Motorola Edge 40 sucks

The bad:

• Screen too big, can't operate with one hand / can't reach all screen positions with the thumb when operating the device with just one hand.
• The system auto-updates itself even if that is explicitly turned off.
• The Panorama photoshoot software is gobshit and misrecognizes the device tilting. Sony does a much better job here.
• The setting "Show pop-up to choose the desired mode [choose from File transfer/MTP, USBnet tethering, MIDI, PTP, Charge only]" does nothing; or rather, as I later found out, the pop-up only shows when in Peripheral mode. But the Edge40 only enters Peripheral mode when connected to a USB-A port. If connected to a USB-C/Thunderbolt port, it goes into Host mode and one has to manually open the USB mode dialog and select "File transfer".
• No light indicator for charging.
• Edge lights are fake, it's just a curved screen. Dedicated LED strips would have been much more to the point.
• Curved screen edge: tapping UI elements in that region is difficult.
• Phone randomly disconnects Bluetooth devices (happens with headphones and the car stereo alike...)
• When the screen comes on as a result of a notification or phone call, it will stay on when certain apps are open which have a screen blocker (e.g. osmand, DI.fm), and now the battery drains so much faster
• One full battery charge depletes in roughly 2–3 days of standby.
• Android 13/14-related bugs that are WONTFIX (e.g. in osmand)
• Can't configure the MPEG4 frame size of videos; 7 seconds 42 MB (48 Mbit/s) are you fucking kidding me

The good:

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Thanks for reading my review. (Update July 2024: The Sony Xperia 10 VI is much better in almost all these respects.)

Posted 2023-12-21 17:12 / Tags: Phones. / link

Notes on photo sphere/panoramic EXIF metadata

• Google's EXIF/XMP metadata tag specification for panoramic images
• Panorama images with sky are to have a negative value for the CroppedAreaTopPixels tag. (The panoramic viewer of Facebook ignores the value altogether, though, and assumes the horizon in the middle of the picture.)
• If a camera or software normally produces panoramic images with cylindrical projection, then doing a vertical capture actually produces a transverse cylindrical image. There is no standardized value for the EXIF ProjectionType field to cover this. (One option is to reproject them to equirectangular — which, again, is not very well supported.)
• Facebook's document on what tags to set
• The Facebook web interface insists that FullPanoHeightPixels be half the size of FullPanoWidthPixels. Else you get “no new photos were uploaded”.

/ Tags: Photo.