Why I Liked the Android 10 Update

Matt Birchler on android, ios, video | | 1 min read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbXxMKqhQJ4

This can only go well, right?

This was actually a video I made in September but didn’t feel like posting right away. As the description and title cards try to make exceptionally clear, this is not a video bashing Android, it’s just fun to see Android folks praise the virtues of things iOS either has or has had for literally a decade. The Android 10 update was really the “let’s add a bunch of things iOS does to make things safer for our users” update, and I think that’s why I liked it.

Round 3: Night Sight vs iPhone XS

Matt Birchler on android, ios | | 3 min read

I did one more shoot with Night Sight on a Pixel 3 and an iPhone Xs which lead to this message from my wife:

She knows me well…

As with the other comparisons, the first photo will always be the iPhone and the second will be the Pixel.

https://youtu.be/ronqsBnJ-OM

This first one is a wild difference, and really shows off what Night Shift can do for you. The iPhone was hopeless at getting something here, but the Pixel got something totally unnatural, but shows off the thing I was shooting.

This one is up to personal preference, as the iPhone is sharper, but the Pixel gets more of the surrounding area. I like the iPhone shot personally.

This is another massive difference, with the Pixel getting so much more of the scene than the iPhone.

Again, I like the iPhone shot better, as the Pixel made everything lighter, but doesn’t actually show any new details the iPhone missed. The Pixel has a blurry shot and the iPhone is surprisingly sharp.

The Pixel is back on top here, but neither camera did a particularly great job.

This was a zoom shot at 2x, and I was surprised how much better the Pixel shot was here. Not only is it much brighter but the details are sharper as well.

Takeaway

Again, Night Sight shows why it’s useful as another tool in a photographer’s bag of tricks. It gets shots that are simply unusable and turns them into pretty decent photos. What it does not do is make every low light shot perfect, which I think has become the narrative out there for some people. It absolutely creates messy images and some that are just plain ugly. But much like Portrait Mode on the iPhone, it’s an opt-in tool that adds to your options without limiting you from doing anything else.

While I maintain the iPhone Xs camera is better than the Pixel 3 for me, if you’re looking for a camera that gives you the most options in low light, it’s hard to recommend the iPhone over the Pixel at this point.

On Camera Comparisons

Matt Birchler on android, ios | | 1 min read

I’ve done quite a few camera comparisons over the past couple years, and they continue to be one of the more popular things on the site. I find them really interesting because they can lead to really surprising results…in certain situations. Let me explain.

So whenever I share a photo comparison and don’t tell people which is from which camera, the results tend to be very split. People vote for the iPhone shot in one comparison and then choose the Pixel one in the next. Or they are are die-hard iPhone fans, but choose the Pixel photo in every single case (and vice versa). The results are unexpected at times, and always fascinating.

But when I do a comparison and I do tell people which is which, then people who I know to be big Apple/Google fans will always vote for their preferred brand, even if they had chosen the other company’s photos in a blind comparison.

Now not everyone does this, but there are certainly people who I notice do this. Also, as an aggregate, I see different results in comparisons when I tell people what camera took each, rather than let people pick the photo they like better. Really what this gets down to is the fact the photography is very subjective and when we’re looking at the best cameras on the market, it’s just as much about feelings as it is about quality.

Camera Test: iPhone Xs (Default and Hydra) vs OnePlus 6 (Default, Night Sight, and Night Mode)

Matt Birchler on android | | 3 min read

It’s dark and snowy here in the Midwest, so it was inevitable that I would do a camera comparison. Here’s what I used:

  • iPhone Xs
    • Default camera app
    • Hydra (low light mode)
  • OnePlus 6
    • Default camera app
    • Default app’s Night Mode
    • Google Camera app’s Night Sight

iPhone Xs

Default app

Hydra Low Light Mode

These shots looks very similar, although the default camera app does a better job of holding onto detail and they have basically the same look. The biggest difference here is that the default app took this shot instantly while Hydra had me hold the phone steady for about 3 seconds to collect more light.

OnePlus 6

Default App

Default App, Night Mode

Google Camera App, Night Sight

You can see an immediate difference in color temperatures and brightness between the OnePlus and the iPhone. The OnePlus images are much brighter than the iPhone’s. If you zoom in, there is less detail here, but the overall image is definitely appealing and I would say more impressive than what the iPhone is delivering.

Meanwhile, the image from the Google app using Night Sight is a very unappealing yellow that I think looks really bad. I’ll chalk that up to this app not really meaning to run on this phone.

Lightroom

This is a bit of a wild card, but what if we take these images into Lightroom and make a few small changes. I took the normal photos from both phones and added a little brightness, shifted to a cooler temperature, added a little clarity, and boosted saturation and vibrancy a few clicks and got these:

iPhone Xs

OnePlus

What does this tell us? Mostly that these cameras are collecting raw image data and making different choices with the final processing. Apple is opting to have a darker image that is more realistic while OnePlus is opting for a brighter image that is not necessarily accurate, but looks quite nice.

The biggest difference, and why the iPhone costs 2x that of the OnePlus, is the detail in the shot. It is more apparent when these were enhanced with Lightroom as you can see lots of details that are either worse or just plain missing from the OnePlus photos that look better on the iPhone shot.

Despite these differences, the OnePlus’s still camera continues to impress me as it holds its own quite well against the $1,000+ phones it’s competing with.

Touch Response on the OnePlus 6, iPhone Xs, and iPad Pro (2017)

Matt Birchler on android, iphone | | 1 min read

https://youtu.be/d4mdB4YTtMo

The OnePlus 6 is a very nice Android phone (and at less than $600 it’s one of the most affordable high end phones of the year), but one thing that was bugging me was touch response time. Animations feel fast and the phone generally works quite quickly, but there was a slight disconnect between when I was tapping/swiping on screen and things would happen. I was not alone, apparently.

To test this, I busted out the slow motion video and counted the frames between how long it took the Twitter app and websites to recognize my swipe gestures to start scrolling. Check out the video above for more thoughts, but the ultimate results were:

  • OnePlus 6: 0.15 second lag (average)
  • iPhone Xs: 0.08 second lag
  • iPad Pro 10.5: 0.07 second lag

Android Updates and the Lowest Bars Possible

Matt Birchler on android | | 1 min read

Android Developers Blog: An Update on Project Treble

Thanks to Treble, we expect to see more devices from OEMs running Android 9 Pie at the end of 2018 as compared to the number of devices that were running Android Oreo at the end of 2017.

It's worth noting that Oreo was on 0.5% of devices in December 2017 and 0.7% in January 2018. Sure, they're on pace to hit at least 0.8% by the end of the year, but that's after Pie will be 4 months old, that's not exactly the accelerated upgrade pattern I think we expected.

As of today, Android Pie still does not have enough usage to register on Google’s distribution dashboard.

One Slick Android Feature

Matt Birchler on android, ios | | 2 min read

Much like iOS, Android has an app store that lets people easily download apps for their devices. The differences between the Play Store and App Store are more in execution than concept, and will be how the vast majority of people get apps.

But Android also has the ability to simple install apps like you can on a Mac or PC. If I manually turn on the feature, I can install .APK files from anywhere I’d like. This has been a feature of Android since the beginning, and many people likely did this for the first time recently with Fortnite, which is not being distributed via the Play Store at all.

Why this is risky

On the one hand, this means that it allows people to install software that does not meet the standards set by Google for what should be allowed on Android. This can be good, but it can also lead to malicious software getting onto your device and doing things that are not acceptable to Google’s guidelines. This is inherent risk with any software, and things like the curated app stores of the modern era are guards against this danger.

This also means that piracy is more of an issue on Android, as people can more easily get free versions of paid apps if they would like. Developers can mitigate this, but it’s additional work and clearly does not stop this from being a thing1.

Why this is excellent

But then there’s the best part of this functionality: installing apps meant for one device (usually Pixels) and using it on whatever phone you happen to own. The most recent example of this is the new Google Camera app which introduced Night Sight. I have a OnePlus 6, which has a pretty good camera, but Google does not intend to give this camera app to me since I didn’t buy their phone. Fair enough, but the Android community got their hands on the APK for the Google Camera app with Night Sight and modified it to let it run on my phone.

And just like that, I’m using Google’s camera app with Night Sight and it works great on my OnePlus 6. And the best part: it works great! Google is using pretty standard hardware in their camera, so the magic of Night Sight is all done in software. So when I try to use Night Sight, I get results like this:

👇 Regular Mode

👇 Night Sight

The Night Sight feature works great and is proving to be a nice feature to have in a pinch. And it’s all possible because Android lets me go around the official app store if I’d like.

I don’t know if Apple will ever allow this on iOS, but it is certainly one of the things that I enjoy about Android whenever I am experimenting with the platform.

  1. No links from me, since I do not want to encourage this behavior. ↩

OnePlus 6 Charges Fast, But Only with It’s Proprietary Charger

Matt Birchler on android | | 1 min read

Note, these results seem almost too bad to be true, but replicated the results across numerous charging setups. Let me know if there is a charging brick out there that will work better.

When I looked at the OnePlus 6 fast charging (don’t call it Dash Charge anymore) last week, I found it was very fast. When put up against the iPhone Xs’s fastest charging option, it was the winner, even if only by a few percentage points. All the better, it won with the charging brick that came in the box, not one that you needed to either have from a Mac you already own or just bought from Apple.

But what if you don’t use OnePlus’s proprietary fast charger? What if you have the fast charger they give you in your bedroom and want another charger elsewhere? I wanted to know, so I ran a couple more tests to see how well it played with standard fast chargers.

I tried 2 other chargers, both of which have previously charged my iPhones, Pixels, Galaxys, and even Motorola phones quite quickly. These were the Apple 30W USB-C Power Adapter and the Aukey Quick Charge 3.0…(long Amazon keyword listing name).

The results are not what I was expecting.

Not only were these charge times far slower than the OnePlus charger, they were almost exactly in line with what my iPhone Xs does when plugged into the 5W charger that comes in the box.

My Takeaway

Basically, if you want fast charging, you really need to use the charging brick from OnePlus directly and anything else will deliver far worse results. Effectively, it turns those fast charging bricks you might have for other devices into the 5W adapter that everyone is grumpy about shipping with the new iPhones.

The good news is that OnePlus sells additional fast charge power bricks for just $19.99 on their online store. It would be nice to be able to use anything you want, but at least their prices for proprietary charging bricks is reasonable.