TorrentFreak has really been spoonfeeding Nintendo’s nonsense positions about emulation everywhere lately.

All LEDs are backlit, and a full 1080p on a 7 inch LED screen is a dogshit reading experience that will make your eyes bleed in about 2 minutes. If you manage to find a terrible OLED at a low price, it’s still emissive and still absolutely terrible for reading.

Free is obscenely overpriced for using a budget LED tablet as a reading device. It’s terrible and has nothing going for it. Don’t pay a penny for a device you intend to read on with any display that isn’t epaper. You won’t read on it because it will be a torture device.

By default it will turn itself off after two days, but it still sleeps pretty completely without a bunch of idle power draw without doing that.

It has a pretty long battery life with no backlight and airplane mode. If you do a bunch of downloads or run heavy apps and have the backlight high, it will drain faster, but it depends how you use it. Boox pretty aggressively limits background behavior by default, though you can change some of it to allow what you want. I don’t have benchmarks or anything to give you a direct comparison, but I rarely think about battery. You’re right to raise it as a question, though.

The one thing with color specifically is that it needs more light than black and white to really shine. In bright sunlight it looks great, but indoors I generally have to raise the backlight higher than I would for other content, and that’s a good chunk of the power draw so makes a dent.

Anything bad about Android is worse on kindle or kobo’s OS. They’re more invasive, give you less privacy options, and make it much more difficult than a decent android app to organize content. I don’t actually particularly like Android, and would be miserable if I had to use it in place of my iPhone. But the device specific software is pretty much all really bad.

Don’t get a device without e-ink as a reader. It will end up in the trash where it belongs. A low resolution backlit display will just discourage actually using it to read.

I use Boox. I don’t really trust them, but Android is just way better than not Android, and their modifications to support e-ink are the best IMO.

I primarily use the go color 7, and the page turn buttons also add a lot.

It’s really weird to include ~500% additional monthly contributions into the math.

I can give you my reasons, but can’t comment on anyone else.

A. I would genuinely buy PS5 over Xbox just for the controller. Third party utilization is hit or miss, but Sony games pretty consistently feel amazing with the trigger feedback and precision vibration.

B. There are a bunch of system seller caliber games made by Sony. There weren’t many made by Microsoft before the Activision merger and even since stuff like Starfield hasn’t been as popular as they’d want. But I’d pick PS5 just for Horizon, just for the Last of Us, maybe just for God of War (over any single game Microsoft has, though I’m not as into it as some), and their catalogue last gen was way better and benefits from the faster storage making a huge dent in load times as well. As someone who likes playing punishing games, loading 20 seconds after a death compared to waiting several minutes breathes a lot of fresh air into them.

C. The low end Xbox along with their requirement for parity between the two made it a lot harder for third parties to support them.

D. There isn’t a lot that really takes advantage of it, but their built in hardware compression is still tech that’s really exciting to me in terms of how seamless you can make open world games without arbitrary limitations. There are brief loading screens when I die on current gen games, but never hitting them during traversal no matter how dense or busy a world is (without the elevator trick or whatever to hide loading) really adds a lot of immersion. I haven’t experienced it in Xbox, and I recognize that the actual speed of the drive is also a key part of the real world difference, but there are also hardware and software components of how fast loading is, to the point that PS5 games pretty consistently load well faster than PS4 games that don’t leverage the tech. Also, the PS5 lets you just use a regular nvme drive to expand storage easily.

They also have the same cost restrictions Sony does because they’re using very similar components, so they can’t undercut them.

Because no one wants an Xbox.

Even during the early launch with Covid killing supply chains and PS5’s selling out in seconds every time a retailer added stock, Xboxes were gettable pretty easily and most people didn’t want them as a substitute.

Fallout has the worst gunplay I’ve ever experienced.

It’s a truly dumpster fire excuse for an FPS.

I doubt it. They bumped their prices in Japan not that long ago, and controllers got a price bump too. Japan might be more about currency, but their costs haven’t decreased in the current economic climate for computer chips compared to the normal life cycle of consoles.

The Pro isn’t just $700 because they think they can get away with it. I’m guessing it costs way closer than that to make than you think.

SteamOS is arch, so some of the derivatives are too.

Steam shouldn’t really care though.

Yes. Exactly identically to them spending money on DRM despite an obscenely strong body of work showing that DRM doesn’t serve any purpose in any context. It’s pure theater.

It doesn’t meaningfully impact the rate of cheating at all. You’re making the deluded assumption that it does something despite a complete absence of evidence to support it. It’s a complete fabrication with no connection in any way to the real world.

It is not security. It does not in any way resemble security. It’s pure theater that catastrophically compromises the actual security of everything it touches.

No, it doesn’t. Cheating is still incredibly common on games that install malware. If people care enough to cheat, they will cheat whether you have kernel access or not. It doesn’t make a dent. They use it for the exact same reason they use DRM. Because they can.

It also can’t possibly theoretically “reduce harm” when every single installation on every individual computer is many orders of magnitude more harm than all cheating in every game ever made.

Good. Scanning everything for CSAM is one thing, but requiring platforms to scan everything uploaded for alleged copyright infringement is insane

Sony does hardware features well pretty much across the board. It completely changes the experience without dominating it.

Third parties seem to either halfass it or ignore it.

Almost every game that uses the speaker is even more annoying.

It is exactly that simple. You already have to account for latency because everyone but one player (who you also can’t trust no matter how many rootkits you install) is not the server. Having a proper server doesn’t change that in any way.

Client side validation cannot possibly provide any actual security, but even if that wasn’t the case and it was actually flawless, it would still be unconditionally unacceptable for a game to ever have kernel level access.

I’m not sure why you think I’m saying client side is better when I called it malware.

There is no approach that is theoretically capable of doing anything at all to impact a camera and automated inputs, and there is no way of trying to do so that is acceptable. It’s simply a reality of online gaming.