@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 waa waa!

@Mitch no, no, 'AFLAC'

@Mitch You can always try some non-Oracle Java, such as Android

Yay!

Try Android!

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Did you see the new Ara trailer, by the way?

They're launching the Ara beta in Puerto Rico, later this year.

Because it is an American colony, probably?

@Cerberus yes

Good.

It's becoming realer and realer.

it's still mostly a proof of concept

Every prototype is more efficient than the previous.

it's not real until there are multiple generations of product, and a suitable number of modules that work across generations, etc.

But the test version will be launched and available to the public this year.

Google has had many manufacturers already come up with modules.

yes, but even that will just prove that you can have reconfigurable phones under certain circumstances.

Like several different cameras from Toshiba, I believe.

It has a long way to go before it's as good as, say, USB is for computers.

shrugs

You know what, there is no Iphone 7 yet.

should there be?

Maybe Apple will say, "hey, you know what, we can't do it; there will be no Iphone 7".

Or maybe the Iphone 7 will not sell well and be a commercial success.

Or maybe I have a phone that is a lot newer than yours.

Like, say, an LG G2.

all these hypotheticals... where are you going with this?

Just that I have an LG G2 and you don't.

I don't want a G2. If I did, I would have bought the Nexus 5, being the G2-flavoured nexus.

I flashed the latest version of TWRP and now everything seems to be working as it should.

The Nexus is just a worse G2.

Worse battery, worse screen, worse camera...

@Cerberus lower price.

No trickery.

No?

Bootloader is unlocked, factory images are provided for ease of development or flashing or fixing, etc.

The difference is even greater for the 32GB versions.

Well, those are the prices now. But I wouldn't buy either phone now.

Why not?

because they're old.

The G2 is affordable.

Old?

They're pretty new and highly capable.

Even the LG G3 is cheaper than the Nexus 5, by the way.

The N5 is $400 and the G3 is $600 here.

Hah.

How odd.

I see the N5 is no longer really sold here by most shops, by the way.

It was cheaper at some point, around €320 at its lowest.

if I get a contract with my carrier I can get them for $0 and $50, respectively.

Ah, it's still in the Play Store for €350, I see.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 And what would you pay per month?

there seems to be a few variants of phones called "G3" from LG, I'd need to figure out which one is the right one

@Cerberus an extra $10 for 2 years

If I conceded to paying as much as €40/months, which I think is ridiculous, I could probably get any phone I want for free.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 The one without any letters at the end.

They're pulling a Samsung.

Or they're pulling an Apple.

The Apple does not fall far from the tree.

And then it gets a letter.

@Cerberus gsmarena.com/results.php3?sQuickSearch=yes&sName=lg+g3

What her face is determined to win an edit war.

This is not right.

This one, obviously. It has two 3s.

@Cerberus That's not even the half of it. The basic G3 has three variants: LG G3 D855 for Europe, LG G3 D850 for AT&T, LG G3 D851 for T-Mobile

Oh, that, yes.

(I have the D802, the international G2.)

But surely all the GSM ones will work.

The Verizon G2 has wireless charging!

I may buy a Verizon backdoor plus battery off Ebay and use those in my phone, if that works...

@Cerberus You say "surely", but you seriously underestimate how fucked up the North American mobile network is

Did you know that it wasn't until 2002 that the top 5 US mobile carriers actually achieved inter-carrier SMS?

And that was only the top 5.

Haha huh?

But we could always exchange SMS messages all across the world?

Well, no.

not always.

not "across the world"

SMS is part of GSM and not all networks are GSM

But people who went to America could send me SMS messages, couldn't they?

No.

Huh?

Weird.

people who went to America with a European phone would be lucky if their phone worked at all.

Huh.

Something about the passenger pigeons not being the same gauge or something.

I don't remember any of that.

The nice thing about standards: there are so many to choose from.

Then again, I think I got my first mobile phone around 2002.

When I got my first cell phone, it was a CDMA phone. It didn't have texting.

That was in 2000.

It's only been recently, the last 5 years or so, that you could reliably buy a phone and expect it to work at all on a random North American network. And if you want data... hoo boy, that's another story.

This is one big reason why people still buy phones from the carriers. Buying phones from elsewhere is not guaranteed to work.

Even for someone like me, who understands this stuff, it's damn near impossible to figure out.

What frequency do I need? what standards are they using? GSM? HSPA? CDMA? HSPA+? LTE?

Each of those standards can be on different frequencies. Some carriers use one freq band for one standard, and other carriers use a different standard on that same freq

Does a random phone support a random tech on a random freq?

Given a phone, will it work on a random company's network?

If I had hair, I'd pull it out.

This is why I have to make spreadsheets when it's time to shop for phones or plans.

If I wanted to buy a G3 outright from one carrier it's %600. from a different carrier, $700. Are those the same G3? Or is there some subtle difference, which meant that if I bought the first one, unlocked it, and brought it to the second carrier, my phone wouldn't work?

anyway, I'm outta here.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Wow, seriously??

In high school, people were texting all the time.

maybe Ara will fix everything, and I'll be able to buy an Ara phone and just get the radio from my carrier. One can hope.

@Cerberus yes, of course seriously. Texting was not a thing in north america for years.

@Cerberus Yes of course.

and CDMA is still around.

And phones should not be allowed in schools.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Terrible!

bye

But we have to think about those things too when we buy a phone directly from China: which 4G bands does it have?

Bai.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 And now it is not a thing any more...

@tchrist Mmm why not?

We weren't allowed to use them in class.

@Cerberus If they are kept in lockers away from the classroom, then fine.

Nah.

You were just not supposed to use them.

Hello. I have a question and I'm not sure if it would fit better on english.SE, or ell.SE; in short the question is 'What's the chance' vs. 'What are the chances'. I didn't find anything in the search on either site.

@Mateon1 Well done for searching! Would that more people did.

What's the specific question about those two?

@AndrewLeach I'm wondering what usage is more proper, unless both are proper.

@Cerberus That's something of a joke. We are not Germans.

@Mateon1 "Which is more proper" depends entirely on circumstances and context.

@AndrewLeach I'm wondering what context is good for both usages, then

@Mateon1 I think that is either "too broad" or "opinion-based". SE questions (on any site, not just ELU) need to be specific and answerable. However, chat is a lot less rigorous.

I have a sentence, "What's the chance/what are the chances of [unlikely event]?". I'm wondering which one of these I should use.

"What are the chances" is more colloquial; "What's the chance" smacks of greater precision, to me.

@tchrist Teachers make sure they don't use them too much in class, of course.

We allow them, because we're not strictly class.

I tell them to stop playing with their phones when they're doing so too much.

@Toroidal Hello, what are you doing posting random characters?

Are you your cat?

I see.

Ahh.

I was about to start flagging all your posts if it was what it took to make you stop.

So, just like a native to the lingo, then.

I once saw someone using T9 input flick through several suggestions to arrive at "sed" as a form of "said" even though "said" was one of the suggestions they flicked past.

Nobody would use that list though. There's two many different subcultures' slangs mixed up for it to be representative of anyone's actual use.

Who talks in text-speak? Or who texts in text-speak?

Oh, what was "m9"?

Hm.

Mate.

M9 means mate. OK, yes, of course.

k

An amusing one in use around here for a while was "book" meaning "cool". Can you see why?

No T9 dictionary.

Or rather, incorrect guesswork.

Hmm. Your list gives that definition, but not the etymology.

G'nite.

And he's gone.

@AndrewLeach Close, the T9 dictionary suggests "book" first, then "cool" after.

That's what I meant by incorrect guesswork. A good phone actually guesses which word you probably meant from the context.

Which isn't all that difficult if an adjective is more likely than a noun.

Or there's a particular collocation.

One word responses don't give any context. And T9 paying too much attention to context would be tricky too, since you couldn't learn to automatically thumb common words if the sequence kept changing.

Yes. It's six or seven years since I had a phone which didn't have a real on-screen keyboard.

Hi

hi

any native english speaker here?

@Toroidal Isn’t that an Australian tick?

@AndrewLeach For certain values of "real". I prefer deterministic typing personally, but I realize that others prefer hand-waving gestures.

Restless grow the natives.

hii

Guys I have a question

which one of those two sentences is correct " The professor called on me for question 1 " or " The professor called me on for question 1 "

@RegDwigнt Would I be misled in presuming that Russian has dozens of ways of expressing this?