Micro HDMI
USB Type C 3.2 with Power Delivery 3.0
USB Type C 3.2 with Power Delivery 3.0
Micro SD Memory Card Reader
3.5mm Headphone Jack
HDMI version: 2.0
USB-C Interface: Display Port (DP Alt Mode)
USB version: 3.2 Gen 2 (up to 10 Gbps)
But the 2x HDMI are visible + listed. :(
100% more usb-c please, with alt modes. USB4 mandates every port be able to do DisplayPort output.
I really hope we start to see phones and tablets which have >1 USB port. Lenovo has an absurd beast phone, a Legion phone, with both dual batteries and dual USB-c (USB3) ports. If we get to 2030 and phones can't plug in to GPUs something is f-ed and the system is broken, tech has ossified grossly. Hopefully happens sooner, and hopefully we see dual ports emerge midway to then too. Would be such a great capability set.
Why? That’s an incredibly minor use case. If you’re expecting something this niche to become the norm then you’re destined to be disappointed.
My dream is much smaller. I just want whatever hardware circuitry is required to accomplish the scenario where a phone that is plugged in to a good power source runs directly from the wall, shutting off battery charge completely, not trickle charging all day and night.
And even before then.
I have an M1 Macbook Air which will only output video over one of its 2 USB-C ports, not the other. There is nothing visible on the case or in the OS to indicate this.
I have had an Arm and an AMD Thinkpad which both have only dual USB-C, and both unpredictably switch between one or the other being bootable, with no discenable pattern.
Weird, ever since I had USB-C based Mac Mini or MacBook (two Intel, two M1) they could reliably output video on any of the two, three, or four ports (as long as I don't go past the limit). They're essentially symmetric on all features.
PCIe transport ("Thunderbolt") and Power Delivery are both optional though, I think.
Unfortunately its not a phone. Its a mini tablet. But I find the size ideal for daily use - browsing，reading pdfs, small sketches . (no SIM slot though)
Wish every battery powered device would have a setting for this.
As opposed to always charging when charger is plugged in, and always charging up to 100% (non-configurable).
But more notably, I think around half also have charge control. It's just been on/off. But it would be a pretty basic bash script to make this happen.
But it depends on the laptop. From what I understand not all laptops have the drivers for power control ie. the ability to from-software tell the laptop to stop charging
Maybe we should be filing feature requests for it;
But reciprocally, what's the new ultra-hot device? Gaming decks. Lenovo just announced theirs today. Steam, Asus, and dozen of others have amazing devices. And there are still gaming-centric phones galore.
This should be an easy ask. It should be a lock. Android alas is kind of a weird divergent hard to use OS that makes everything difficult. Apple hasn't supported anyone elses GPUs in a long long time. But in general, this should just be easy simple & doable, were it not for the sins of these ultra-bizarre weird not-PC but so close systems. ChromeOS finally found jesus & is now running on Wayland, because it was obviously the correct & only sensible choice all along, And has huge advantages, such as having a huge world of people optimizing & making the system better. I don't know how Android ever pivots (they just steal everything ChromeOS (which runs Android great) is doing), but it should, so that it can make ideas like this unimaginably easy & simple tasks, versus today where this sort of idea is a painstaking slow & awful endeavor to make happen.
So much of computing is a story of niche finding leverage & finding adherents. The early adopters are just those who see potential, and they continually have reshaped what computing is. Writing off "niche" as uninteresting & minor ignores how sensible & clear & obvious so many advancements are & should be.
If people could plug in their phone and run Linux apps on a full size monitor they'd probably pay a lot more for the phone, knowing they didn't then also need a nice laptop.
I used Samsung DEX a few times on my tablet. The mouse plus touchscreen combination works well. The keyboard is a little worse because there is no Esc key on Android and Ctrl [ is uncomfortable.
If one IS a software developer of course, then you probably need a lot of Linux apps, and it would be cool to have them alongside a platform that's way more reliable than Linux, so that your browser and email and calendar and music are always there and don't bog down.
The point is not that phones should be connected to GPUs, that’s a silly idea.
But nevertheless for plenty of reasons including ecology and autonomy of people, it should be the case that any device should work with any other device as long as anyone is able to develop a driver. And there should be no permanent lock against custom drivers.
Every usb-c to HDMI adapter has to actively convert the signals which is why one end is usually much larger than the other.
We're much more likely to get phones with 0 USB ports (justified by 'security', 'water proofness' or 'simplicity') where the only charging is wireless.
That would be an interesting thing for the video production industry. Basically the entire market is divided between "professional" equipment, in which SDI continues to dominate (with some movement towards SMPTE 2110 aka IP), and "amateur" equipment which is all HDMI - with very few products on the boundary and supporting both connectors.
Consumer grade digital cameras have only recently (10 years, maybe less) started being able to output the live video feed over HDMI. Before that, believe me or not I've stumbled upon MANY camera models from 2013 or before that had an HDMI port, but all it was good for was displaying pictures from the memory card on a TV.
It would certainly make life easier in a lot of "small streamer" setups. Currently, if you don't want to torture your camera's battery, you need to get a silly (often third-party) "dummy battery" that you can (hopefully!) plug into an ordinary USB power supply; and on top of that, a separate mini/micro HDMI -> full HDMI cable to plug into a capture card. If you could reduce that to a single USB-C with PD and DP - trust me, every silly cable you can eliminate from your setup is an enormous win.
Even better, if these cameras could talk the regular USB "webcam" protocol in addition to DP, eliminating the capture card for the overwhelmingly common setup of "I just want to look very good on video calls".
But that opens a can of worms: in any non-trivial setup, a camera (one camera) is merely a small piece of a much more elaborate puzzle. Even seemingly simple setups end up converting the signal back&forth between some crazy stuff. On one job, we needed to run an SDI or HDMI cable between the floors, but couldn't do either because the building was untouchable; so we've used a couple of HDMI -> HDBaseT converters to run the signal over existing Ethernet cables. Turns out, it was no longer possible to convert the resulting HDMI signal again to SDI (we've tried many converters, all failed), which limited our choice of video mixers. Would the signal make it through if it originated as DP? Your guess is as good as mine.
Broadcast is a strange place. I still laugh whenever I think of Quad-SDI; only the broadcast industry could ever come up with that. Things need to work with one another and even if every single person in the world agreed that HDMI must die, starting today, I'm fairly certain we'd still see new equipment being made in 2033 that supports it.
It seems like the last few standards started really robust and open because of the lack of compatibility, and then greed got involved and vendors just slipped in something to make it difficult cross connect. I assume so people would have to buy more of their stuff.
The focus on "realtime" makes the standards have worse quality in practice (bad handling of dropped or bad bits), and makes it much harder for the IP based standards to be routed (network congestion from high bitrate through uplinks). WebRTC by comparison can be quite nice.
I seriously don't have any hope for sanity in that market.
Consistently good colors. Sometimes even PC monitors won't negotiate properly with the PC and start displaying washed out colors. IIRC this had to be forced on a Raspberry Pi on the PI side. Not all monitors can be adjusted.
Consistently no under/overscan. For some reason, the TVs we had in conference rooms figured it would be smart to cut the borders of the image and zoom in, so you get missing bits and whatever's left is a blurry mess.
For the TV situation, you usually don't have a full remote to adjust it, if it even supports that. You often don't have time to look up things in the TV's typically crappy menu system. I've usually found the option to disable over scan, but using full-range RGB seems less common.
Also, HDMI seems to lag DisplayPort capabilities when it comes to higher resolutions and refresh rates. When my 2013 MBP came out, it could drive a 4k@60 screen over DP. HDMI required the 2.0 version to do that, which, IIRC, came much later.
I think that one very much depends on when you chose to look at it. HDMI 2.1 has more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4, enough to do 4k@120 which DP1.4 wouldn't be able to do it without dropping color down to 4:2:0. DisplayPort 2.0 devices are starting to come out, but even Nvidia's RTX 4000 series still do not have DisplayPort 2.0 (but do have HDMI 2.1). While TV started supporting HDMI 2.1 around 2019, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X having HDMI 2.1 ports.
So while DisplayPort may be ahead now with DisplayPort 2.0, HDMI was ahead for at least 4 years with HDMI 2.1
Although, if I'm not mistaken, my particular PC monitor initially didn't support HDMI 2.0, even though it's a 4k panel. There was a further revision which included it. I have that revision, but support is still somewhat wonky, in that it can't seem to switch on its own from 2.0 to 1.4b.
I've only encountered overscan on TVs not monitors, but I don't give conference room presentations, which would be very annoying. On Macs there compensation for that.
I've had trouble with colors where it uses YPbPr rather than RGB, but that seems to be an Apple thing where it's done on purpose for non-Apple-approved displays and it happens for both HDMI and DP. Generating a custom EDID profile fixes that. Can't recall having trouble with color range, sometimes the display has a setting but the default always looked better to me.
I've used 4k@60 HDMI just fine (and 4k@30 on an early Apple adapter), but more often use 1080p anyway. I use USB-C with my 4k displays which likely runs DP on them.
Right. So... DP is better than HDMI?
The color issue I had was not with a Mac but with an HP laptop on an HP monitor. My understanding is that there's something about "broadcast colors" or something, which is "regular" RGB only with a narrower range. I think the PC thought the monitor was a TV with a limited range, which the monitor was not.
With the TVs I plug into, it's usually harder to judge since their color rendition tends to be all over the place anyway and tend to have the reverse issue (too much contrast).
I remember the overscan control on the mac, but it still was a PITA to have to fiddle with that instead of, you know, just plugging the screen in and being in business.
While I've also had numerous positive experiences with HDMI where things seemingly "just worked", I've never had an issue with DP. It always worked. Hell, even my gaming GPU, which came out a while after HDMI 2, and supported it out of the box, connected to my monitor with full HDMI 2 support, still has weird colors compared to DP. No tweaking in the AMD drivers managed to get me the proper output, so I went and bought a cheap Chinese DP KVM instead. Which worked with no fuss.
All this makes me automatically pick DP if given the choice, and discount any computer or screen that only does HDMI. Which makes it pretty tough to buy a TV, so I just watch movies on my computer monitor.
I might get one anyway, if they ship to SA. At least micro HMDI is still dockable.
(Just out of curiosity - does anyone know of any other option to use an external display with this tablet? Are wireless displays a thing?)
> USB-C Interface: Display Port (DP Alt Mode)
Did you assume it definitely will support DP out for both?
Power bricks of the 1990s didn't have this problem. The barrel connectors were almost indestructible. You could drop bricks on VGA connectors and they'd still work.
I have never yet broken a USB-C cable. Not one.
When I used an iPhone for a couple of years, I went through approximately a Lightning cable per month, sometimes more. At one point I took a carrier bag of broken Lightning cables to the electronics recycling.
You must treat equipment exceptionally roughly.
(Now the cat chewing on cables in another matter xD)
I will say that I really wish they had managed to not have that middle section sticking up in the female connectors - cleaning out my phone's USB-C port is about 20x harder than cleaning out a lighting port because I feel like I'm going to break that little thing in the middle.
Like if my phone is low on battery I plug it into a portable battery and shove the phone and portable battery (connected by a USB-C cable) into my pocket, like any consumer would. I then go hiking, snowshoeing, biking, sleeping, like any consumer would. Cables have bent and broken in my pocket in these scenarios, among thousands of others.
My parent comment was yesterday; today's USB-C cable broke when it got stuck in an office chair's wheel caster, bending the sheet metal housing. Thi doesn't happen with ANY connector of the 1990s. BNC, RCA, DB-9, 1/8" headphone jacks, 5.5x2.5 barrel connectors, they ALL withstood office chair crushing and were all probably designed with consumer abuse like office chairs in mind.
I've even run over DB-9 and BNC connectors with heavy duty carts, they were fine.
USB C doesn't have that issue. There are high end cables and just kind of OK cables, but at least with the braided ones I normally buy, there aren't many terrible ones at any price. They decoupled reliability from craftsmanship and materials.
Pockets should be considered industrial duty environments.
Right next to a person is a much harsher environment than people think it is, stuff people carry tends to break and wear.
I'm not surprised the cables break in pockets in that kind of scenario, although I haven't experienced it myself with my admittedly much lighter and less varied lifestyle (lots of walking, occasional hiking, maintenance work sometimes including light carpentry, but no sports or biking).
There seems to be a very large variance in percieved reliability of cables and tech in general. Are you buying the same brand every time you need to replace something? Do more athletic people with more muscle have problems because their weight or level of force they commonly apply is more likely to break stuff? Probably just unrelated factors but it does seem like people who lift are more like to hate new tech. Is it about what clothes you wear? Is it the phone itself having something about the connector?
Obviously USB C has a problemwith a few specific environments, but I'm not exactly sure what those cases are.
While not saying USB-C is a great choice instead. Personally I just wish everyone could have generic magnetic Magsafe style connectors.
Just terrible overall.
Inventing a new standard with a weak sheet metal connector and 19 pins to deliver + and - isn't a solution to the above.
Regardless it's a crappy choice for consumer electronics because it's got no voltage negotiation. You can fry stuff with it, and chargers aren't universal.
2.1mm is a wonderful connector for switches, sensors, solar panels, and power you need to daisy chain, but PD is pretty much perfect for point to point medium power devices.
USBC seems to break far less often than anything else that's cheap and small. I don't see why 19 pins is an issue unless you just really like simplicity.
It absolutely looks like something that would fail all the time... But it doesn't. Somehow they made it so even the cheap knockoffs are durable.
So cost and complexity increase. MicroHDMI does suck, but despite that raspberry pi 4 has two of them.
They're a great company but MicroUSB? Really?