There's an easy explanation for it too. Pretty much every single high-end phone released in the last two years uses a Sony sensor. They completely dominate the smartphone sensor market right now.
[1] Current list of these unremovable apps on my Nexus 4: Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Google Presentations, Cloud Print, E-mail, Google Now, Google Drive, Google Earth, Google Indic Keyboard, Google Keep, Google News & Weather, Google Play Books, Google Play Movies, Google Play Music, Google Play Games, Google Play News kiosk, Google street view, Google talkback, Google text to speech, Google+, Hangouts, Google Wifi connectivity, Youtube.
That seems a little short sighted. You seem to assume the only way an update can fail is in because of a software bug, and it's just a matter of not enough testing. If the phone loses power for some reason, or one of the hardware components is misbehaving, I would rather it not brick my phone. This is the industry standard, because shit happens, and CYA is a good thing.
> Sorry, not buying this. If the phone had expandable storage, then yeah maybe, but this is the 16GB story all over again (woops, 11GB actually and less after the Play apps updates).
Buying what? I'm not selling you anything. Is there somewhere I tried to convince you it was ultimately the best solution? I simply explained it had an additional (likely primary) purpose that you were not accounting for.
Android correctly gets a lot of flack for having a fragmented user base which makes it a security and developing nightmare, if this feature were to become standard it would help everyone.
It should also be noted that they are giving away unlimited cloud storage for photos and videos which makes leaving some free space for updates a lot less painful. You probably won't fill your phone with app binaries, it's the photos and videos that take up lots of space.
While I don't think you can properly "uninstall" Google+ and Hangouts, you can "disable" them, which makes them inaccessible. I don't think you get updates pushed for disabled apps, either.
It also stops their services, and whatnot. It wastes room inside of the ROM partition, but not inside of the user data partition.
I'll also be abandoning several paid apps that I've bought over the years that are only available on the Play Store. It's going to be hard extricating myself from that ecosystem.
That said, there is TREMENDOUS variance in image quality, even if you're using the same sensor. The ISP and color tuning process is extraordinarily complex and severely subjective; the noise filtering and encoding processes are incredibly difficult as well.
And then there is Autofocus; HDR blending; when to do HDR at all; video stabilization; and so on and so on.
I'm not expecting D810 quality, but I do find it suspect when artifacts appear in blue skies. There is plenty of light, there shouldn't be any noise. Then again, there are a lot of pixels packed into a very small space.
Based on what we're seeing here, there might be a viable competitor to the iPhone in this space, but that hasn't really been the case until now.
Let's stop perpetuating this falsehood. Agreed that iPhones produce great results. But as you can see from the previous and current DxOMark results, there have been several cameras that had better image quality than the iPhone. High end Samsung and Sony cameras have been consistently good for a while.
what do you think of nexus 5x in that regard?
The Nexus 5X's camera also kills the Nexus 5's. Nexus 5's camera was poor.
Looking at any sort of comparative review, you'll find that on some shots the Samsung produces better results; on others, an iPhone looks better. Each phone may perform a little differently in different situations -- low light, high contrast, whatever. But taken as a whole, at least some Android flagships' cameras have been as good as the iPhone's for a couple of years now.
Nexus phones have been noticeably worse, but they've also tended to cost 60% as much, so it's not exactly an easy comparison to make.
Sony gets a lot of hate online from people comparing full-resolution pictures at 100%. Sony has been using 23MP/25MP sensors in their own phones for a while, but in auto mode images are supersampled to 8MP. In manual mode you can use the full resolution. People always compare the full 25MP pictures at 100% to full 12MP pictures from other devices at 100%. And at that point, they will indeed look a bit less good and less detailed. At Sony's default 8MP things actually do look great. And their camera apps are pretty good too.
Perhaps just as importantly, it takes at least four seconds for the camera app to activate and be ready to take a photo. Simply put, the software is awful.
So yeah Sony, you used to have shit cameras but amazing battery life, but now the battery life is trending downwards, great job.
And yes everyone, if you look at just the hardware the Sony phone's cameras should be great, but the software and processing has always been so shitty that the pictures you get have been awful despite the great components.
I know Aptina[1] has made sensors used in smartphones in the past. And was also the initial manufacturer for sensors used by Nikon in their 1 series mirrorless cameras.
Toshiba has manufactured some in the past, but sold their image sensor business to Sony[2] last year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptina [2] http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/4/9848222/sony-buys-toshiba-...