Steve Litchfield

In my three weeks of Pixel Fold video review Shorts , I'd been slowly coming to the conclusion that, despite being slightly outgunned in the raw specs department (screen brightness, chipset, charging speeds), Google absolutely nailed the form factor. What's needed is a phone that's manageable in the hand and yet which unfolds to a decent tablet size. Samsung's Z Fold series gets all the basics right but is over-tall and over-slim when folded, while OnePlus' new Open foldable is almost as tall and wider, making it a large phone to start off with. Plus the latter omits a 2023 essential - Qi wireless charging and isn't waterproof... See my concluding Short in particular (a blog embed isn't perhaps the perfect container for a portrait video, but hey...), in which I list all the reasons why the Pixel Fold is the foldable right now: The key phrase in my video is perhaps 'compact'. Although heavy, the Pixel Fold sits just right in a pocket and in the ha...

It remains a mystery to me to this day. Why don't other phone manufacturers and their cameras use the tricks that Google pulls off? An issue of patents perhaps? Or just lack of software expertise? Regardless, the two 'tricks' demonstrated here are Sensor Fusion and Super Res Zoom. You'll find them on any Pixel in various combinations. On the Pixel 7 and 8 Pro and on the Pixel Fold (below) you'll find both techniques employed. And yes, I already said that most people don't need to zoom more than 3x in normal life , but hey - this is for when zoom is needed. Perhaps at a sporting event or trying to spot rare wildlife. To demonstrate both tricks, let's take a standard landscape shot - with an interesting central subject: So far so good, and any camera phone could take this shot. Here scaled for the web, but don't worry, I'll show off some crops below too. Now we try zooming at 2x: In the case of my Pixel Fold, the main sensor is 48MP, so a 2x zoom smart...

Something of a Frequently Asked Question around these parts! This is mostly explained in the last full length video I did, Phones Show 436 embedded in https://stevelitchfield.com/sshow/index.html - in short, my life, and the world around me, had changed. A lot. But I did want to amplify my reasons from a Creator standpoint. Back in 2006 (pre-YouTube) I was the only person in the world reviewing phones in video form . As YouTube started to take off and as smartphones became sexier, especially in the USA, as the iPhone rose and rose, the number of people attempting to review phones grew almost exponentially.  Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) started as a school kid in 2008 but it was in 2012 that he started to cover phone tech seriously.  Michael Fisher (Mr Mobile) started reviewing phones on YouTube in 2016.  Lewis Hilsenteger (Unbox Therapy) started unboxing phones in 2011.  Dave Lee (Dave2D) started up in 2015. Arun Maini (MrWhosetheboss) started up (again as a kid!) ...

Forgive the click bait(y) title, but there's actual evidence here, I promise. Note that I did write an article before availability, putting forward worries and concerns , but I've now had hands-on to confirm a few things and report back.  Cased (of course, read the blooming' article!) Pro Maxes - 15 and 14 (with XtremeSkin, Aged Oak , in case you're wondering!) In fact, it's the first time ever in the iPhone line-up/evolution that I seriously think the old 'Pro Max' model can be argued to be  better than the new one. (Admittedly, that I already own the old one [14 Pro Max] and didn't really want to spend over £1000 on the 15 Pro Max possibly helps my argument from a personal perspective.) (There's one big win for the new model, of course. Type C connectivity has been a long time coming - but this will take several generations to become established in iPhone/Lightning households and maybe I'll come back to this in a future article.) My observat...

I have to confess that I don't totally 'get' the fascination of some for old vinyl records - of course, the huge cardboard area for artwork and lyrics is enviable and I loved this too in the 1970s. But the sound quality, in terms of scratches and rumble and constant wear and tear every time the vinyl is played had me running for CDs when the format came in, in the 1980s. So, forty years later, surely I'm sorted in terms of all my favourite albums? Well, not really. Not 100%. You see, first vinyl, then cassettes, then CDs were all produced from imperfect workflows in one way or another. Regardless of being produced from original studio master tapes. Vinyl would have been stamped from a gold master, itself created from a stereo mix of the original audio, itself often 'bounced around' within the studio track/tape system. And then each copy degrades, as I said just now. Ditto cassettes, though with at least one extra copying step, added to all the fragility and (aga...

So we had the big Apple event last Tuesday, with a new flagship, the iPhone 15 Pro Max. In theory, a direct replacement for my iPhone 14 Pro Max. And, while I'd never recommend upgrading any phone every year since improvements are so small, there are several things to be concerned about in this year's iteration. (We cover the other new iPhones, plus other changes, in the PSC podcast , etc.) Titanium Meh, I guess lighter is nicer, but it’s also just a thin shell, with an aluminium sub-shell fused to it. Plus, titanium may be light and strong but it also scratches much more easily than stainless steel (used in the 14 Pro series), so Apple is also coating most 15 Pro Maxes with a ​​PVD (Physical Vapour Deposition) coating - which will also scratch easily, as it did on some MacBooks in the past. (If you have to go titanium, then get the plain one without the coating.) So... I'm not sure that going to titanium is a step forwards overall. Mind you, real users use cases on their...

...instead, buy it, perhaps, for larger-screened regular applications and for dual-pane productivity? But no, don't buy a Galaxy Z Fold 5 or Pixel Fold or similar 'in order to have a larger display for watching movies and YouTube'. Because the dimensions don't work out that way! Back in the day, TV pictures were 4:3(ish), but they moved to 16:9 in the 2000s, while video content itself has been 16:9 and then 18:9 for years, at least in terms of high production quality output, while movies are often shot at 21:9 or wider for that extra 'cinematic' look. You'll see where I'm going with this. If you watch, say, a 18:9 YouTube video, on a folding phone like the Samsung Z Fold 4 or Google Pixel Fold then you'll be faced by large black bars above and below the content. That's just physics, that's just maths. The diagram below is based on actual measurements of display size, though not 100% due to limitations in Google Drawings(!) - it'll give yo...

Just over a decade ago, writing for AAWP, I declared that Qi (wireless) charging was the future . And I'm convinced it still is, even if less than 10% of phone users know about it or use it. They're the ones missing out. My friend David Gilson did a post a few months before, in 2012, highlighting the physics behind Qi , and that's a good primer to how it all works. In the intervening decade we've seen: standardisation of coil sizes higher supported charging power protocols for how a phone and Qi pad work out what power to use pads with multiple coils, so that two devices can be charged at once - or one, but positioning isn't as important circular magnetic alignment rings (Apple's MagSafe) to ensure that both devices are always perfectly aligned, for maximum efficiency The upshot is the same, whether in 2013 or 2023, mind you. And as a data point, I've only plugged my main smartphone to a charging cable about twice in eight years . 99.9% of my phone charging ...

As 'how to's go, this one's really, really simple. But worth documenting, as it has me scratching my head every time. So your Macbook's SSD is filling up and you've had a bit of a spring clean. Gone are all those temporary video and audio files, those duplicate folders of images, and so on. You've deleted, say, 15GB, but... the free space shown in Finder is exactly the same. OK, you think, empty the (recycle) 'bin'. That'll do it. Nope, the free space stays resolutely where it was before you started your clear-out. So what's going on? It turns out that emptying the 'bin' actually did delete the files permanently, but that Mac OS has a wealth of checks and tidying up procedures that it needs to do under the hood before it's happy to declare the space genuinely freed up. So the answer to the 'how to', after all your deleting and bin-emptying, is...  Wait! Leave your Mac on, feel free to keep on working and doing what you normall...

It occurred to me, when listening to a 'deluxe' album, remastered from a 1970s classic, with loads of bonus tracks, that recording music used to be a lot more fun, a lot more spontaneous. In 2023, in fact since about 1983, so for the last 40 years(!), recording music is about assembling parts of a jigsaw - drum parts here, bass there, keyboards there, vocals, and so on. All of which are recorded in 100% isolation and can be replaced, broken up, and generally juggled until the rendered whole, down to stereo, is as the artist wants it. I have some knowledge of all this, having at first done lots of home recording onto Foster and Tascam multi-tracks, then recorded an album in a real studio, plus lots of 'live' recording along the way in a variety of settings. So I'm listening to some of these 1970s out-takes and bonus tracks and it's blatantly clear how different recording was, especially for rock bands. Several tracks started with studio chatter "This might b...

Not a click-bait title at all - I'm quite serious. And the point won't take long to make, I promise. Exactly as they sound, Bananabix are Weetabix cereal 'biscuits' infused with chunks of dried banana - and they're delicious. Add cold milk and enjoy any time of the day, etc. There's one problem, however. They're darned hard to get hold of. In Berkshire, in the UK, we have supermarkets everywhere. Large and small, almost a dozen chains of shops. Every single shop sells the 'plain' Weetabix, most sell the various chocolate-infused Weetabix (nice idea, but way too sickly IMHO), many sell the 'Protein' variety, and a few sell 'Oatibix', presumably made without wheat. There's also a fruit and nut version seen occasionally. And, just as occasionally, I see a shop selling my favourite. The legendary Banana Weetabix. And so I buy a clutch of packets - because I know darned well that it will be weeks before I find anywhere else that both s...

No, this isn't a detailed treatise and specification comparison between the various car propulsion technologies. More me musing on where to go and what to do, in terms of 'choosing my next car'. I currently drive an eight year old Ford C-Max with a three cylinder 1.0 litre turbocharged 'EcoBoost' engine - those exact details becoming relevant below, as you'll see. Definitions The year is 2023 then. 'Hybrid' cars (see definitions below) have been around in production form for 25 years (since the first Toyota Prius), so are almost ubiquitous now. 'Electric' cars (ditto, definition) for about 13 years (since the Nissan Leaf), so are more common but still considered new technology. ' Hybrid ' cars have both (small batteries with) electric motors and  Internal Combustion Engines ( ICE ), with the former handling low speed, low acceleration duties, and the latter handling higher speeds and higher accelerations over longer distances. Most hybrid...