive to see how quickly things are progressing to need a replacement now.


I wonder what impact this will have on overall application design. So much time seems to be spent across the computing stack managing caches and other tricks to deal with speed bottlenecks somewhere.

It is interesting that NVMe is in very few laptops yet (some MacBooks and an upcoming MSI machine as far as I can remember), but it is already appearing in phones (the iPhone 6s/6s Plus).

RAM is still getting faster too though, in the latest iPhones they are hitting 13.9 GB/s memory bandwidth !

What will 'memory leak' means when the operating memory is the same thing as storage memory? The OS and programming implications are far reaching when 'rebooting' does not mean reloading 'main memory' from a known stable/blank state.

There are operating systems (and their apps) that live entirely within the machine memory for long run durations but aren't those mostly specialized and/or carefully managed application cases?

This Google guy has been buying USB-C cables and accessories and posting Amazon reviews about their compliance or lack thereof with the spec. Yes!

https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/H2FgDvpPBMJ

http://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/A25GROL6KJV3QG/review/ref=pdp_new

Heh. I was going to post the same thing here after seeing a friend link this on Twitter.

This is going to be massively embarrassing for the vendors making non-compliant cables. I bet some of them sue, others just change their name and keep selling. I also wouldn't be surprised if some of the compliant cables were just lucky, and future parts from the same vendors, with the same part numbers, might be different inside. Such fun.

And he just posted a review on the Cable Matters cables that I bought. Non-compliant. I'm going to try to return them and get something else. Whee!

Excellent find!

I'd seen this on the Verge, but hadn't checked my cable out. Thanks for the Amazon link, Dan.

Woohoo!! I lucked out! I bought this one without much research. He gave it 5 stars and seems to consider it one of the best ones. Wow, I usually end up with the crap 3rd party product.

Yesterday I changed things around and instead of using the LG USBC charger/cable in my nightstand, I'm going to keep it out in the kitchen for emergency charges. There's simply no need for rapid charging on my nightstand, where the phone is just going to sit for 5-7 hours anyway. But when I get home at the end of the day and want to make certain I get through the rest of the evening (maybe I'm going out somewhere), it'll be nice to be able to quickly fill up.

Eventually I'll buy some official type-C chargers and cables, but I'll probably wait until I have other devices that use it.

The Anker cable I posted earlier has the correct resistor.

After talking to my friend, even if you had the incorrect resistor, you wouldn't harm your charger / computer if the battery charger ramped up the current. The USB spec writers are worried about charging time, so they stipulate you start at a high current and then ramp down. If you started low and then ramped up, most of the charger ICs monitor the charge voltage and then stops ramping when the voltage sags (either to high cable resistance or poor current capability).

Following up on this, I've been watching that Google dude's Amazon reviews every day, looking for him to link to a cable that's spec-compliant and in stock. Finally today that happened. I've now ordered five no-name "Nekteck" cables that do the USB3 "super speed" thing for $11.99/ea, on their way. (One for each car, one for each of two computers, and one for my travel bag...)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VIWE1ZY/ref=pdp_new_dp_review

"Nekteck" - who comes up with these names?

This is so much fun. A no-name company, "Tronsmart" built a USB car charger that the Google dude failed, and then the Tronsmart guy responded, in broken English, with a bit of a nonsense reply, along with "hey, we said it wasn't compatible with the Chromebook Pixel". All because they used the wrong resistor.

http://www.amazon.com/review/RX4U3GW1TUB...#wasThisHelpful

Tronsmart is definitely one of the better products. Their cables and chargers are quite. His English is quite good (not "severely broken" like the next reply).

They were quite clear it wouldn't work so clearly they've tested it or understand the problem. I suspect this is a bit more than just a resistor change.

I suspect that there's one poor electrical engineer who made a mistake and/or a gut call that "more power = more better" and that this mistake got replicated widely under all these non-brands, who presumably source things from the one firm with the one poor electrical engineer.

The real hurt will happen when Amazon starts accepting all these returns and charging them back to the original vendor.

Ah crud. Well, I guess I shouldn't have gloated about getting the right A-C cable earlier, because I bought one of these chargers earlier this month. Crap. Well, I'll be returning it.

Dan, am I correct in assuming that that car charger will be ok for my Nexus 5X? The reviewer said that it couldn't charge a Pixel, but I'm not trying to charge a Pixel. Would it be ok?

Maybe? Perhaps? Your Nexus 5X will try to draw 3A, while the charger unit itself is apparently only rated for 2.4A. That could cause problems.

I'm planning to send all my non-compliant stuff back to Amazon for a refund. They sold me the goods. They can deal with them.

I'm quite excited about the Photos app update that adds a feature to delete all locally stored photos that have already been backed up to Google Photos. I finally feel completely comfortable about going with the 16GB version of the 5X.

Also in the news, Google finally added a "compress all my photos" button. (Currently on the web version of Google Photos, soon to be in the app.) This takes all your "original" photos on Google (but not on Google Drive) and replaces them with "high quality" versions, compressed with their proprietary whatever, and charges you nothing towards your quota.

Since I keep my originals elsewhere, this is a no-brainer for me, and it gave me back 18GB of quota headroom.

I just wish they'd had it before I hit the quota ceiling and Gmail was giving me "pay up or give up" warnings.

I'm still not sure if I want to ditch my originals. I'm sort of treating Google Photos as a second backup, and I'm currently on a good grandfathered data plan for Drive of 200GB for $50/year. I haven't had a need to jump up to their next plan of 1TB for $120/year. Maybe when I hit that 200GB limit I'll rethink it.

I need to share my #1 annoyance with the Nexus 5X so far: the camera captures data upside down.

There was a story about this on the Verge recently, but apparently there's something about how the camera is configured where for some reason it captures things upside down and relies on the accelerometer to know which way the image gets stored. For the most part, this hasn't been a problem. All Google apps know how to display the photos and videos, but people have experienced problems with some apps.

Where it's getting me is with my Dropbox backups. I have Dropbox saving every photo and video back to my NAS, and I move those files into my photos folders to free up my Dropbox storage. For some reason, the photos look fine but every video I've taken on my 5X looks upside down in Windows. It's extremely annoying! So far I haven't found a decent solution for the issue...

It's a continuation of a growing pain with many applications and APIs still not dealing with sensor orientation properly. Everything in the stack from the camera, to the photo or video viewer app and any image/video editors must support the orientation flag and handle it correctly. The way the Nexus 5X sensor is oriented is within acceptable standards. The Reddit comment from the Google engineer indicates the older camera API Android used put the requirement of handling rotation more on the application. Due to most Android phones using a different sensor orientation, most app developers didn't notice the requirement as they didn't come across an issue during development. The default worked more due to luck of most every phone using the same orientation. Odds are some lesser known Android phones have had similar over the years, the Nexus 5X has a high enough profile in the ecosystem to perhaps move towards more apps fixing this issue.

For your particular situation, that stack now involves whatever your using to access the videos on the NAS as well. I remember a burst of stories around the time the iPhone gained video support about upside down videos due to Windows Media Player of the era supporting the Quicktime contained MP4 video, but not supporting the orientation tag properly.

http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/exif-orientation.html talks about this from the point of view of a photo. EXIF is where orientation data is stored. With video, it's also still metadata, but a bit more deeply embedded as part of how video works. A much higher level discussion including vector math explaining the metadata is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7025186/how-to-remove-or-edit-exif-from-mp4-video . There's a chance this isn't as standardized with video as it is images via EXIF, I didn't research to see if this method is unique to MPEG 4 or a more general standard seen across MPEG/Microsoft/VP video.

Continuation of the Bad USB Cables story:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/o...s-and-adapters/