Database Info

To you, what is the one most important feature of a smart-phone

Okay, let's gather some data. I want to know what the majority at XDA find that they rely on the most on a smart-phone?
Take the poll and look at the results.
To those of you who aren't sure what they find the most important feature for them, here is a short criteria list:
Personal Information Management
Calendar
Contacts
Notes
Tasks
To-do
Finances
Passwords
Reminders
Communication
Call Quality & Clearness
QWERTY Keyboard
Phone Log
Email and Messaging Compatibility
Travel and Assistant
Dictionary
Calculator
Unit Converter
Bar-code Scanner
GPS
Alarm Clock
Encyclopedia via Web
Multimedia
Music
Video
Picture
Entertainment via Web
Games
File management
Speaker Quality and Loudness
Camera & Audio Recorder
Sound Recordings
Captured Pictures
Recorded Videos
Productivity
Word documents
Spreadsheets
Presentations
Other Documents
Audio Editor
Video Editor
Image Editor
Computer Programming
I am also working on a personal project and I need help from anyone who is willing to participate. I would like to organize a list for smart phone criteria. I want to correctly categorize each feature and sub-feature to the correct and most APPROPRIATE parent category. I will take the suggestions of each new post. And I do hope that at least a few of you participate in the poll and also give me other features to add to the list and give me category advice.

If I had to pick just one then I suppose I'd say communication; but I think this poll kind of misses the point, to be honest: the reason I want a smartphone is precisely the fact that it is NOT limited to just one set of functions. If it only did one of those six things then I wouldn't buy it regardless of which of the six it is. The fact that it does all six is what's important.

Shasarak said:
If I had to pick just one then I suppose I'd say communication; but I think this poll kind of misses the point, to be honest: the reason I want a smartphone is precisely the fact that it is NOT limited to just one set of functions. If it only did one of those six things then I wouldn't buy it regardless of which of the six it is. The fact that it does all six is what's important.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The point of this thread is to see what users like the most, so people (the ones who make your phone) can decide what is trendy right now. If they know what is trendy, they can spend a bit more time on improving something that is currently in demand, and less time on the less desirable features. They can also look at the smallest probabilities and see why people do not like that feature. Maybe then, they would understand why people don't use the feature. Then they can make decisions on not what is most beneficial to improve, but on what NEEDS improvement. Keep in mind that time is always moving forward so distributing equal attention and work on all features is probably uneconomical. Of course, this is only a personal experiment. Sorry, people.
I didn't ask what makes a smart phone essential (as in necessary). I asked, what is the feature that is most essential (ahem... useful and most addicting) to you.
Ya know, I am fairly certain that I use PIM more than Communication. If a smart-phone specializes in every feature such as awesome communication capabilities, awesome recording capabilities, and awesome multimedia capability, but fails to implement useful PIM management buttons/software/capabilities, then I would look for another phone. But if it only had an awesome PIM implementation than I wouldn't buy it because a smart-phone is an all-in-one device. So your point is invalid to me, and would make sense on a topic talking about how useless every other feature--except communication--is.
Please, reconsider the fact that I said smart-phone. I said nothing about travel phones, basic phones, business phones, or multimedia/music phones, or camera phones. I mean okay, maybe there is a phone that you like and think that is a perfect 10 for each category. But considering that all features are really good, I WILL still ask you what do you like the most about it? It's so simple, that I am don't know why you have to deviate from the purpose of this poll.
Otherwise, you are saying that your preference on a phone is perfectly and equally distributed. That would mean you love PIM 16%, Communication 16%, Travel and Assistant 16%, Multimedia 16%, Camera & Recorder 16%, and Productivity 16%. This is impossible in the real world.
So my topic absolutely makes sense. I think YOU are missing the point.
Please vote people. Thanks.

Essay about Android

Taking a speech class and had a chance to write about the Android platform. Figured I'd share here. Enjoy and comment as you will.
I wish to start off by saying welcome to the future. A bold proclamation yes, but with such experiments and ongoing research by numerous scientists today, technological breakthroughs are vast and epic. One of the many platforms so to speak that is having phenomenal breakthroughs is in the mobile systems department. Here lays a couple companies with R&D plans that carter towards certain parties promising slick user interfaces, application channels, and a complete web experience. Couple that with feature rich phones that allow one to text, call, global positioning (GPS), and well, you have a product to sell. Google has done just that. Taking bits and pieces of everything one could ever ask for, and merging it all into its mobile operating system titled Android. Represented by a green round-headed robot figure, Android is passing its two year anniversary, and has surpassed other prominent mobile architectures like Apple’s iPhone software. But what exactly is Android? Why would one desire to chuck away their limited iPhone, or stray away from the Blackberry Enterprise lineup? One word: Open source. Couple that with the experience (the art of customizing your device), and the synchronization aspects of the device for virtually any account you have on the net, and you have a total package.
Having a total package within arm’s reach, and inside your pocket is quite a powerful tool. With Google’s Android platform, there is never a point where you can say No. Any and every idea can and could be coded into the device if you have the means to do so. Open source is the ticket. Asking yourself what this means is actually a very simple question. Open source is the definition of computer code that is freely available to anyone who wishes to find it. Google has opened up the software to all who have a spirit to create and provide applications (Apps) and programs to others. Hackers, coders, and all techy guros have created a plethora of net-libraries ranging from support groups, forums and websites to further help noobies in the process. Sounds like a lot, but in reality, the experience is quite easy going. Competitors like Apple and Blackberry have limited their system to developers by safekeeping some of its computer code. This limits creativity, as it puts restrictions and limitations as to what exactly what one can create. Add to the fact that companies like Apple also screen apps to a much higher caliber, halting smaller apps without much bang in the beginning to be choked to death. It seems as if anything is available for pleasure with Android though. If it doesn’t exist, pop into a forum and jot down a reply on a thread. If that’s not enough, I’m sure you have one friend that has already found solutions in the “Green-Guy”. There is always someone there who has the tools necessary to create it, or rather has already created it in the first place.
From forums and coders who have the know-how and tools to create a mind-blowing experience, the customization factor of Android is truly one of its largest selling points. To be quite honest, each and every android device could be considered a work of art. It’s all in how the user desires it for themselves…how deep the user wants to venture; how deep goes their rabbit? From changing backgrounds and wallpapers, to adding widgets to your home screen, the android spectrum allows one to make the phone their own, morph it into how they see fitting. But how is this different from other products? Surely other phones allow their users to alter what they see on screen. Yet I assert, the android experience is different. Almost, if not every aspect of android is customizable. Icons can be altered, the font can be changed, dates, times, anything can be tweaked. Sites like XDA, AndroidSpin, and AndroidandMe provide great reviews, heads up, and forums to browse through numerous applications, both beta and final. The options are endless, and it’s open in the air to anyone who desires a bit of change. Many new phones come preinstalled with newer software, as you might here Froyo, Éclair or Gingerbread tossed around. These are simply codenames for newer versions of software from Google. If your carrier doesn’t support the newer software, chances are a coder has already made it available for you. Convenience without a price attached!
Free in price is seemingly synonymous with freedom. Freedom to choose. Freedom to enjoy. Freedom to experience. Freedom from a stationary computer. Android is a thriving system that allows you to constantly stay on the up and up. Synchronization appears a mystery as your Facebook, Twitter, email, and numerous other accounts are integrated into the system via apps or at stock. With live widgets that monitor in real time your accounts, any and all social networks, social feeds, and business/personal accounts are updated instantly. No more carrying around a tiring laptop, or waiting to login the networks at any given campus. 3G speeds and now 4G on some carriers are making mobile devices the in crowd, as speeds are comparable to standard net speeds. As many people day are on the up and up, or rather, out and about, a mobile system that constantly allows access to ones desired feeds is grand. Couple that with ability to alter documents on the fly, listen to your favorite music (via Pandora, or from the Phones Internal Memory…think iPod), you have a complete package. It’s not just a Media Device, a Business Device, a Cell Phone, as it truly lives up to the name of Smart Phone.
For me the choice was easy. I thrive off customization, the ability to make my phone a tad different, even faster, or more efficient then what the original company did for me. But as Android ages, everything looks bright and promising. To proclaim dark clouds linger would be insanity. From its initial creation of being open-sourced, to customizing features and its ability to be versatile, Android has shattered the mobile systems realm. As it races to the top, Android allows users to update on the go, with synchronization from virtually every social feed. When people ask me about phones and what should be right for them, there is no question for me. It’s never been a question about what Android can’t do, but what Android does.

<- Laughing Out Loud.
It's full of grammar faux pas, by the way.

Still very well written *only read first paragraph* but I was impressed, not bad Also maybe a bit many commas...
BTW, shouldve been posted in the off topic section

Nice Speech. I Enjoyed reading it.
Sent from Conical. 07

Why Are Secondary Monitor Apps So Hard To Get Right?

Why are secondary monitor apps so hard to get right?
Hi Android enthusiasts,
I noticed that many of the secondary monitor apps in the Google Play store have terrible ratings. Reading the reviews, it seems that most of the issues are in device compatibility. The largest such app appears to be iDisplay which even promises connectivity over USB for working in coffee shops.
I'm wondering what it is that makes these apps so hard to get right. Is there some inherent technical difficulty that I'm missing? I read one suggestion that the variety of screen resolutions on Android tablets makes this difficult, but I can't see why this is a limitation.
The only reason I can seem might be vendor specific APIs that these apps have to interface with, but I can't see, from my experience, which these would be. It seems the harder bit would be writing drivers for Windows and OSX but that's really only one platform to support, unlike Android.
Another reason might be bandwidth, but surprisingly, this doesn't seem to be a big issue in the reviews.
What do you think? Shouldn't a good app like this be fairly simple to develop?

Visual Aesthetics: Judging a photo’s quality using AI techniques

Visual aesthetics has been shown to critically affect a variety of constructs such as perceived usability, satisfaction, and pleasure. However, visual aesthetics is also a subjective concept and therefore, presents its unique challenges in training a machine learning algorithm to learn such subjectiveness.
Given the importance of visual aesthetics in human-computer interaction, it is vital that machines adequately assess the concept of visual aesthetics. Machine learning, especially deep learning techniques have already shown great promise on tasks with well-defined goals such as identifying objects in images or translating from one language to another. However, quantification of image aesthetics has been one of the most persistent problems in image processing and computer vision.
We decided to build a deep learning system that can automatically analyze and score an image for aesthetic quality with high accuracy. Please check out our demo to check your photo’s aesthetic score.
About the Research
We came up with a novel Deep Convolutional Neural Network which can be trained to recognize an image’s aesthetic quality. We also came up with multiple hacks while training the algorithm to increase the accuracy.
In our paper published on arxiv, we have proposed a new neural network architecture which can model the data efficiently by taking both low level and high-level features into account. It is a variant of DenseNets which has a skip connection at the end of every dense block. Besides this, we also propose training techniques that can increase the accuracy with which the algorithm trains. These methods are to train on LAB color space and to use similar images in a minibatch to train the algorithm, which we call coherent learning. Using these techniques, we get an accuracy of 78.7% of the AVA2 dataset. The state of the art accuracy on the AVA2 dataset is 85.6% which uses a deep Convolutional Neural Network with pretrained weights on the imagenet dataset. The best accuracy on the AVA2 dataset using handcrafted features is 68.55%. We also show that adding more data to our training set (from AVA dataset not included in AVA2) increases its accuracy to 81.48% on AVA2 Test Set, hence showing the model gets better with more data.
Use-cases of Visual Aesthetics
App developers of social media sites can help their users decide which photo will suit best for their profile image. We all have faced anxiety while uploading photos on social media sites or changing our display pic. With our API integration, app developers can help their users look good, always!
Smart Machine Learning algorithms can help you put your best photo on dating apps
Ok, now this use-case may not appeal to the zen, non-materialistic folks among us but to be honest, dating leads to the most social anxiety. Dating landscape keeps changing as well and therefore, if you are active on dating apps, it’s important to choose your best photos to improve your chances for right swipes!
Dating App developers can easily integrate our APIs to help their users upload their best photos; the visual aesthetics model can also be fine-tuned if the developers want to optimise it on their data set.
Recently Google has launched Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL which has a portrait mode. This phone offers the portrait mode even though it lacks the second lens that many other phones have. For example, the iPhone X, Galaxy Note 8, OnePlus 5… all these phones offer the portrait mode because they use data from two lenses. One lens captures the image, the other one captures the depth information, apart from providing some focal range magic for the blurred background. However, Pixel phone uses AI to give HDR+ images to users which are comparable to pictures clicked by a DSLR camera.
Similarly, mobile manufacturers can augment the capabilities of their native camera by integrating the visual aesthetic APIs to let their users know in real-time the quality of their photo even before taking a snap! This will enable your users to share their photos with confidence and you will end up creating a great differentiator for your brand at no additional hardware cost.
Virality in online content
visual aesthetics
Content is king, and it has become ever more difficult to write compelling content that resonates with your audience. However, the best content these days often have great images to complement them, and therefore, you’ve got to include something that will keep eyes moving down the page.
BuzzSumo did an analysis that covered over 1 million articles and found that the ones that had images every 75-100 words had more social shares. Using our visual aesthetics tool, you can quickly check how appealing your images are and accordingly, improve the virality of your blog post.
In this blog post, we have covered some of the use-cases of our visual aesthetics API. When machines become more competent than humans to judge such subjective content, it opens up a lot of possibilities to exploit which were not feasible yet. You can read more blogs on Visual Analytics here.
ParallelDots AI APIs are a deep learning powered web service by ParallelDots Inc, that can comprehend a huge amount of unstructured text and visual content to empower your products. You can check out some of our Visual Analytics APIs and write to us at [email protected].

How do I get a striped down version of Android.

Hi everyone,
Here is a little history first. In 2014 I helped develop a traffic counting app for an engineering buddy. I designed the UI's, the flow charts and wrote the 275-page illustrated, developers manual. The developer had it working in less than 6 weeks, thanks to, as he said, "to the awesome documentation provided". The app has been in use since then and has worked flawlessly on the original 24 tablets I originally purchased for him.
Recently, we have been asked to bring the app to a wider audience so, my question is, "Is there a way to prepare an image of the Android OS containing only the setup we need, and then clone it to the new tablets?" The app is designed as engineering tool and is not listed through Google Play and as such, it does not require most of the bloatware found on the new tablets. The app does require the use of photos, some file management along with network connectivity to send and receive the various data files required and produced by the app.
I have limited experience in rooting, but I have been successful when I done it on my Samsung phones.
As a certified Graphics Designer/Windows and Mac tech/COVID-19 survivor (nearly killed me, literally...LOL), I am aware of the amount of work that goes into aiding people with their "little" projects. Any help or direction in this matter would be deeply appreciated.