sbird

Honestly the actual hardware is very competent for the price, and a lot of the technologies Valve is showing off (foveated streaming, Windows PC games on ARM Linux VR, etc.) are awesome!

It’s more how people are comparing the price to the heavily subsidised Meta doodad that is less open, has similar or worse specs (especially when it comes to streaming it seems), and is owned by Meta (selling your eyeballs to advertisers is not something I would like to do personally)

It’s 2160x2160, so less than 4K (which is 3840x2160) horizontally, since it’s a different aspect ratio but it’s still more pixels. About 8 million for a standard 4K display, while it’s 9 million for the Frame. Even streaming games on such a high resolution display is performance intensive, plus you have the controller + eye tracking

VR headsets effectively need to run two 4K displays, one for each eye, and you have all the processing for controller tracking too. You also have eye tracking, they’re doing the whole foveated streaming thing everybody has been gushing over about (it’s really cool tech!). The mobile chip they used is nothing special, it’s a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a 3 year old smartphone processor (certainly powerful enough to run lighter PC games, but nothing more than that. It’s kind of insane that a phone can even do that nowadays!)

So I’m doubly wrong! That’s kind of neat

That’s actually pretty cool, I’ll be making an XMPP account then. Adding to my collection of chat apps!

Oh whoops, I didn’t know that! That’s kind of neat, didn’t know had encryption. I will amend my comment

Also, please don’t use LLMs for simple questions. Aside from the ethical, legal, and environmental concerns of LLMs, they also tend to be wrong more often than not, and when they are right, there is lots of word soup because the chatbot needs to act like it’s a smartass, to put it bluntly, because its job is to market itself and push you towards subscriptions. Try to avoid LLMs wherever you can, it’s almost always better to search it yourself. Don’t offload thinking to a chatbot, it’s not very good at it!

The only usecase where LLMs could have an application is translation. I have a friend who doesn’t understand English very well, so they use a chatbot to translate things into their native language, and it’s really helpful for that. Of course, it can get stuff wrong, but for non-critical stuff, it’s kind of neat! That avoids the question of the insane water and power usage involved in training these models, as well as the disregard of the rights of artists and creators by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. I believe my friend uses a local model, so there’s that.

I personally don’t use LLMs, they’re more trouble than anything in my opinion.

Have you ever had any experience with Scratch? It’s an awesome tool to learn basic programming concepts like loops, conditions, etc. I played around with it in my early years, but even if you’re older, it’s still fun to mess around with the blocks to make weird programs. I particularly loved the “remix” functionality, it lets you see the structure of other people’s projects and you can tweak them (and thus learn about how it works!)

After my years of doing Scratch, I moved on to Python, and it is probably the easiest programming language to learn (depending on how you define that, e.g. HTML), code is very human readable and unfamiliar symbols are avoided for the most part

W3Schools has a lot of good Python guides, and there are SO MANY good programming tutorials online. Back in my day, I learnt Python by reading a good book (and it was an awesome book), but resources to learn programming have never been more plentiful!

My advice is to work on a simple project, could be a small game (with or without PyGame), or maybe a useful tool that you want to make, lay out what you want it to do, and along the way when you don’t know something, search it up online (W3Schools, forums, video guides, docs, whatever) and figure out how to do it. Practice doesn’t make you perfect, but more practice does. Does that make sense? Not really, but definitely try your best!

Well, there’s also IRC and XMPP. Could those work better for older devices? Dunno, but neither are encrypted, so don’t use them for anything sensitive. Signal is good if you want security, they’ve been audited a lot, but they are based in the U.S. which isn’t great.

I’ve also heard of Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer, both are relatively new, but I would prefer Matrix over both since it’s more easily self-hostable (+ all those different clients to choose from!)

edit: I really didn’t know, but looks like XMPP does support encryption! (and it’s enabled by default on most clients!)

I have tried it before, it’s neat, but notifications are not reliable since it is peer to peer (both devices need to be online for a connection), a bit like Briar if you’ve used that before. I don’t think it uses the Tor network, so it might be faster than Briar (but also less anonymous?)

I don’t have experience with the jami daemon though, so can’t comment if that solves the peer to peer issue.

I personally like Matrix the best, since you have federation, options for encrypted chats, self-host able with Continuwuity (or Synapse), lots of alternative clients for nearly every OS (even mobile Linux, you have Fractal! FluffyChat also works but it’s definitely oriented towards Android devices)

Must have missed that, sorry! No idea if it was always on the site, either way my bad!

The post has been amended

The Clicks also has a programmable switch and notification light fwiw. Both are featured here.

It wasn’t listed on their website when I checked a few weeks ago, has it been updated?

edit: Yep, I can see that on their site now. Has it always been there? Dunno, but it looks customisable too, which is good!

There is a customisable “Clicks Key” on the keyboard, whereas the MP02 has a button on the side rails, so it’s just user preference I guess? The fingerprint reader is in a similar situation too.

Clicks has confirmed bootloader will be unlockable.

That’s good, hopefully it’ll be unlockable without any cloud shenanigans that other companies pull

I don’t think USB speeds have been confirmed yet.

If USB3 isn’t listed, assume it is USB2. The MP02 labels their port as supporting USB3 speeds. Time will tell, but when a manufacturer doesn’t advertise the speed of USB it’s almost always USB2 480Mbps.

But phones are a totally different space.

That was my point, this is their first smartphone. The first device. The keyboard case is kind of neat but phones are a beast of their own (software development, thermal management, finding suppliers for all the parts, etc.)

I wouldn’t get either right now, but the MP02 seems more open and transparent than Clicks, plus the software looks more polished and keyboard-centric with the commands and whatnot. I really don’t like how Clicks advertised the “starting at” price with the $199 deposit on their site.

edit: It seems they’ve changed that now and are advertising the early bird price with a slash over the retail price, which is better! Still doesn’t help my suspicions though.

I think the custom keyboard centric interface will make it quite a bit nicer to use than the Clicks, and I love that it’ll get a notification LED (a proper customisable one, not a Gemini light) as well as a programmable switch. It just seems like the more open and customisable option right now, while the Clicks seems a little shady with how they’re marketing it.

Both are only on their preorder stage I think, so I wouldn’t get either right away. I would wait for independent hand-on reviews on the MP2.

The MP2 is smaller than the Clicks, which could be nice for pocketability (but yes, the battery is smaller). The lack of a microSD slot has already been mentioned, which kind of sucks, but realistically you probably won’t be hitting the storage limits on it (you aren’t running any storage-heavy games or taking super high quality photos and videos)

Some notes comparing the Clicks and MP2 from a comment I made in my Lemmy account:

The Clicks is plastic fantastic while the Minimal Phone 2 is metal (+ glass?). Weight is not an issue, the MP2 is only 8g lighter, but it might feel a bit denser due to the smaller size.

The screen on the Clicks is a bit rounded compared to the flat one on the MP2.

You also have a voice key on the Clicks, which could be a pro or con depending on how much you’ll use it and, more importantly, how often it will be accidentally pressed. The MP2 has a switch that can be reprogrammed, which seems really useful!

edit: The Clicks has a customisable button on the keyboard! (different from the voice key) Seems neat, it depends on whether you prefer a button on the side or on the keys. Original post continues below:

The cameras look similar on both devices, but you do have a cutout on the Clicks while the MP2 has a Sony Xperia style forehead (which should also mean better speaker quality?)

The fingerprint sensor is on the spacebar on the Clicks, but on the MP2 it’s on the side. I personally prefer on the side button, but either work.

The MP2 has a notification LED that can be configured per-app!!!

edit: So does the Clicks, yay! Original post continues now:

As for I/O, They both have 3.5mm jacks, hooray!! The MP2 does not have microSD card slots (they are transparent about this), but the Clicks does. The MP2 supports USB3 (5Gbps) and DP over USB-C, while I can’t find the specs of the port on the Clicks website (so I’m assuming it is USB2, please correct me if it was mentioned in a promotional video).

They both have a squareish aspect ratio (the MP2 is 40 pixels taller, but basically identical) and the software looks a bit different: Niagara Launcher on the Clicks and a custom solution on the MP2 that looks a bit nicer, both run full Android though.

The MP2, as you have said, is more open with an unlockable bootloader, while the Clicks makes no mention of this. Both work with any carrier.

They both use the same Dimensity 8300 chip, they both run recent Android, 12GB of RAM, etc., so there shouldn’t be significant performance differences

I would rather go with the MP2 if I did need the physical keyboard, it looks to be more open and has a nicer build. USB3 + DP over USB-C, the programmable switch, and notification LED is also really important for me. The storage is not expandable on the MP2 though, but realistically you’re not going to be using much on this kind of device I feel like (goes up to a 512GB config if you need it)

You also have the fact that the Minimal Phone is in its second generation, while this is Clicks’ first device, so support might be a bit better. In both cases though, they are relatively new companies, so keep that in mind. They both have a 1 year warranty.

I also feel like Clicks is a little shady, the website shows a “starting price” of $199 (when that’s just the deposit, not the full price of $499), and it’s very difficult to find some of the specs for the thing (it’s not nearly as detailed as the MP2’s kickstarter page). You also have the whole supported by an influencer marketing that doesn’t do it any favours. Neither is particularly great in terms of reputation, but Minimal seems more transparent than Clicks in my opinion.

I wouldn’t go for it personally, it looks a bit shady, being promoted by an influencer, and their marketing is quite opaque. I also hate the price shown on their site is/was their deposit price, a fraction of the actual base price.