iPhone 8 replacement will probably be available in spring 2020

As with me, a smaller group of people have been uncomfortable with larger and larger phones.  Years ago, the phablet was an unusual item--a phone too big to be considered a phone.  Now, it's commonplace, especially since iPhone X.  Samsung's Galaxy Note has been around for a while, but it still seemed a niche product.

The iPhone 8 has continued but has not truly been updated and of course, there would not be an iPhone 9.  As of the next spring (March/April 2020), there should be a replacement that could be called iPhone SE 2.  Given that the iPhone SE was based on the iPhone 5, but with more advanced internal hardware, it's easy to predict a similar treatment for the iPhone 8.  Whether the name will be used or not doesn't matter.  They could call it the iPhone 11 mini, for all I care.  Having the A13 processor and 3 GB of RAM seems worth the price of US$399/US$499 for 64 GB or 128 GB of storage.

I told Apple that, without a successor to the iPhone 8, I would consider switching back to Android.  There aren't many Android-based phones I like but Razer and Asus have phones strong enough to get my attention.  Whether I'll grind my teeth every time I read some security glitch or not, who knows?  After my Asus/Google Nexus 7 tablet never really was in sync with Android, I didn't feel great about using it and gave it to someone who clamored for a tablet.  He lost it within a month.  I've looked at the Razer Phone 2 for an alternative, if the iPhone 8 replacement doesn't happen.  Of all the Android-based phones, this one seems to come from a company that is enthusiastic about making something interesting.

It's been suggested that the iPhone 8 replacement will not be named SE 2 but iPhone 9.  That would suggest an end to the 4.7 inch display phones.

Update 2020.02.17: My iPhone 8 battery has been beaten regularly by iOS 13--lately 13.1.1--and it isn't recovering.  The battery health states that it the battery is at 83% of new capacity.  That's close to replacement time.  After nearly 2 years, that is understandable. I'm considering a replacement for the battery in my 256 GB over a new, more powerful phone with a new battery.  If they're still US$79, isn't worth the money, especially when no phone payments (one time or monthly) would be necessary for a while.  US$27.09 each month would be good to save.

Hopefully, the rumors are true and that there will be a media event on 31 March and the actual launch on the 3rd of April.

I've seen another rumor that it won't be a 4.7 inch display but a bigger display of over 5 inches.  That might suggest an edge-to-edge display, which isn't likely in a budget phone.

Update 2020.04.15: Tax Day is here and so is the iPhone 8 replacement, the iPhone SE.

US$399, $449, and $549 for 64 GB, 128 GB, and 256 GB isn't too bad, especially since it's got the same processing unit as the iPhone 11.  The camera is somewhat different with some depth (of field) control.  How much is optical and how much is digital remains to be seen.

Considering how warn my battery is, better with 13.4.1 than earlier releases, but losing power quickly, it's probably better to put US$79 toward the $549 model, so I don't have to give up capacity.

Update 2020.05.22: Sprint just offered me a 18 month lease with $0.00 payments.  I ended up with the 256 GB model since I already have an iPhone 8 like that, and it cost me US$150 + tax up front.

This is possibly the first time since September 2000, when I wasn't with Sprint, that they offered me something better than expected.  That time, I got a Motorola StarTac for $9.99.

Not only was the monthly lease payment waived, but so was the $30 upgrade/activation fee.  We'll see what happens when I get the phone.  Still, it's a great deal compared to paying $79 for a battery swap on a two year old phone.  The latest reviews show that the processing power is better than most anything else on the market, expensive or inexpensive.

I posted something on Instagram and someone complained about my buying so much storage, saying that Apple should allow removable storage.  If there was a possibility of that working as well as internal storage, it would be expensive.  I've worked on a number of big iron systems that had something called Single Level Store--every drive was meant to work together as one.  That was the only time I saw a system work well with multiple, different kinds of drives, but they were all similar with a certain hardware interface, and there was no inbuilt, dedicated storage, so everything had to work together well.

I think I will be surprised at how good the new phone will be.

Update 2020.08.05: My iPhone 8 replacement, iPhone SE 2020, has been very good, just like the iPhone 8.  There isn't much difference, except for the processing power.  That is a good thing, and it was also good that I didn't have to replace a battery.  The price made it extra wonderful.

7artisans 55mm f/1.4 Is Here

After my interesting time with the Zhong Yi Mitakon 25mm f/0.95 for micro Four-Thirds, I didn't think that I would ever pick another Chinese lens.  It seemed that they were more worried about the case than they were the lens.

Flare was a weird problem, and the lens didn't really do better at f/0.95 because, as expected, it was quite weird there.  It worked, and for situations where no other aperture would do, it was capable.

That lens was US$349.00.  Quality control should have been better.  I could not, as others might tell you, focus to Infinity.

So, now I've ordered this 55mm f/1.4 for US$119.99.  I don't expect a Zeiss Otus 55mm f/1.4 for that price, but I hope that the mechanism works better than the Zhong Yi lens did.  I'd only heard of 7artisans a few months ago when I was reading about alternatives to Fujifilm lenses.

It has arrived.

Maybe obviously, the lens isn't very big at all, even for an aperture of f/1.4.  The filter size is 49mm, which seems about right for the 1970s, when most lenses didn't have auto focus or auto exposure or anything more than very, very basic electronics, if any.  This one seems a nice, third-party lens from the 1970s with modern lens coatings.

It feels about the same weight as the Panasonic GM5--the micro micro Four-Thirds body but it's probably heavier.  At least, the weight feels proportional to the size.  The Mitakon 25mm f/0.95 seemed overly heavy, and yes, I know that the optics play a great role, but it was ever so tiny and rather heavy.

This 55mm f/1.4 lens seems geared toward portraiture.  The focus ring moves very little between 5 meters and infinity, making focusing on distant subjects a bit problematic.  Practice will help.  The Panasonic GM5 doesn't have the best of image processors, due to the size, so hopefully, the GH4 will be more helpful.

 Photographing at sunset is a bit difficult and my eyes aren't as good as they might be, especially in the last two weeks, due to heart problems.  Practically everything was registering ISO 2000-ISO 3200.  That doesn't help.

In the afternoon, given that it's about 100 degrees F right now, things are a bit better.  The detent-less aperture ring tends to make things more interesting than they might be but as with everything else about this lens (and most new lenses), it takes time to learn.

I'm mostly pleased with the performance, but focusing to infinity seems to not work correctly.  I pointed at a tree and focus peaking told me that the tree was in focus at the infinity setting, despite it only being about 50 meters away.  Trying to get the moon in clear focus was impossible.

Google Home Mini is a Useful Device

Back in October, Best Buy was having a huge sale on their Insignia speakers with Google Assistant.  I bought one for each of the two people who live in this apartment where I rent a room.

Sometime in December, he opened the package and got the speaker out.  She still has yet to open the box.

Thanksgiving Day, Target, where I work, had Google Home Mini speakers for half price--$24.99--as doorbusters for Black Thursday.  I ordered one and it was waiting for me when I clocked out.

It took a bit of configuring and unfortunately, there is no user-accessible battery unlike the Best Buy Insignia speakers, so if it comes unplugged, it doesn't work.  Thankfully, it retains settings and re-connects to the WiFi connection on its own.

From the beginning, I didn't have much luck with Siri in English (Japanese was better), but Google's speech recognition worked for me.  Google Assistant is fairly useful, but often tells me how it doesn't know how to do something.  What was disturbing is when I asked "Where is my package from Amazon?" and it told me.  When did I connect it to that information?  Who asked me?  How did this happen?  Thankfully, it can't go into my wishlist, but I should investigate all of the connections to the e-mail account.

It is especially interesting considering the effort to get Pandora and Spotify to work.  I haven't done a lot of talking to the speaker, except to start and end the music.  Occasionally, I request a certain playlist that I already added to my account.  Music playback is good, considering $24.99 and the compactness of the device.  In some ways, it reminds me of a Bose Wave Radio in that it can fill the room with music.  Vocals are good enough.  Bass is implied, not implemented.

One thing that would really help would be a connection to iHeartRadio, since I miss various radio stations across the country, especially WDAS 105.3 from Philly.  iHeartRadio is having financial troubles, so I'm not sure how they would make a deal.  (Yes, it can be used as a Bluetooth speaker, but it was a pain when I did that and I don't want to try again.)

I'm not sure that I would ever pay more than $24.99 for a speaker with an assistant.  Obviously, Apple's HomePod is too expensive at $350.00--you might as well just pay for the computer.

Google have changed the name to Nest Mini.  I'm not sure that helps but it does confuse.

1TB M.2 drive, 32GB RAM installation complete

Getting a laptop computer that is working well for me has been a struggle.

For years, people have told me how much cheaper it is to buy a Windows machine than it is to buy a Mac.  For years, I told them to find one with the screen resolution and graphics hardware and it would be practically the same price.  It had been for the longest time.  Displays for laptop computers are not inexpensive but high quality displays are really expensive.

I got this 2017 Omen by HP laptop at about 25% discount.  It has an Intel i7 7700HQ quad core processor, Nvidia 1050 GPU with 2 GB of RAM, and the system came with a 1TB hard drive and 8GB of RAM.  It seemed to crawl most days.  The mid-2012 MacBook Pro had 16GB of RAM and a 480GB SSD with an Nvidia 650M GPU.

I found G.Skill RAM that I trusted that wasn't too expensive at the time and bought 32GB in two sticks.  I also found an HP m.2 SSD that seemed a good fit--an EX920.  Given that I've been working in retail and Thanksgiving Day to New Year's Day has been so brutal, I had few chances to get anything installed.  (I actually thought that, having a decent background with computer hardware installation since around 1981, I might be able to do the work myself but was proven wrong rather quickly.  It was much easier to modify each of my Apple Macintosh machines.)

I went to a phone repair store that was close, where I had some work done in the past, and the technician I knew was gone.  The person who might be able to do the work wasn't there that day, and since time wasn't convenient, I didn't return.  I went to a "computer services" shop (that looked like a pawn shop) and that shop's computer person wasn't there, either.

Last week, I decided to check another phone repair shop and found that they did computer work.  I called and was told that it would be US$30 to install the RAM and m.2 drive.  That was much lower than the $130-$250 I expected.

Wednesday, I went to the store and dropped off the computer.  They didn't give me a receipt--scary--but they sent my phone text messages to inform me on their progress.  US$30 to install the hardware and US$35 to clone the drive was given to me as the quote.  Thanks very reasonable.

Today, Friday, I went to see about the computer.  Things happened in the store and the progress was a bit delayed when "things happened", which was expected.  Thankfully, it wasn't some catastrophe where the hard drive didn't work at all.  He was "optimizing" it, so he told me that it would probably be three more hours.

I ate so-so VietNamese food at a new restaurant for way too much money, walked to a store to shop a bit, and got the text message that my machine had been finished.  I returned as quickly as I could walk.

I paid and I started the machine.  We looked and there was an update that required a restart.  I checked to see if the RAM and drive had actually been installed.  I wasn't accusing.  I just worry a lot.  If you can imagine something going wrong almost every time I do something, you'd be cautious, also.

Having the machine at home now, I'm pleased to say that my usual 51-66% RAM usage is around 19-22% now.  I'll be able to get started on my skate park videos finally.  I still need to select from thousands of clips.  I won't have to worry about my software being unhappy with the environment on which it's running, though.  Hopefully, Magix Movie Edit Pro Plus will be good.

As I've played a few games, the response is generally good but there are still delays.  I wonder if the operating system needs to mold itself to the new drive.  This machine is still labeled by HP as a casual gaming machine, which is all I needed anyway.  It still seems strange that UT2004 was smoother on a 2012 MacBook Pro than it is on a 2017 Windows machine purposed for gaming.

Update 2019.02.16: Windows 10 seems much better, although it does seem to be off in Never-Never land far too often still.  Who knows what it's doing?  As soon as I launch Task Manager, whatever was happening stops.  Defragmentation tends to continue, so I'm sure it's not that.  Feedback Hub is running, but why?  Microsoft does not want to know what I think of their collection of patches that they consider an operating system.  Back when a machine was limited to 64KB (or even 4MB) of RAM, it seemed that everything had to be tight.  Sloppy writers didn't make it.  Atari's implementation of GEM and DR-DOS weren't great but they were quick and efficient.

Firefox and Chrome both seem to handle scrolling more smoothly.

Games still seem just a bit better, which doesn't seem enough for the difference of having 4 times the RAM and a much, much faster drive.

Sprint has improved dramatically

Every year around Christmas here, I complain that the shopping area has horrible service with Sprint.  As of the Christmas season 2018, I can complain about it no longer.  We didn't get 100 Mbps service but the service was never unusable as it had been in the past few years since I arrived in 2014.

Further, I had jury duty in Stockton, which has generally had the worst of everything and I had a solid 4 bars downtown, especially on the 7th and 12th floors of the court house, but even on the ground it was exemplary.

I haven't had a lot of praise for Sprint, except for EVDO/3G in 2005 when the others were far behind them, and several years later when WiMAX was delivering data well before LTE was available in even a few places.

I'm pleased to say that the company has done better lately and I'm not sure why but I hope they continue to improve.  I'm almost okay with the T-Mobile merger, as long as we don't end up on GSM.  I hate having a voice conversation with anyone on T-Mobile because of the way it distorts and echoes.

VoLTE (Voice over LTE) should have been implemented already, so that we could rid ourselves of GSM and CDMA.  I expected it would be in place in 2015, even if it wasn't widespread, but it doesn't seem to have gone very far at all.

Update 2019.02.24: Sprint is now advertising that LTE Advanced is in use.  They also have "Calling Plus" for Android-based phones, which appears to be VoLTE, as they mention that you can use the internet while on a call, etc.

Apparently, 5G service will be launched in a few cities in May.  It seems that they've not bothered with Philadelphia or Miami, which is a big change from earlier times.

Don't you love how AT&T/SBC is finally going to LTE Advanced and is calling it 5Ge, as if it's something better than everyone else.  It's similar to when they enhanced their 3G service and called it 4G, even though it wasn't much different from T-Mobile.   By the original definition LTE Advanced is 4G, and we're not quite there yet, as far as a nationwide implementation goes.  I still see 1xRTT on occasion.

Update 2020.02.17: Apparently, 2020 is the year that 5G will penetrate our lives.  According to news, Verizon couldn't cover the Super Bowl stadium with 5G service, so I'm not sure how great it's going to be.  I'm still waiting for 4G/LTE Plus to be everywhere--and for 2G to go away.

Update 2020.04.24: The Sprint/T-Mobile merger happened and the two companies are cooperating on LTE, but will remain two operations otherwise.  I'm glad that they're not getting rid of CDMA.  I wonder if MetroPCS is still using CDMA, as they were prior to their acquisition by T-Mobile.  They were known as the worst carrier, but I'm not certain that they were the worst.

In any case, it should be interesting to see how everyone's service goes.  Hopefully, it's better and Verizon and AT&T sweat some.

FujiFilm's Mirrorless models Are Finally Great

Ever since the FujiFilm introduced the X-Mount and the X-Trans color filter array, I've waited to see what would happen.

I tried the X-T1 in a camera shop and decided that it was too slow and sloppy for my needs.  In fact, it seemed a very casual camera body, much like the Sony mirrorless models.  When a body has loads of enhancements but requires complete manual control to keep up with action, what does it really offer?

Having used various SLRs in the 1970s, manual control wasn't a big deal.  Keeping up with the action could be.  Back then, I appreciated the shutter speed ring around the OM-1N lens mount that kept my focus on the action, rather than having to reach across with my left hand to futz with the dial on the top panel.

In 2012. that didn't make sense to me.  In 2018, it makes even less sense.  However, the newest image processor in the X-T3 is quite capable and various parts have been modified to make the X-T3 the envy of most APS-C and micro Four-Thirds users--if they could just admit it.

At this point, I wouldn't recommend any APS-C Nikon, Canon, Sony, or Pentax models, although Pentax' weather-sealed bodies are quite good and offer plenty on a budget.  Tight budgets notwithstanding, the X-T3 is the best compromise, even without In-Body Image Stabilization.  (I'm still of the opinion that the Panasonic G85/G80 with Dual I.S. is a better option for great video and good lenses on a budget, plus it's part of a very compact system.)

People starting today, should seriously consider what FujiFilm are offering.  They have two good systems now and will continue to improve, especially as they gain more, impassioned users.  The company has pulled back from their frequent firmware updates but if they get it right first, they don't need to fix it or add features afterward.

It's somewhat amusing that the X-T100 pulls at me the same way the Fujica ST-605 did.  Reviews mention shortcomings, but those shortcomings, such as slower than anticipated auto focus, aren't that different from the first two generations of the X-series camera bodies.  The X-T1, for me, seemed quite unusable but plenty of people have done well with it.