I think rainisto teased about it already on TMO. What I understood is that the antenna currently on the devce is small and can only detect inner NFC chips embedded in Ambiance Other Halves, but I may be wrong. I asked for details to clarify and make sure I got it right, but got no answer. I was very disappointed that they did not manage to put proper NFC in the main half.
The other half concept is great, but you can't count on it for basic hardware features like if people were going to go out with their phone and 3-4 OH. NFC is basic stuff, and now if I want a good HWKB OH, it needs to include NFC as well, not to mention FM radio. :/ I can't imagine having to drop NFC to have radio (and then not being able to pair my BT headphones easily), or having to drop NFC to have a keyboard. Droping the keyboard for weather sensors would be OK, as well as droping an Angry Birds OH for an extralarge battery OH. But NFC in 2013-2014 is something different, it's like discarding gyroscope from the main half and putting it in an OH.
Fortunately enough, no OH is out yet, so I don't have to chose anyway.
I can understand the lack of FM radio given that it is not used by a large proportion of users (yet very important to those that find a use in it), but NFC antenna too tiny for working with something else than OH? :/ Hope I got it wrong, which is totally possible. Sorry in advance, if so.
I thought the more complex stuf was going to be covered by teh I2C chip and not NFC. It worries me that NFC restrictions may be hardware related, I can wait for sotware and firmware updates but if the device is physically crippled and can't do full NFC or I2C that is a different issue.
+1 re NFC, it is really nice to pair with the speakers with that. Then again, that is my only use case, and I know nobody that actually uses it for anything. My mates discovered NFC thanks to my speakers. In fact, the Nexus 5 is rubbish at it in comparison with older phones. Perhaps it isn't a popular feature, same case with MMS that affects a small fraction of people.
Basically the image in the people(contacts on N9) appears full screen but darkened much like it would be if it was set as an ambience, it is still distinguishable as the person though. I quite like it.
On making a call the text on the screen shows dialling then alerting once the other end is ringing and one they pick up a timer starts.
Just above mid screen are three icons
Speaker - Dial Pad - Mute
A small "cancel" line appears at the bottom of the screen which turns into "end call" when the other party pick up
As a phone the Jolla is very good. Reception is great, earpeice speaker is loud and the loud speaker is good too.
Thanks for answer! Would be great if you also could post some screenshots.
Thanks
HW buttons have been taken to absolute minimum on this phone. Only button I have been missing from other phones is dedicated camera button. It is good that Jolla managed to get completely rid of home, back and find buttons.
I think I read somewhere (probably here on TMO) that the volume rockers are both useable as a hardware camera button? For me, that's good enough... not quite a hardware camera button... but definitely a huge step up from having to fumble around for an on screen button.
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The other half concept is great, but you can't count on it for basic hardware features like if people were going to go out with their phone and 3-4 OH. NFC is basic stuff, and now if I want a good HWKB OH, it needs to include NFC as well, not to mention FM radio. :/ I can't imagine having to drop NFC to have radio (and then not being able to pair my BT headphones easily), or having to drop NFC to have a keyboard. Droping the keyboard for weather sensors would be OK, as well as droping an Angry Birds OH for an extralarge battery OH. But NFC in 2013-2014 is something different, it's like discarding gyroscope from the main half and putting it in an OH.
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I have the same thoughts. I'm completely fine with features missing in software, as they can be easily added in the future, but those hardware cuts are are quite dissapointment. I mean, if it's just a case of a bigger antenna. Also, I'm using a FM radio sometimes and I don't understand why it's not present in the phone, although it seems that FM radio is already a part of the used SoC (it's only software/driver issue like in N900 or some hardware part is missing?).
I like the Other Half concept, but not everything can be added by that, surely not everything at once in one "the best" OH. And I don't want to carry bunch of other halves with me for several tasks I might want to do with my phone.
But, I still can't wait for my Jolla to arrive and I'm happy that I've helped Jolla to grow, hoping those issues will sort out in the future, at least with Jolla 2 phone ;-)
Re other half, I'm really hoping Jolla is reading this and getting it for feedback, or anybody for that matter. The Jolla is 9.9mm thick, what can an other half that makes it 15mm thick provide? Maybe NFC, FM radio, keyboard, some extra juice. You never know. What about 20mm thick in total?
I thought the more complex stuf was going to be covered by teh I2C chip and not NFC. It worries me that NFC restrictions may be hardware related, I can wait for sotware and firmware updates but if the device is physically crippled and can't do full NFC or I2C that is a different issue.
Absolutely, that is not what I meant. Of course if a HW KB OH is made, it'll likely use i2c. What I meant is that NFC is useful (sometimes), and if it only comes with OH, then we'll have to drop it if we prefer using another OH. NFC is definitely not my priority over HW KB or FM radio, but I think it's a shame if it is not fully integrated in the main half, because that means we won't have it except if nothing better than a NFC OH comes out.
It was already hard to believe in the release of a HW KB someday, then believing in a HW KB with FM radio included became insane, and now adding NFC in that precious OH is beyond insane. I don't like the idea that I'll have to chose between OH exclusive features and features that are already default in most 2013-2014 phones. The idea with OH was "additional" features in my thinking, not substitutes.
Eagerly looking forward to playing with the Jolla anyway. Don't conclude that I am trolling or raging because I criticize this, I just feel it deserves to be clarified, or criticized if it is actually what NFC on the Jolla will be.
There has been some conflicting info from JollaHQ about that. They said a few times earlier this fall that up to 64gb is supported, but just before the launch they said that only 32gb. Although they did say something about file formats so maybe I got confused???
exFAT filesystem is not supported currently, I think. All 64 GB SDXC-memory cards are preformatted to have exFAT. Reformatting them to ext4 in some Linux PC may work. Later, exFAT-support could come to jPhone also.
I'd say anybody using android apps isn't into multitasking at all
I'd say you are wrong. Android has good multitasking. In specific ways it is better and more clever than the normal UNIX multitasking. Activities, processes which interact with a user, are not suppose to run when process is not on the foreground, there is no reason to waste battery life then.
If a process needs some code to run in the background, a Service or IntentService is created.
I use multitasking in Android daily, successfully.
Recent high end Android devices with bigger screens, like Samsung Note 3 and Note 10.1 have multiwindow multitasking, when many applications run in the foreground and they all can interact with a user at the same time.
There were some discussion about Android's process life-cycle's (see picture) Pause-state. Pause-state is when the Activity is no longer in the foreground, but may be partly visible still (or not). The Activity's process may run in the background also in the Pause-state (Android 3.x and later) and only when going to Stop-state, it needs quickly to save all needed session data, if nice user-friendly Resume is needed. On the Stop-state, the Android system may kill the Activity in low memory conditions or for some other reasons.
I'd hope, also native apps for Jolla, would have trapped SIGHUP and SIGINT signals and behave like Android apps when they go to Stopped-state. So if kernel needs to OOM-kill the process, it would have session data saved to persistent memory and when a user restarts the app, it returns to the same state it was before the OOM-kill. That is one lesson which would be good to learn from the Android system for all (mobile) apps.
But also many (lazy) Android-developers do not just care if their app go to Stopped-state. They just assume a user would always run their app in the foreground and then quit it when a user is done with it. It then gets frustrating if a user goes back to the app and expects it to be in the same state where (s)he left it.
