Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

And if you happen to have more pics,
either more render of what are your current expectations of the device,
or pictures of the current test-bed,
we would also be happy to see them !

Thanks for your work.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

We are designing the LED position, Sim slot without a tool, battery mount etc, and most importantly the keypad layout.

I will update more pics as soon as they are solidly confirmed.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

LED is cool. It's an extinct dinosaur feature but still a cool useful feature. If it can be blue, white, green and yellow it's even cooler. It would be like n900.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I wouldn't call it extinct, OnePlus 3 has it. But true, for the Instagram crowd a selfie flash is much more important.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

From what I've seen, Chen is quite pragmatic and knows what is feasable and what is just crazy. I trust his judgement on what to include to make this product a success and I think you should too.

That said it is interesting to read about other ideas aside from the continual discussions over screen size and keyboard layouts.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

What do you think about including a camera cover (like in the N900?)

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Even "work in progress pictures" would be an interesting insight into the design progress.

Btw: what are considering? A LED wih some specific protocol piloted over GPIO ? Or a LED using I2C ?

Also, "double tap to wake" (as featured on the original Jolla 1 and several other tablet and smartphones) was mentioned a few posts back. Is it something that would be possible (given your selected chipset and board) ?
I find it useful to quickly wake the phone to check status (charging, etc.)

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I think chen's point in coming to this forum isn't implementing every single mentioned idea into a 3000€ costing phone, but more as a place to brainstorm to work on idea and finally producing the device that *he* thinks is the best balance of features.

I find these discussions very enriching too.
And i learned something about Tritium... :-P

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Whats the deal with xenon-Flashes on phones nowadays?
I havent seen a device with one in a while.
Are LED-flashes good enough nowadays?

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

My only experience with a xenon flash was on the 808, and it's module was huge. Chen seems to have shown some concern with keep the device slim, which would be hard to do with a module that large.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

https://cdn3.recombu.com/media/mobil..._w620_h400.jpg

As you can see it's pretty big. Not something you want to put in a slider but rather in cams/cam phones. I hardly think the cam should be important for this device, or the light.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

And it sucks. Just like LED flash. Flash can't solve sensor limitation in low light.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

True. And the amount of pixels is only a half (if not less) of the truth. One should be more worried about the quality, not quantity of the pixels or the colour of a led flash.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Noise is solely based on sensorsize, amount of MP doesn't matter. More megapixel can* be even less noise when viewing on the same resolution / printsize. This is because more pixel can average noise out better.

Only way to improve imagequality is to gather more detail AND available light. Available light can be fixed with flashes. Xenon can deliver way more light than LEDs.

* The optics has to be able to deliver the amount of MP, if the optics doesn't there's no way then the noise can't be averaged out as much.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

For Xenon flash, it is achievable. But it needs way stronger power supply than LED, so we must re-design the PCB to some point.

The question is if it is worth the time and effort, and if the majority happy to wait and pay more.

Our main difference is having a slider keyboard inside the device, because of that our work and device complexity is much much more than a normal phone. We need to position the sliding frame correctly, need to have quite some additional FPCs, need to implement additional sensors for keyboard, need back lit, need to control thickness etc. All those efforts are not easy to achieve, and will make the device expensive. (And again we are a small team, we don't have so much resources on engineering and we are doing something big companies don't bother to do because of complexity.)

So in theory adding Xenon flash it is possible. But we are based on a slider phone it's not the same amount of work as a normal phone. It's all come into the same question about timeine/money in the end.

PS: LED can be used as torch but Xenon can't.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I use my Nokia 808 often. It has an LED along the Xenon flash for use as torch and for finding the focus.

The Xenon flash is awesome, no doubt. Its way brighter than an LED and thus the phone takes way better pictures in the dark in distances of 3-4 Meters and below.

But it also has a little downside beside the size: It will take a little to reload. Half of the space it uses in the 808 is a giant capacitor. You can make fast image series in the dark.

Besides that: You rarely want to use it. The flash changes colors slightly and I only really enjoyed its benefits when taking pictures at night at a beach or when I took pictures of an unlighted chapel without windows and old paintings.
If I have the chance, I just take out my tripod and take pictures in natural lighting.

So: Its awesome in the rare situations you need it, but I don't miss it most of the time. If this would be a camera phone a Xenon flash would be a feature to be demanded. So its just too much hassle for the result.

Much more important are: a big enough aperture and the possibility for long exposure times.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I have two professional cameras and have had others in other brands before, none of them have built-in flash (and in fact I don't think any semi-pro or pro camera have built-in flashes). There is one main reason for dropping the flash: if you want extra light to expose your pictures, you have to do it properly, i.e., not with the limitations that come with built-in flashes, so you'd better off dropping the features that won't be up to that standard and still come at a cost.

Of course phone cameras are not the same, nor do they serve the same purpose, and it's arguable that a flash could be more useful on a phone since the main purpose of the camera is to take souvenir shots rather than artistic pictures. Plus their sensors do not show the same performance in noise control. I acknowledge that. But if we come by that definition, there's little support for justifying the bulk of a xenon flash and design/power supply issues it brings, a LED flash should be plenty enough for taking a souvenir picture, and even the best (!= powerful) flash won't do miracles when placed 5 mm next to the lens right in front of the subject.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I see. So its not worth the hassle then.

@Kaboulik

My a6000 has a built in flash, which does a fine job as a fill-flash.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Another point where the Xenon flash rocks is to take picture of things in motion (like kids). The Xenon flash duration is a lot shorter than with LED, so that the scene is frozen on the pictures, and not blurry like with LED.
I was once surprised while looking at a picture of a circular saw running at full speed, that on the picture the blade looked still. It may not be the effect you have wanted, but it allows to froze a picture to that point.

Despite loving it on my N8, I am not sure it is worth the trouble to add it to this phone.

Some other thinks that could help with phone cameras quality in low light are, among others : sensor size, optics quality, and technologies like OIS (Optical Image Stabilization).
OIS would not help when taking pictures of things in motion, but would help when taking pictures in low light with long exposures. It would also help with videos. Not sure how the cost of such techno is, and the difficulty to embed one, but it exists...

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I agree that a flash can still be very nice in case of motion or filling (although filling would work with LED as well, just to a lesser extent), at least when you need it even it it's not necessarily common. It's a nice comfort on a phone to take all kinds of pictures with the camera you always have in your pocket. But as Macros and Chen said, the main goal of this phone is to be a keyboard phone and not a camera phone, and these two things are hard to reconcile in the same design (and I have a clear preference since I don't really care about camera phones, but that's personal taste and the market shows that most people think the opposite :D). A LED flash seems like a nice compromise.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

How long does it take to modify SFOS for the new phone? Have you asked licensing from Jolla? Phone without OS is like having a brick.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

...and maybe, by the time Chen starts designing his next phone, light field module will become possible on smartphones.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

exactly, Jolla aren't exactly big enough to get a few people on the device to release it by the end of the year.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

As stated before Jolla is probobly not even aware of what have to be done, much less planning for it. Its unfortunately very little gain for Jolla so as I stated before. This will take years to get a consumer product ready. The best we can hope for is that some coding ninjas appear with access to sailfish source.

That said, end of year might be a great goal for Chen with the hw, but to me it's just a checkpoint.

That said Is nothing bad that it takes time, Its just too much to do with too few people.

Just look at qwerty for moto. It takes time. Then add the complexity of a total design of a working phone with additional sw and it obvious. Nothing bad. It just takes time.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I would say 6 months once Jolla get their hands on the device.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

What to base that assumption on?

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

True. Xenon can deliver way more light and in the process over expose the closest object and leave the background almost completely without the details.
Every built in flash on any camera is equally crappy and useless as those on the phones. The same goes for a very bright sunny day. To much light is almost as bad as not enough light.
Bigger sensors with bigger pixels on the other hand do wonders. Add a tripod and long exposure and than we have something.
Every sensor in every phone is simply phisically not big enough for some quality photos. Taking pictures when there's not enough light is one problem. The other one is the perception of the whole scene. It's OK when taking pictures of something close but in any other case picture always look "flat".

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I seem to remember when sailfish was first announced, they claimed to be able to port it to various devices 'overnight' :eek: :D

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Let me jump into sensor size/MP discussion.

I don't know what is these days used in the phone cameras, but I expect it to be CMOS and a rather small one.

The cameras are having usually problems with lower light conditions, so let's focus on this case. Assuming that we have the same size of the sensor (CMOS or CCD chip), the larger size of a single pixel will lead to larger signal-to-noise ratio. This is due to a way the chips are transforming photons to digital signal. There are several parameters that determine the performance, but for know, we can concentrate on the noise sources. These include shot noise (photon nature of the light, not much to do about it), thermal noise (warm camera will get electrons from a thin air), and readout noise. Now, in low light conditions, you are frequently limited by readout noise. This is a noise describing physics of electron to digital readout conversion. In essence, when you feed to the readout circuit the same amount of electrons, you will be getting different numbers due to measurement error.

When we are limited by readout, signal to noise (SNR) for larger pixels vs pixels averaged in software is dramatically different. Namely, you will get considerably better SNR when you have a larger pixel than when you average after in software (including firmware...). See https://www.photometrics.com/resourc...s/pdfs/snr.pdf for simple explanation of physics behind and compare averaging of multiple frames vs single frame long exposure for readout limited condition.

For CCDs, you should be able to change pixel size on fly (assuming that it supports it) since you readout the whole chip through the same readout circuit. So, you could change your effective pixel size and adapt for lightning conditions. For CMOS, you are limited to software averaging since each column has a separate readout.

In the end of the day, at the lower light, I would always prefer larger pixels that lead to sufficient resolution. And, as stressed by @mr_pingu, to get the photons in with the decent optics.

As for flashlight, I would suggest to go for a faster solution - LED. You already have so many things to do and are able to differentiate yourself with hardware (keyboard) and software (making steps to deliver developer-friendly device with SFOS and Android), that I would suggest to focus on that this time and not on loosing time on a complicated flash.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I can't find the exact quote now, but I remember time concerns were mentioned as one of the reasons of INOI releasing without Android support in Russian Telegram group.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I meant to get it fully working, all the licensed stuff ready, ready to be installed onto the phones in the factory.

You could probably get it booting in a day if you knew what you were doing, but the thing with this phone is that it looks like it's going to have a keyboard (obviously), IR blaster, and NFC. None of which have been available on an officially licensed device. So getting those things working properly in UI and stuff will probably take a while.


Xperia partnership was announced in February, it's now August, and it's being tested by cbeta guys, 6 months later.

Intex partnership was announced in July 2015 at the Shanghai MWC event, the device wasn't released till a year later.

So there has been a larger turnaround recently.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

It may be a good idea to talk about it during the community meeting.

Wow, IR blaster! I remember doing Pierogi pranks with my N900, that's awesome.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Will there be NFC support?

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

If porting sailfish to every device needs 6 month, I think Jolla can shut down. I hope porting Sailfish to Xperia just takes so long, because of the 64bit processor.

Otherwise I have no Idea how to get manufacturers to sell their devices with sailfish on it.

I'm planning to buy chen's qwerty device. But if it comes to market without a OS, that supports keyboard and other components like the camera, it doesn't make much sense for me.

Even worse:
If I have to wait for that device until summer next year (wich wouldn't be a huge problem) and than it turns out, that the hw is quite nice, but the software isn't. I probably don't have the chance anymore to buy the Xperia X.

...And no, I have enough devices for now, I won't buy first the Xperia X, just to replace it 6 month later with the Livermorium device

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

That is probably why it the Xperia X is taking so long. But every time Jolla announce a device to be released by the end of the next quarter, it never happens.

Maybe they have experience with hw keyboard support in Sailfish when they first came about, iirc they were using n9 and possibly n950 to show off the OS. They are in a better financial position these days than before. So I too am hoping it won't take 6 months.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

That was one of the reasons my N950 didn't become my daily phone. The software was not at all optimized for a hw keyboard.

That was a real pain - to have a great device, which had poor software support for the hardware (let's be frank - poor software support altogether, sfos seems to have a better selection of quality software - all the Harmattan developers seem to have moved to sfos)

Exactly.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Porting is mostly reverse engineering, or re-engineering things to work with the OS. You can't really say "it will take X months" because there's no real way of knowing without getting stuck into it.

Some devices you can get working rather well very quickly in the community, some things are harder and many people give up before finishing it. These things are complicated, and if you buy a device you expect all the hardware pieces work with the software provided and that takes time.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Because sfos is a lot easier to develop for. Due to the aegis system on Harmattan, it's quite a pain to get things running.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

NFC is the whole thing behind "TOH" concept.
Jolla 1 has a funcitonnal NFC antenna.
The thing is, it's currently not used for anything else beside identifying other halfs (and most importantly it's not available to android).
- So getting it to work as before wouldn't be much complicated
- Getting it to work perfectly as users would like THAT is going to take time, and specially ressource from Myriad in order to make sure that NFC is available to all the wireless payment android apps, etc.


Keyboard currently already works on Jolla1, both purely hardware (TOHKDB) and bluetooth (A 4-parts foldable (= the W shaped one) "Stowaway" bluetooth keyboard is my daily driver, whenever I'm sitting at a desk with enough room). And they both "just work".
Android App support keyboard nicely too.
- So getting basic keyboard working would be about correctly licensing the patch already floating for Jolla 1.
- Getting it to work perfectly boils down to small nitpicking about details

IR is the only odd thing. And even there, IR is usually showing as a simple serial port with a few specific ioctl.
- So getting it to work basically just like the FM radio on some community ports (have the port available in /dev/, maybe write a simple app to emit codes on the IR - like a remote control emulator). Won't take ages.
- What would take ages is implementing ton of protocols over IR (file exchange, etc.) but I don't know if those things are still relevant in 2017 (seriously, are they ?)

In other words, Jolla could rather quickly cobble together something that more or less works (see the speed of community ports as a rough idea), and could then spent the next 6 months shipping out *upgrades* to make everything work better (see firmware upgrades nowaday on Jolla Phone 1 as a reference).

In short :
- if you "just" want to have a Sailfish OS smartphone and don't mind spending some time on openrepos.net to get all the patches to customize : Chen's smartphone could have SFOS available rather fast.
- if you want a perfectly-working hassle-free experience on par with Samsung Phone (including payments over NFC), you'll have to wait longer, until Jolla and Myriad irons everything out. In the meantime, you should perhaps consider using Android on this phone.

I was under the impression that chelien tries to short-cut some of the time by partly re-using available designs (specially regarding the main PCB).

I'm not saying that the phone is going to be available by next week,
but that it might not take as much time as a complete "ground-up" solution (like Openmoko, etc.)

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Well, I use Jolla 1 since the start as my daily driver. I'm used to pimp it in the one or other direction. That's part of the fun, isn't it. I'm just expecting the key-features to work mostly bugfree. Tinkering around and using differnt patches is OK for me.