I can use the same wall plug or portable battery for my laptop, phone, and soldering iron, and it has a bunch of nice qol features.
There's an accelerometer built-in so it can detect when you put down/pick up the iron for sleeping the heater and also for orienting the display. The new version also has Bluetooth so you can monitor/control the iron from your phone/PC.
The heating element is in the tip so you are less likely to burn your fingers and it's also far more efficient so it's able to heat up very quickly and handle large pads for its size.
It can draw up to 85W through a barrel jack or USB-PD.
I paid $25 for it and have gotten a ton of use out of it.
I put away my expensive soldering iron and use this one exclusively now because it's just more convenient to use.
I would definitely recommend it for new or experienced users, it's a great value for the price.
No matter how poorly Apple's implementation works with Google's, this will be a net positive for consumers.
Apple finally giving in allows RCS to become a true standard that works across any mobile devices. That will motivate developers and the industry as a whole to continue to improve upon it.
The initial release may be underwhelming but in the long run this week be good for everyone.
If Google's implementation remained the defacto "RCS" that everyone used there would be no motivation to add things like encryption to the standard as everyone is using Google's anyway
The biggest thing is attachments like photos/videos.
While MMS pretty universally sucks, Apple is very aggressive with the compression they apply to attachments over MMS so the resulting user experience is garbage akin to what we used to have when MMS was new.
Modern phones from other manufacturers will make use of the full MMS attachment size available, typically 100MB or more (depending on your carrier) iPhones will compress that video down to a couple MB regardless of the higher capacity available.
It should've been a layer of encryption over SMS and remain otherwise stateless and platform agnostic.
Umm what?
SMS has a very short size limit. Implementing RCS as an encryption layer on top of it would require devices to send several messages just to cover a short one-word reply. They also often come out of order so they would need to include a numbering system so the client could piece them back together.
Granted that is already how SMS works on modern devices, but the underlying protocol is woefully inept at modern messaging and completely unviable for what you're proposing.
How should media attachments work? I assume you expect that to just use encryption built on MMS? So media can come through even more compressed than basic MMS? None of the actual benefits of RCS would be possible if it was built on top of the existing ancient standards.
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