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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Daydream SDK currently only works on Nexus 6P, but comes with this warning:

> Caution: The 6P's thermal performance is not representative of the consumer Daydream-ready devices that will be launching later this year. In particular, expect the 6P to thermally throttle CPU and GPU performance after a short period of use, depending on workload.

It seems that it's a hardware issue.

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That is precisely the problem - the 6P was touted as the best top-of-the-line Android phone when it was launched - just a year ago. And now, it is "not representative of the consumer Daydream-ready devices that will be launching later this year". So while Pixel is ready for daydream VR today, it very well might not work at all with the next big thing that Google announces in a year or six months..

Yeah, I'm pretty peeved. I have a Nexus 6P and seeing that Daydream doesn't support it (unless I root it and turn off the thermal throttling perhaps?) is absurd.

What's the alternative? Not announce new features that won't perform well on current hardware? If details emerge that they could have made the 6P perform well but chose not to, that's something to be disappointed about, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

If you realize too late your product is not fit for purpouse [1], you recall and replace it. Especially if you're a big estabilished company flush with cash and an expensive brand to protect. (I wonder if their decision to drop the Nexus brand had a part here...)

[1] Obviously the VR SDK is not the benchmark here, the other well publicized overheating problems with consumer apps are

Unfortunately the overheating issues on 810 made a lot of this gen Android devices unable to perform well under load for extended periods of time. There's nothing you can really do when the SoC throttles down to almost no performance after a bit of time.

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