kirk781

This is a relatively old review when the TicWatch was new. This watch easily outperforms the Galaxy Ultra and even Oneplus 2R and musters in 4/5 days of battery life (looks sadly at my GW 6).

Some did report its app being not as good as S Health or Google's implementation. However it's main Achilles heel is the update problem. Pixel Watches, IIRC, get 3 years and Galaxy Watches get 4 years ; but TicWatches are lucky to get one major Wear OS upgrade and that too, delayed. Which is a Shame because the hardware here easily equals last gen Galaxy/Pixel Watches and in terms of battery life, will stand for many years to come.

In my country, Wear OS forms a tiny share of the market and Samsung has the biggest pie of it (it doesn't help that watches aren't considered for trade in here, so if and when I do upgrade to a new watch, my current watch becomes e waste and I pay full price). I did consider the TicWatch but seeing it's relatively poor software support went with Samsung. However, damn if I said that I love Samsung's battery life or charging implementation. The WPC mechanism wastes so much heat and throttles itself to heck in hot temperatures.

This link about Glance made me think about this.

Majority of folks here might not be aware of this company. Their software usually ships on low end phones mainly in the Indian/South Asian market. They do seemed to have pivoted to the US as well but I am not sure if overseas models also see this scourge. As of right now, if one's phone has this, they will basically see a new glorified wallpaper with news/text each time they unlock their phone. And if you read the article, they wish to go even furthur. It can technically be switched off though often it's buried deeper than Dante' s last layer of hell.

Do overseas(read:other Asian markets/European/American and so on) also have any local equivalent to this scourge from my country? Are ads plastered on lock screens on entry level phones common anywhere else in the Android world?

This is a regional release from the brand apparently for Nigerian market only which explains the fact that despite having decent specs( things like 90W charging, 8 GB RAM and 144 Hz high PWM dimming display), it is a 4G phone only.

Though it is gimmicky in some respects. It has a SpO2 sensor apparently built into the back but skips out on basic things like micro SD or 3.5 mm jack (but hey, they do give free USB C headphones; now I can switch from Sennheiser's IE 600 to an upgraded variant :p).

It is a half baked review, IMO. The author says that despite having 45 W charging, the phone takes 75 mins to charge. Samsung really slows down it's charging speeds post 80%, so testing from 0 to 100 is not a good criterion at all.

Plus, he forgets to mention that Samsung skips on a microSD card for A56 which was present on A55. Though in Samsung's favor, they are offering 6 OS upgrades and I doubt any other OEM except Google matches it.

Pre 1990s, there was supply side limit in my country and long waiting time(like years) for cars. This meant that car ownership flourished in the hands of elite only. Post opening up of economy, owning a car has become a status symbol and even villages, where once the ubiquitous sustainable cycle was the way of life, cars now rule.

Cars choke the street like pollution choke my country's cities. Trains carry hundreds of passengers, buses dozens, autos multiple, but a single vehicle mooching on the street just for sake of a single person. Since parking is a joke, people park their cars anywhere on the side of roads creating more traffic (Yes, it's a developing country). Folks here love to blame shared autos or government(and some criticism is valid) but none wonder about cars. What is the need for a single person driving an SUV that takes nearly half the space of a small bus?

I see old images of Bangalore from 1960 or Delhi from 1930s and it was wide open spaces/streets. Now it is choked to the limit. Cars have made my country an urban dystopia. There are many things I would have loved my country to copy from the US. It's obsession with cars is NOT one of them.

For me, cars are an utilitarian waste of space(until they are always running packed to capacity which they rarely do)

The title is err, not correct because the top 2 alternatives Opera and Arc are based on Chromium engine. I have seen tons of people swear by Arc, but I am seriously asking (since as a Linux user I can't use it), how much good can a browser be in this day and age if ultimately it's ad blocking breaks and it will since Manifest v2 will go soon(unless Arc folks have a solution for it)

The rest alternatives are Firefox, Zen (FF fork but honestly Atleast this was something new I learned from this article) and Tor (which is weird since it is not meant for normal web browsing and using it will not only be slow but put additional strain on the nodes, correct me if I am wrong).

An old article but still atleast introduced me to one really weird Keyboard layout

The market is India. 4 out of top 5 phone OEMs are Chinese in origin (last I saw data) with other being Samsung.

Google does not have the same brand value as Apple in India, despite still somehow expecting people to pony up in the same price range. Add to it their custom heating Tensor chips in the past years in a hot climate like India and it doesn't make for a good showcase. Brands like Nothing have made faster inroads in the Indian market both by local production and complete array of their products available from launch time.

Too bad S25 base model still has only 25W charging support and a relatively short battery capacity of 4000mAh