A brief history of phones

15 May 2015

In the past 3 years I’ve had two phone contracts. Up until this week I was happy with my record that I’ve never screwed either of them up. And then a shining example of the human race pinched my nexus 5 out of my hand on Sunday. No I did not have insurance. Students of the Hull variety: I don’t want to dampen anyone’s opinion of Hull (I mean for the general population, it’s hard to get it any lower), but this was in Student ville on what is arguably the main road of Student ville with lots of people around (Newland Avenue). Be on your guard, particularly in hot weather when you’re sitting outside. Anyway. Now I’m on a £30 eBay phone which I’m not really sure anyone could consider it smart, but I thought I’d review the differences between my 3 phones.

Blackberry

Apps: virtually none existent

Signal: fine, but no possibility of 4G

Interface: keyboard takes some time to get your fingers round but once you do it’s a breeze. However, it took me a good 2 weeks to figure out how to reply to texts and one of my friends who’d had one for 2 years hadn’t worked out some of the tricks I’d found. Upside is that if I’d of had this phone now, I would have had fun laughing at the image of anyone who stole it trying to figure out how to use it.

Power: Probably a day, maybe a day and a half. If you made a phone call at any point during that time, good luck with that battery life.

Price: Think I had a £20 contract with orange, which would be £25 without NHS discount from a family member. Not sure on the handset’s actual value.

##Nexus 5 Apps: ALL OF THEM.

Signal: 4G capable but when my contract started I lived in Bristol where 4G was only just being rolled out, and half way through my contract I moved to Hull, so after that ANY kind of signal was barely there. But that’s not the phones fault.

Interface: Igh. Relatively easy to use, except that occasionally the phone would crash or pop up the message “Unfortunately, Google keyboard has stopped”. K. Not really sure how I’m meant to handle that…

Power: Fluctuated. On heavy use probably less than a day. Price: £300, but I paid £150 and had a phone contract costing £30 a month.

##LG L20 Apps: Most of them, except you really need to put a microSD card in the phone or you run out of space quickly. I have Facebook, Spotify (with a lot of downloaded music because I can’t stream anything in Hull reliably), Facebook messenger and WhatsApp and it’s ran out of space. Also because of the size of the screen my banking app is no longer compatible.

Signal: not 4G capable. Not really an issue because Hull. Also it doesn’t have NFC which for most people isn’t a problem, but I was working on some NFC capable tech so…

Interface: tiny. Relatively OK to use but the keyboard is like an amalgamation of the Nexus 5 touch keyboard with the blackberry size keys, because the screen is so small. It feels a bit like using a phone that’s half way between the time when we had tiny touch screens which were awful at recognising touch and using a phone with a regular touch screen. You don’t have to press hard for it to work out where you’re touching, but the screen is so small it’s difficult to tap things precisely. Also, the phone came with this stupid “knock” technology whereby you’re given 4 corners of an invisible grid and expected to tap in the code when you can’t see the grid. I guess again, it would be fun seeing someone steal it and attempt to unlock it, but if someone stole this phone I really wouldn’t be that bothered because cheap tack.

Power: I charged it full on the first day (Wednesday). It’s just running out now, but baring in mind I only got cell reception about 2AM this morning, so I’ve really only been using it for Spotify.

Price: £30