Talk:1549: xkcd Phone 3

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 01:59, 12 July 2015 by 108.162.216.141 (talk)
Jump to: navigation, search

I assume that this is made, at least in part, in reference to the just-made OnePlus infodump and their upcoming OnePlus 2 smartphone. 162.158.2.188

Is the heartbeat accelerator used to fool fitness wristbands? Or apps? Or ... ? sirKitKat (talk) 07:56, 10 July 2015 (UTC)


"Ear screen" may refer to a different meaning of "screen" - a device that protects you from something, as in "sun screen". In this case, the "ear screen" would block the sound of the phone's speakers, making it useless (at least for telephony). 08:02, 10 July 2015 (UTC)~~ thepike

I thought it was a name change like those of beret guy, repurposing words to stay accurate without using the correct/standard term.Athang (talk) 09:54, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

Doesn't running natively just mean that it runs apps natively instead of emulating them or something. Which would be a pointless marketing term OR it implys that the phone itself or the person inside runs.108.162.249.192 10:53, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

I did some re-writing on that point (because the likes of the Java Virtual Machine-type solution is a half-way house that needs mentioning, between 'native' and 'emulated'), but it's a bit long. Also I briefly mentioned the Crusoe chip essentially a 'hardware virtual machine layer' (over and above the machine-code to micro-code one that doesn't bear mentioning due to the ubiquity), but not sure I described it well enough. At the time, the talk was that a Crusoe chip could end up (by sofware flag or magic 'autodetection') run x86/Intel-compatible or Motorola (Apple) or DEC Alpha instruction sets (and probably any other sets they could squeeze in, whether CISC or RISC, like Acorn's ARM) without any software emulation at all. Of course, that was the time when programs didn't so heavily rely upon an OS's own API for pretty much all resources (at least on single-user machines), which is in effect an additional Virtual Machine layer, and the whole computing business has gone in a different direction, even Apple temporarily played with the PowerPC platform model.
...Yeah, that's no shorter than my in-article edit, is it? 141.101.98.252 13:44, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

Wireless discharge: I think the explanation is too complicate. Every cellphone (and every other device that uses batteries) does discharge without a wire, it is just normal. The joke (in my eyes) is here that no-one would advice with that. --DaB. (talk) 11:43, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

Here's an idea: a phone that discharges it's power wirelessly into another device.(unlikely that this is what it means though)108.162.249.166 12:39, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

  • How about a phone that discharges it's battery into another human? I'd buy that (provided I could control when and whom.) 141.101.88.224 13:54, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
  • knowing the previous xkcd phones: it isn't going to be controllable 108.162.249.166 11:41, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

Could "Boneless" be a play on words against the jawbone devices?108.162.219.203 13:12, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

Does the title text seem to imply to anyone else that the customer may have been abducted for testing? Schiffy (Speak to me|What I've done) 17:13, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

A runaway pacemaker ("heartbeat accelerator") probably wouldn't cause a heart attack. A heart attack is the interruption of blood flow to the heart muscle. A runaway pacemaker could cause a lethal tachycardia -- 2,000 beats per minute is documented and hearts don't do well at that rate... Andrew (talk) 19:24, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

The first xkcd phone comic also mentioned that the phone can drown. It said something like, "Don't submerge phone; it will drown."108.162.216.141 03:20, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

I have to protest the idea in the explanation that a screen "all the way through" would leave no space for the actual workings of the phone. I owned an original Nexus 7, which I took apart after the kids dropped it in the bath. All of the controlling circuitry was in a thin layer *around* the screen surface, not below it. Below it was mostly battery, and presuming it takes AA batteries it wouldn't have a giant LiIon. It's not an absurd notion at all that a phone could have nothing behind its screen. 108.162.216.59 11:30, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

I would actually like a phone running on 2AA (Or better, AAA) batteries. Not a smartphone, just a basic phone. I wouldn't want the other features though... -- 141.101.104.67 15:38, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

  • Based on my experiences with wireless microphones, which I think probably consume batteries at a similar rate as dumbphones do (the reason I think this is because the main thing powered by the battery in both devices is the wireless transmitter), you'd get maaaaybe 5-6 hours of battery life from each pair of AA batteries. Less if they were AAA - for alkaline batteries, the smaller they are, the quicker they die.108.162.216.141 01:59, 12 July 2015 (UTC)