art with code

2017-11-27

Nokia 8, a week later

[Update 29 Nov 2017] There's a bug with the glance display feature where unlocking the phone after the glance display turns on drops the UI frame rate to 25 or so. This is super annoying. The fix is to turn off the glance display in Settings > Display > Advanced > Glance.

Camera. Hmm. So, I took the Camera2 API sample and built the basic demo camera app to explore wtf is wrong with the camera. Long story short, it's the camera driver + camera app. There are a couple of factors at play here.

First, the bundled camera app is slow to start. You can use the Footej Camera app for much faster startup and manual controls.

Second, the slow shutter speed is due to the camera driver auto-exposure liking slow shutter speeds. And maybe because rolling shutter + AC-induced light flicker makes for stripey pictures at fast shutter speeds and the AE flicker compensation goes "oo, better use a 14Hz shutter to get more even exposure in 50Hz lights".

The viewfinder is slow because it uses the AE shutter speed.

And there's no S-mode because the Camera2 API doesn't have one. There are only P and M modes.

The weirdo colors in very low light, who knows. I'll have to investigate.

And now I've got the beginnings of a camera app that works the way I like. Send money! Like, $25k. (In the words of Burnaburias: "My work in the houses of the Gods is abundant, and now I have begun an undertaking: Send much gold!")
[/Update]


Having grown more accustomed to the Nokia 8, here's the rest of the review:

- It's fast. Minimal jank (on Nougat at least). Better than the Samsung phones in that respect, they've got some UI thread resource loading stuff in the launcher that makes your first impression of the phone be "oh it's dropping frames". The Nokia's speediness is thanks to them using the Google launcher.

- The shape feels good to the hand. The bundled case has a nice feel to it. The case is very tight on the phone, it hasn't come off after dropping the phone on the floor a few times (Tho the case did crack in the corners. The phone is a-OK, thanks case.)

- I like the ringtones. The ringer volume can be set very loud, which is great outdoors.

- The camera is fine in daylight. The color profile is quite Zeiss - a sharp yellow-green with natural saturation levels and luminous whites. I guess. Could be placebo effect / just the light here.

- The camera is useless indoors. Everything's blurry, the focus is all over the place, the color balance is bananas (like, desaturated blue-green bananas veering towards gray).

- The screen's white point is very cold. 8000K+. Compared to the 6700K used on other devices, it's blue blue blue. Not good in the evening, though Oreo's Night Light helps a lot there.



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