Gone Horny

Yes, it was a long time coming. I had been planning to get the new phone since it was announced, skipping the iPhone 8. To my surprise, Anita wasn't keen to upgrade, sticking to her 7 Plus for the time being.

The couple of departures from the iPhone of the past were obvious right of the bat. The first being the disappearance of the home button. This created space for bazel-less display. Rather than having a fingerprint reader at the back of the unit similar to the Nexus 6P, Apple went with Face ID, using the front-facing camera to deal with unlocking of the phone. And it worked perfectly even on the first few hours if using the phone.

Next was wireless charging - and for this I used the charger from Samsung. It worked a treat.

The bonus would be the camera. I had a different entry specifically on the camera. Excellent snapper and it could handle 4K at 60 fps. I had to use iMovie on my Mac for post-processing since Final Cut Pro can't handle the new file system yet to process the movies.

The main downside was using the Face ID while mounted to dashboard. You had to look at the phone when you unlock ...

So far, I had no major complains. The battery life was also excellent. 256 Gb is an awfully large storage to fill. The phone was blazingly fast.

Idlan Got Oreo

I have given my Nexus 6P to Idlan after his Oppo broke. I had been using the Huawei P10 and the experience of vanilla Android was always something i missed. More so when I saw the pushed update on Idlan’s phone the other day.

It was for Oreo. Damn!

His phone had been smooth as silk since the update and I was not sure when the update for Huawei going to be .... guessed I would have to wait a bit longer ....

Shattered

Anita dropped her iPhone 6 at school earlier and the aftermath was not that pretty. The whole of the front glass cracked, with a slight dent on the side. When I examined it earlier, there was a small gap in between the front glass and the body panel. But the phone, including the touch screen was still working fine.

It will to do for the time being. Not sure if she wanted to repair for the time being, with a front glass replacement or splash on a new phone. Or would she just rather wait for the iPhone 7 when it comes out before getting a new one. It all depended on how stable the dropped phone was ....

Firing up an Old Flame

I had been looking up the review for the upcoming BlackBerry Priv and felt that the phone certain got potential. On the one hand, you have the great hardware and keyboard - both physical and software - which came with BlackBerry plus the flexibility and the established platform that was Android operating system.

I have invested a lot in Android software, so it would make perfect sense to port over into another Android rather than plod along with BlackBerry OS, which may be going nowhere soon.

While waiting for it to be available at the shop, I thought I rekindle my love for BlackBerry. I went back into my digital cupboard and dusted off my old Z10, got it charged up and updated the OS.

Hmmm! Sluggish but usable. Now I realised why I left the phone in the cupboard in the first place. The main problem j had with the phone was not the hardware, but the software. And the worst part was navigating through the trove of emails in the so called Hub. To erase the email in bulk took some prodding. Then came the problem of trying to jump from email to the next. It appeared that you needed to load each emails individually rather than sift through them fast such as in the Android or Outlook.

And that was just for starters. It get worse with the other third party apps. They were just slow and sluggish. Therefore marrying the good of BlackBerry and Android made perfect sense. The keyboard on the Z10 itself remained peerless. Even better than any Android or iOS keyboards.

Still waiting for a unit to try. Hopefully the wait would not be that long.

The Orange Snapper

I have been eyeing the Windows phone for a while now. It started with the HTC One Windows version, which unfortunately was hard to come by in Malaysia.

Then came Windows 8 and the 1520. Great but the software still felt sluggish although the camera feature looked interesting.

The last Nokia I owned was the 9300i Communicator back in 2006. Before that, it was the excellent N73. Great 3.2 MP camera with a feature called Nokia LifeBlog which when the phone were connected to a PC, would upload the photos and the SMSs onto a program akin to a diary. A great feature. There was no Mac equivalent unfortunately.

Even back then, the camera on Nokia had been half-decent.

Then with the announcement of Lumia 930 and Windows 8.1, my mind was made up. And the camera was just simply amazing, with a good built-in photo editor which made post-editing and posting onto Flickr a doddle. Dare I suggest that the snaps were better than my main phone, the iPhone 6 Plus.

There were three options as far as the photographs were concerned, the small 5MP jpeg, larger 20MP jpeg and 20MP DNG file - a RAW version essentially. Even the 5 MP looked great. I only tried manipulating then lather's files using Aperturebut found the whole process - transferring and processing - rather time-consuming. I prefer just to snap, edit and upload.

How about the other features? The app store wee's still pretty basic but there were the usual Facebook, twitter and Instagram. As long as there was push email and Google Calendar integration, I was fine. Not quite as much of a productivity tool as my iPhone, but it had potential. I wouldn't mind it as a second phone. So, the Android had to stay on the tablet for the time being.

All the photos, apart from the top were taken with the Lumia 930.