this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Where's the punch?
In the face of everyone expecting an upgrade
For me, phones have been more than powerful enough for probably 5 years. I'm predominantly looking for battery life from my new phone, not more power. I think I'd happily use a Pixel 1 processor if it had double the battery life.
I have had my phone for 7 years now and recently replaced the battery for 20 bucks. I don't really understand the need for fast af phones when everything already works smooth as butter. What are people doing on their phones that needs that much power?
Mobile gaming.
Lemmy isn't really the iPad baby generation's demographic.
are mobile games actually good or are you referring to emulation?
"Good" is subjective, but mobile gaming is huge.
It's an interesting read.
That's a fair point. Mobile gaming is a fairly broad spectrum and perhaps I should have differentiated casual, lower demanding games from high fidelity ones.
Like, I know cod mobile was decently popular (and maybe still is), I would consider this one higher fidelity. I would be quick to question whether these games are actually good, though. The flappy birds of the segment on the other hand probably dont need much graphics throughput.
Both types of games are brimming with predatory monetisation. The only value I personally see when it comes to gaming on a phone is via emulators, source ports, indie gems like shattered pixel dungeon etc.
Though, on the topic of emulation (and to contradict my earlier comment about the need for higher perf) you can leverage box86/64 and Winulator to play fairly recent desktop windows games on your phone.
A key caveat is that the experience is contingent on the gfx umd quality for the SOC vendor (Qualcomm seem okay here but others may suffer - the state of Vulkan on Android still isn't great right now), but it seems we're gradually reaching the possibility of having phones as our primary computing devices.
I think you might be a bit behind on the mobile game market. Stuff like the Resident Evil Village and the Resident Evil 4 remake are on Apple arcade and actually playable. Furthermore, you can stream both PS+ games and Gamepass games on phones now. There's an emerging market of having single player games from last gen consoles ported to mobile and PC at the same time, as well. Lemmy might tell you that the Steam deck is the mobile gaming device of the future, but that's very much because Lemmy is a techy, older, Western niche audience with disposable income. Buying a phone is much easier to justify than buying a "gaming machine".
I agree with you about the monetization of gatcha games, but that's not going away, especially when people playing stuff like Genshin Impact or Honkai think it's "worth it" because they are higher fidelity games that they can play without having to put the up front costs of a console/PC.
I can't comment much about emulation, I just got into it. But I installed Dolphin onto my old Pixel just as their servers got borked from the achievements update, so I have to go back and actually play around with it.
I'm familiar with those releases. We also saw Bioshock, GTA etc come over several years ago. It's great to seem them ported over but they are still few and far between. It's not like we're getting the equivalent of your entire steam library as native apps on mobile. Native ports feel less likely now considering you can just cheese it with translation layers.
Streaming to phones is video decode, you don't really need performant graphics for that. I'm a little on the fence about streaming though it can definitely work well for certain types of games.
Battery life and performance go hand in hand. Race to idle when done correctly gives both great battery life and feels nice to use.
I don’t use my phone for a lot of intensive things often, but when I do I punish this thing. Also for work we abuse our poor phones.
I don't disagree with the theory but I've been getting barely a day of battery life since I started buying smartphones 15 years ago. As processor efficiencies are made, they waste all the power elsewhere.
I want to know how long a Nexus 5 would last with a modern battery and CPU and modem.
A modern nexus 5 would also have modern software and probably get the same battery life because of it.
And while I don’t use my phone a whole lot, I pretty easily get 2 days of battery life out of my iPhone. Had I gotten the MAXX XL Xtreme instead of the smaller one I’d easily get 2 days of battery life. And that’s with my maximum charge limited to 80%.
This exactly how I looked at my phone. I just got a pixel 8 pro this week upgrading from the pixel 3xl (because I fell for the sale email and got it for $600 lol) I was already considering upgrading as my phone had started acting up and hitching recently and it's been about 5 years anyway.
Can't say I'm a fan of the 8 pros battery life so far in comparison to the pixel 3xl though.