BV shananigans.

Lazy afternoon in the BV. at Belle Vue Hotel Pub

Seeing as last time I got a new phone I wrote a post comparing it with my previous one I thought I would do the same again now I have got another new phone.

I’ve had my eye on the Galaxy Nexus for a while. I really liked the bigger screen, so on Monday I went and got it. I’ve spent most of my time with it so far moving data across and getting it set up how I want it. I finally finished doing that today.

Here are my observations after 5 days of using it.

Stuff that is better on the Galaxy Nexus:

• Bigger screen - it makes reading so much easier. Sometimes before I would use Instapaper to save long articles for when I was back on my laptop because the screen size made reading for any length of time uncomfortable, but now I won’t need to.
• Screen has better colours - ever since Google pushed out an update to the Nexus S they made the colour saturation on the screen horrible, there were lots of complaints about this at the time. Fortunately this isn’t a problem on the Galaxy Nexus and white is actually white, rather than having a yellow tint.
• Screen curve - on the Galaxy Nexus the screen is curved ever so slightly. On the Nexus S the curve was more prominent and was a bit annoying.
• Front facing camera - better quality, shoots at 1.3MP rather than VGA.
• Battery life - definitely lasts longer on the Galaxy Nexus, maybe because the battery is bigger.
• Battery charging time - it took forever to charge the battery on the Nexus S, fortunately the Galaxy Nexus charges fast.
• Fast - absolutely no lag at all, everything just happens instantly.
• Notification LED. This was strangely missing on the Nexus S so I had to use an app instead (NoLED), which was a bit of a battery drain.
• No physical buttons on the front - the buttons are just part of the display, so when you rotate your phone to landscape the buttons rotate too. When you watch a film, the buttons disappear.
• One press app switching button - on the Nexus S to switch to a different running app you had to press and hold the home button, which wasted time.

Now you would think with this being Samsung’s/Google’s replacement for the Nexus S, everything would be better, but no! I’m sure manufacturers deliberately make one or two things not perfect, just so they can then bring out a new improved model in the future to get you to upgrade. Here’s what’s not so good:

• Rear camera - both phones use a 5 megapixel camera. I was expecting exactly the same photo quality as my Nexus S but it’s nowhere near as good. The images it takes aren’t sharp and the camera is a bit of a disappointment, even though it does take photos super fast.
• Loudspeaker volume - it’s not very loud. Using sat nav in my car on full volume I can hardly here the directions. The loudspeaker on my Nexus S wasn’t great, but on the Galaxy Nexus it’s poor. I am going to invest in a bluetooth speaker for around the house and garden.

The Galaxy S2 has a great camera and a really loud loudspeaker, so Samsung are clearly capable of making a phone that does these two things well, it’s just a shame they didn’t use this camera and loudspeaker in the Galaxy Nexus, as that for me would make it a perfect phone.

captainfarrell:

I spent the best part of last week gallivanting around my old stomping grounds of a surprisingly sunny Bangor. It proved to be the welcome break I needed. After all my unemployment/woe is me/general unimpressed attitude with life as a graduate, I was able to kick back for a few days and just enjoy…

Good morning. (Taken with picplz in Stoke-on-Trent.)

Hans (Taken with picplz in Stoke-on-Trent.)

helloterrilowe:

life complete.

Just scanning in some old photos. Here’s one of my Mum.

What a job.

My geocaching “heatmap”, complete with Michael Fish!

BMI Baby

Two weeks after buying some scales and my BMI has reduced by 0.36. Not a huge amount, but it’s going in the right direction. Other than some short walks with the dog, that’s without any exercise too.

Once it gets a bit warmer and lighter at night I’ll be out geocaching more and walking up mountains and my BMI reduction will accelerate.

I’m officially fat!

I bought some scales last week and decided to calculate my BMI. I knew I would be overweight, didn’t expect to be bordering on obese though.

My aim is to get my BMI below 25 and into the green. I need to start eating healthier and walking my dog more. As it’s now starting to get lighter and warmer that should come naturally anyway. I’m not sure how long it should take as I don’t know about these things, but I hope by the end of the summer I’ve achieved my target.

My HTC Desire suffered the common overheating problem when using GPS. It gets hot and then constantly reboots itself. One day it got so hot it just died. I got it replaced with another Desire. The GPS on the replacement didn’t work at all. I got it repaired. The repaired HTC Desire has the same overheating/rebooting problem when using GPS as my original Desire.

Last week I set out on an unfamiliar journey.  Knowing the GPS on my Desire was as much use as a chocolate fireguard I borrowed my Mum’s Tomtom sat nav.  For some reason that wouldn’t get past the boot screen though. The GPS on my iPhone doesn’t work either. I don’t think GPS likes me (strangely enough I gave my mum her Tomtom back today, she turned it on, and it started up first time).

So fed up with having 3 lots of GPS, none of which worked, I went to The Carphone Warehouse and bought myself a Samsung Nexus S. I’ve been playing with it for a week now, and these are my observations of it compared with my HTC Desire:

Good things about the Nexus S compared to the Desire:

• Wider screen - it’s only slightly wider, but it just feels better and because the keys on the virtual keyboard are ever so slightly more spread out it makes typing much easier for me. 
• Signal strength - I now get 3G signal in areas where I had no signal before. Calls don’t drop in areas of low signal like they did before.  I now get 2G signal as well, never did with the Desire (I blamed my network for this, when it was actually a hardware issue).
• Front facing camera - I love it! Although I haven’t found any apps that use it yet. Will be good for Qik, etc though.
• Touch sensitive back/menu/search/home buttons - not having these as physical buttons was putting me off buying it, as I like the feedback you get from pushing an actual button.  The Nexus S though gives a little vibrate when you touch the buttons, so you still get that feedback. The amount of vibration is subtle, so it’s not annoying.  You can switch it off if it does get on your nerves though.
• Headphone jack at the bottom - means I can use my phone in the rain, without fear of water getting in the headphone jack and causing damage.
• Screen - black is actually black rather than dark grey as it was with the Desire, and it just seems sharper and brighter.
• Olephobic screen - this sounds like a gimmick but it actually works. I hardly get any finger prints on my screen, I was forever wiping my Desire’s screen clean.
• Speaker sound - the sound is far less tinny than the Desire, and considering the speaker size it actually sounds really good.
• Speed - it’s a lot snappier.  My HTC Desire was fast, I only noticed a slowdown if installing apps but the Nexus S installs apps and does everything super fast.  It also boots up in about the half the time.

Bad things about the Nexus S compared to my Desire:

• No LED - no idea why they didn’t bother with a LED, which I find really useful for notifications.  Fortunately there’s an app for that - NoLED.  This puts a little coloured dot on your screen instead, and because the Nexus S uses an AMOLED display it means that the entire of the screen doesn’t need power just to light up one dot. So it’s not that big of a deal.
• Screen unresponsiveness - I’ve had to restart it a few times because the screen has become unresponsive. Usually after installing a load of apps. Not a major concern at the moment though. I never had to restart my Desire for this reason.

There are some other things that the Nexus S has over the Desire (gyro, NFC), I’ve not mentioned them though as I’ve not used them.

The Nexus S is also running Gingerbread, which has a few nice advantages and tweaks compared with Froyo. I don’t have HTC Sense anymore, but I’m not missing it either. Maybe HTC should stop playing about with the OS and just concentrate on making more reliable hardware.

For my needs (actually for my wants, nobody needs a phone) the Nexus S is the best phone available, and I’m more than happy with it.

Earlier @LeighPreece tweeted that he would be taking a daily photo this year. I’ve seen that done before, thought about it but worried that on some days (especially in the winter) I wouldn’t be able to take a photo that is interesting.

I’ve decided to give it a go though, and have chosen to upload my photos for this project to Google’s Picasa.  Uploading a daily photo may even incentivise me to do something interesting each day!

I’ve just uploaded my first photo.  It seems you can add a caption to a photo but not a description.  I was going to be adding a description as well but on thinking about it some more not being able to do so is probably a good thing as it will save me time and make me more likely to see this though to the end of the year.

My plan is to upload a photo every day, rather than say taking a photo each day for a week then uploading them all at once.  It shouldn’t be that difficult, as I can just take photos with my phone and upload them directly from it.

The album is at http://picasaweb.google.com/awoodvine/365

Enjoy!