| tracking comes with any phone where people leave their gps on.. remember the discussion about e911 a dozen years back? Few to no one seemed aware that the phones had that capability and at that time almost none of the security agencies and zero police departments used this supposed emergency feature.. no one really knew who was using it despite data being transferred and it being in almost all GPS enabled phones. My brother was mocking my choice of Android 'spyware' phone and I showed him the monitor program I had running in the background checking uploads and downloads - the data for the month? . zero. He was a little less smug (and a bit gobsmacked) when he saw how much data his iPhone was transferring .. but assured me that was all legitimate despite not being able to account for any of it. Having said that, keyboards, mice, thumbdrives and other peripheral USB devices have all been found to have keyloggers and sniffer chips installed - and not just no-name branded items but name brand stuff which had been constructed or part constructed in China. Heck, we've only just recently discovered a whole bunch of ATMs have additional chips added during manufacturing and no one has a clue what they're doing. Who among those you know could tell if they had a keylogger in the keyboard or mouse? I was thinking less of the network related stuff and more along the lines of dual cameras and things like USB OTG .. that's been with them for a dozen years and we're only now seeing it. many folk will wonder why bother, but being able to connect a thermographic camera, a thumbdrive to the phone to move data on or off, an endoscope or a 3D panoramic camera, a keyboard or a datalogger, a scanner, a printer, an oscilloscope .. almost any USB device can be connected and used. Seems a no brainer to me, but I kinda like using this powerful little computer as much as I can rather than just using it for phonecalls games and photos. heck, it's got more grunt than desktops from not that long back.. I'm currently building a bunch of PIN radiation sensors to add to my collection of home build geiger counters, scintillation detectors and ion chamber radiation detectors - and connecting it to my phone is a breeze thanks to the OTG port. Asking around, few to no one I know has even heard of USB OTG, give it another five to ten years though.. it's only been ten so far for them Sure I'd much rather have a WindowsCE based phone, I could write programs for them and I am a bit clueless still about the Android OS, but I'd rather take a cheap high powered octacore phone with oodles of ram and the capability of adding an addition 256Gb on a TF card than mess with something old now. I have in my collection of cool things a 1999 Chinese phone that had a GPS module in it, that predates GPS in Western phones by quite a bit as far as I recall. I think, even hand held GPSs were hard to get then. One I wanted but could not afford that I wrote of here was the phone with a 12Mp camera. The best in the West at that time was 1.6Mp. I have no idea what's on the horizon next, but I'm always curious to see and it often comes from the East. Even integrated circuits - some of the electronics chips coming out from there are utterly amazing. Electronic forums are often awash with comments about how someone opened a thing and instead of the usual 56 components they find one 4 pin IC doing the whole job which no one's ever seen before and there's a flurry of activity as we try to find manufacturer info and data sheets. They really are very good at such things. Even the humble torch.. we've been making torches and parabolic reflectors and lenses in the West for decades but some of the stuff from China is mindblowingly good and sell for pennies. A $4 led torch purchased days ago, three rows of ten LEDs - all collimated to one point via the shell/lens array - they didn't just bang in reflectors and say 'that'll do'.. it really is remarkable and reminds me how Nikon and Canon were once the cheap Junk upstarts daring to challenge the supremacy of the European camera (how DARE they!?) look how that turned out ;) a year ago I'd never heard of Leagoo. Now my wife has a verrrry nice Leagoo and I'm a little envious despite purchasing a verry nice Mi not a year prior. they move in leaps and bounds ----- Original Message -----
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