3x14: Hard Where Thoughts

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which no news is good news, hardware makes us hard-wary, and:

  • [00:01:45] The PlayStation 5 and the Xbox. Specifically, can you get a PS5? We can't (and Sony admitted it), but the graphical things look amazing. They claim to have eliminated loading times with a new super-fast SSD... we're looking forward to that, but what's more interesting is that the two consoles seem to have pretty different business models...
  • [00:26:00] ...and in related news: exclusives. Microsoft have just bought Zenimax for $7.5bn, and this won't be their last acquisition, although at least the Bethesda part of the purchase will apparently run "semi-independently"
  • [00:41:36] And the final hardware question: are you going to buy a Pixel 5? The announcement of what the Pixel 5 will actually be was after recording time but before release time for this show, inconveniently, but we still have thoughts, and would like to hear yours...

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

Download from https://badvoltage.org

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

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As a fellow member of the IAFTWTH* I have totally given up on the idea of operating a phone with one hand. Trying to get a phone small enough that meets my essential specs is hard enough without adding size limits. Unfortunatly I always need: Less than £200 (I smash my phone a lot), ruggedised phone (so I smash it less), dual SIM unlocked with a wide range of supported frequencies (I travel quite a bit for work, and often need local numbers).

Being a bit of a tin-foil-twat™, I try to somewhat de-Google my phones. However, to not brick it this normally falls short of actually replacing the OS, as no one has worked out how to do it on the janky no-brand monstrosities I buy. The really perverse thing is that normally the best phones for replacing Android with a de-Googled OS are Google Pixels. There is something deeply wrong with the best way to avoid the Apple/Google ecosystems, is to buy another Google product.

*International Association For Those With Tiny Hands