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Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 packs up to 10GB of RAM and a stunning 93% screen-to-body ratio
Following a tease by the company's president back in August, Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi has now officially announced its next all-screen monster handset, the Mi Mix 3.
Boasting a FHD+ AMOLED display with a stunning 93% screen-to-body ratio, the Mi Mix 3 also packs a powerful 2.8GHz Snapdragon 845 processor into its unique frame, along with the option of 6GB, 8GB or a whopping 10GB of RAM.
Those after the 10GB model will have to track down the 'Forbidden City' limited edition, which sports traditional Chinese styling, a 10W wireless Qi charger and a collectible statue.
All of the Mi Mix 3 phones will be exclusive to the Chinese market for now. The 10 GB version is priced at RMB 4,999 ($720).
Xiaomi also announced a gaming phone with up to 10 GB of RAM, the Black Shark Helo.
Also at Ars Technica and The Register.
Previously: Oppo Likely to Release the First Smartphone With 10 GB of RAM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by lars on Saturday October 27 2018, @12:51PM (8 children)
Instead of doing the easy thing and just making them faster, more ram, storage, etc., maybe add some features that are new, unique?
How about a manual exposure setting for the camera? Nobody sells this, and there is demand for it if you go searching. You could do some nice, long exposure night photos without having to pack a separate camera.
Some other stuff, I know they won't go for since apparently everyone wants phones that break easily, well I guess at least the manufacturers do:
A big, built in battery, make the phone twice as thick, sure, but most phone's batteries are only about 1/3 the size of the phone, add one that takes up the whole back and you have 4x the battery life. Most people add cases that vastly increase the phone's thickness anyway, which gets me onto the next feature:
Make the phone's frame out of decently thick stainless steel that actually protects the screen, not wimpy aluminium. No need for phone cases, no more bendy phones.
User removable digitizer/screen. Make it nice and easy to swap out a new one, how hard would that be? Just 4 screws and an edge connector. While we are there, lets make it east to swap out the charge port too like LG does.
A second USB/hdmi port would be nice too.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @01:05PM (1 child)
No, you can't. There is a good reason why you want larger aperture, not tiny lens.
That's not really a problem
Huh?
Why not just get a laptop?
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Saturday October 27 2018, @08:01PM
If I could comfortably run linux in a chroot environment on a phone, it would become my laptop-replacement when traveling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @01:53PM
https://www.ephotozine.com/article/top-13-best-camera-phones-for-photography-2018-23050 [ephotozine.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @03:15PM
If it's like the Mi Mix 2, the body will be ceramic, not aluminum.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @03:52PM (1 child)
The Open Camera app supports this. FOSS and on both fdroid and play store. Many high end smartphone cameras are supported.
There heat dissipation issues preventing this. A case could be made for a detachable power bank like they used to do with laptops. But no one cares enough to make it. See the next answer.
Plenty of rugged phones out there. Some models get stress tested for mil specs and water resistant/proofing. The alloy and construction (glued/screwed) choices has to do with the antenna, heat conductivity, weight, and battery expansion over time. Plastic clam shells, btw, are often the safest choice with regards to battery expansion since they can be made to pop out if pushed from within. It's trickier to achieve this when working with metals and/or screws. Apple and Samsung had a few models with full aluminum cases that showed these sort of issues.
The screen and touch digitizer needs to be glued together to prevent shadows.
It's model dependent even for LG: When the port is placed at the bottom it usually ends up on a daughter board running a flex cable that also has the microphone and maybe an indicator which can be replaced as a unit. But since a top position if preferable for usability, most models, regardless of manufacturer, will have it soldered into the same PCB as the SoC.
There's powered usb hubs for that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @04:46PM
And external USB batteries are super-cheap and serve almost the same purpose. With the bonus of not being specific to any phone past needing the right adapter cable (i.e. one of USB micro-B, USB C, old iPhone, new iPhone). I've had a couple old phones with batteries that lasted only 2-3 hours that I used just fine for longer periods by keeping my USB battery in my pocket or backpack with my phone plugged into it when I was going to be away from an outlet for longer than that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 27 2018, @09:51PM
Wholly incompatible with planned obsolescence.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday October 27 2018, @10:31PM
Agree, but it's all marketing. Just like how people think more megapixels equals better camera. People compare phones based on specs like ram and the companies are responding to this. All New phones, at least the popular ones will smash like a terracotta pot if dropped, it would be awesome too seea stainless hardened unit. I guess they can't due to antenna location and RF attenuation. There's always plastics or built in silicone.
I have an Asus ZenFone 5Z with 6gb ram and it never uses it all. Currently sitting at 2.6gb free and I have 50 tabs open in Firefox. 10gb is just silly but it'll still sell, especially given they used the old marketing trick of limiting the production of them to generate demand.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday October 27 2018, @05:09PM (7 children)
That's not a damn "phone", its a workstation that you have to throw away after a year.
How about giving me something that just makes/receives calls and putting this fancy shit in a desktop or laptop where it belongs and can do more.
So you need 10GB of ram to post drivel to Twatter now?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 27 2018, @05:43PM (1 child)
Get a case, don't drop the thing too often, and I bet it could last 3-4 years.
Aren't you being just a little too pessimistic?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday October 28 2018, @12:55AM
It's what I do. :P
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 27 2018, @05:54PM (1 child)
Ok, so it has a "non-removable" battery. So I'll revise that down to 2 years, unless you can find a way to tear it down and replace it. You would do surgery on a workstation if you could repair it, right?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday October 28 2018, @01:09AM
Why wouldn't I? No batteries, but if my power supply blows up, I can run down the street to Microcenter and pick up a new ATX power supply of any brand without sending the entire machine back to Frikking China. Same story for most other components assuming I didn't make some consumertardastic mistake purchasing/assembling the system in the first place. Sometimes I even still get to solder something (which reminds me, I am going to make a repair to one of my keyboards).
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @08:50PM
The 10GB is for carrying your emergency supply of porn, moron.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 27 2018, @10:00PM (1 child)
How about making something that runs for 2 weeks on a charge, like the feature phones of 2005 used to?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @10:11PM
Phones of 2005 did little more than phone calls and texts. If you want a phone that only does that, I'm pretty sure you can find one that will last 2 weeks.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Sunday October 28 2018, @02:49AM (2 children)
LOL, ROFLMAO, and ROFLcopters!
To each, their own, I guess.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 28 2018, @03:59AM
Let's critically examine the concept.
Smartphone gaming is bigger than ever, particularly with new hyped titles like Fortnite [venturebeat.com] and TES: Blades [youtube.com]. You see Super Bowl commercials for mobile games these days. The market for smartphones is bigger than the market for gaming PCs or consoles, and you can use one just about anywhere.
The smartphone hardware is obviously much better than what existed a decade ago. Today's flagship smartphones can rival supercomputers of a certain year, or gaming PCs of a certain year. Apple leads the pack in mobile performance with SoC processors that theoretically blow past older laptop and desktop systems. The Razer gaming phones [androidpolice.com] have 120 Hz displays, close to the 144 Hz desktop displays some people use and probably more than enough for most users. Phone resolutions are in the 1080p to 4K range.
The Black Shark Helo's gamepad attachments and similar products could make the experience much more like a gaming handheld (DS/PSP/Switch) or console controller. You could also slap some emulators on the phone, configure them to work with the gamepads, and get a better experience than before.
You may also have the option of inserting the phone into a Gear VR or similar headset, and then you have a VR gaming device. Obviously, this has limitations compared to a gaming PC + Rift/Vive/etc., but it is more convenient and untethered. It's likely that most people will end up using VR in a portable, untethered way. Standalone headsets are cheaper and use the same SoCs that smartphones use (except even weaker in most cases). But if you bought an overpriced 10 GB gaming phone and a headset to put it in, you would still be paying less than a gaming PC + Rift/Vive.
There are going to be additional generations of hardware before the last blood is squeezed from Moore's law. "7nm", "5nm", and probably "3nm". Smartphones are starting to gain tensor/neural network processors, which are basically nowhere to be found on desktops or laptops. Obviously there are some relevant use cases for putting this kind of hardware in a phone, since you can easily point the camera at things. But it shows that in some ways, phones could become a more interesting platform than PCs. Maybe games can make use of this hardware. We could see 2-3x improvements in battery density eventually, which would allow high-end phones to run games for longer on a single charge. Although there are plenty of places where you may have a USB charger or outlet available, such as on an airplane.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1) by fakefuck39 on Sunday October 28 2018, @07:43AM
Well, I know what 'lol' is. The rest are words normal people don't use, so no need to explain them - I'll just assume they mean "Really ugly dork who feels stressed until he walks back into his house and closes the door."
To each his own is exactly correct. People often say
"why not thicker and bigger battery or removable battery" - tiny market. Both my pixel2xl, my nexus6 before that, and my galaxys1 (att captivate) before that have lasted several days on a charge. no games, rooted, unneeded services disabled, host file ad blocker. i read shit like this site while shitting, make calls and do email, text, and run a korean flash card program. 3 days minimum from 100 to 25%.
"sd card" - first phone had it, stuck one in, never used it. my phone now has 128GB, who gives a fuck
"no headphone port" - that did piss me off. and then I adapted and found it better. bluetooth is much more convenient, especially while sleeping on a plane which I do a lot. I've used the regular headphones once. usb-c gives me a single charger for phone and laptop. yeah, some people want the headphone port.
most of the "famous" phones are there to hit the largest target market. and then you got all kinds of weird shit - tiny, large battery, etc, and they sell to their specific small target markets. Like this phone, probably for the few people that want to play hardcore games or run some web server, or whatever on it. So yeah, to each his own. Is a rolfcopter when you throw up into the blades of a spinning fan? Like shit hitting the fan, but from the uphole? Is this site getting some reddit spillover or something with all the dork kid highschool lingo? This is unfortunate. It's always been older people. Dumb older people, losers, but at least not annoying. sad.