umm...
Sorry what was the name of the phone I didn't quite catch that !!!
WB dabbsy, There seems to of been a mutiny of sorts whilst you were gone! Please could you go angrily stare at them till they behave childishly again.
Welcome back. Just think, it’s been a week already since glum users began reluctantly re-occupying seats that had been blissfully empty during most of Christmas and New Year. No doubt your Monday was spent dealing with forgotten-password requests, Tuesday helping the same users who had already forgotten the replacement password …
That's what using cheapy Chinese white-label phones with SAR ratings higher than sticking your head in a microwave does to you. I hope everyone realises that they should stick with Apple, the radio signal can't even get through your hands if you hold it wrong.
"(Apart from the last one which was a bit too clever for its own good.)"
OT I know, but I liked the plot twist in which we don't know whether 19th century Sherlock is dreaming 21st century or vice versa, or whether they are dreaming part of one another's lives.
sandraandwoo.com played a similar game with its readers leading up to Christmas, [spoiler alert] with a similar plot twist in which while the main character thinks she has been dreaming, her pet raccoon is wearing an artefact from the "dream".
But I suspect I am far from alone in having a 'burner' phone for said activites? In my case my very much beloved Razr i, albeit with my current sim. My mate for years used a flip Nokia which got retirted last summer....
Still, I demand to know what this is, the Doogee X5 Pro is too big for this function really. Someone don their dearstalker please.
This post has been deleted by its author
[ v2.0 because I missed the 10-minute edit window having taken a quick look on teh interwebs and found that prices for similar items have gone down even further since the one quoted in the article ]
A basic smartphone for occasional use, for those rare times when my clamshell* portable telephonic apparatus isn't enough, e.g. extremely approximate map location** and email without having to trust someone else's cybercaff. Possibly wishful thinking for such a budget item but if it can also do tethering for the fondleslab then we have a winner.
* no 'butt-dialling', extremely hard to break and a battery life of just under a month standby, about a week under frequent use (better than their stated spec too). Less is more.
** even in the UK, online map locations are crap, I dare you to try relying on these abroad, it doesn't matter how good the GPS is when the map shows the destination on wrong road in the wrong town and it takes 6 months to get corrections done...
I wish I still had a working Razr I, rather than one that was dropped from 17meters onto concrete!
I'm assuming it's an Acer Z220 that was reviewed. It got slated for the screen, but otherwise it would be an upgrade from the Huweai U8180 I'm currently using , still running fro-yo!
I'd be great to just leave one's house with a suitable phone... a cheap one for drunk nights out, a big rugged one for weekend camping trips, a fancier phone for that long rail commute.
However, being tied to a physical SIM is an issue. Yeah, I can shrug off the loss of a £20 phone on a night out, but not having my SIM for a couple of days will still be inconvenient.
Dabooka, I agree. All I want is to make an occasional phone call or maybe use the calculator function to figure a bar tip after having had too many to figure it mentally.
Those of us who do a lot of physical work can't stick a small tablet in our pockets and expect it to come out in one piece at the end of the day. In our end of the woods, nobody gives a crap about what electronic kit anyone lugs around. Chainsaw, maybe. But, not a phone.
usually just as you turn on to the motorway and 100 miles from the next service station, thereby driving you insane
Or as my iPod did once, crash just I merge onto the M40 when setting off for Scotland. Of course I keep it in the central console. Tucked nicely out of the way right at the front actually underneath the heater controls. I can just about reach it if I duck down and stretch out my arm...
£65? Just reminded my father that £20 on the even more disposable (but higher spec than [insert name here]) [insert other name] he was considering was a bit pointless without an internet connection or PC.
Could have bought 2 of them with some credit for double the party fun. Next year i fully expect usable phones will be given away with cereal.
Next year? There was one embedded in an advert in Entertainment Weekly 4 years ago.
http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/ew-has-smartphone-inside/
I'm old enough to have been impressed by the blinkenlight on Pink Floyd's Pulse so a throw-away smart phone is still astonishing 4 years on.
@ Seajay#; The Enterteinment Weekly thing doesn't really count as that was quite obviously a publicity stunt they'd have taken a loss on. The article states they only produced 1000 of those "special" magazines.
Pretty sure it more than paid for itself with the intended result of getting them in the news though.
[insert generic greeting here] Dabbsy! Please [insert URL of mystery manufacturer's website here] so that I can look into purchasing [insert name of mystery product here] by [insert name of mystery manufacturer here]
[insert mystery appreciative comment here]
[insert mystery commentard name here]
apparently the postman tried to deliver a Large Hadron Collider while he was out.
You'll find it amongst the roses in the neighbour's back garden, where the postie chucked it when no-one answered the door four seconds after knocking.
Plenty of other particle accelerators to compare it with:
http://www-elsa.physik.uni-bonn.de/accelerator_list.html
But I'm sure there will soon be an app.
PS - bumped into Steel Panther at the launch of COD Modern Warfare 3 - so there's the IT angle if you needed one.
-The LHC has plenty of expandable storage, though the battery life is probably not all it could be. The camera has fantastic resolution though.
-My 2-yo Galaxy S5 is nearly a burner phone at this point, albeit with better specs: The value is depreciated, it is my main phone, and it doesn't break easily.
-Every week we replace 1-3 iPhone 6 devices on which someone has smashed the glass, apparently by looking at them the wrong way.
-I'm not wearing any pants, though unfortunately I must do so soon.
Dear Sir,
"-My 2-yo Galaxy S5 is nearly a burner phone at this point, albeit with better specs: The value is depreciated, it is my main phone, and it doesn't break easily."
Do you find as well, that the S5 gets quite hot sometimes, almost turning itself into a burning phone rather than a burner phone? Well, mine does sometimes...
Regards,
Guus
Bought an unlocked used one of these off fleaBay for similar price (sixty odd quid).
Came with Android Lollipop, which was fine.
Have since rooted and installed CyanogenMod 13 (Android Marshmallow).
Works great and found myself using for more than just sports tracking (instead of my main Android phone).
Not laggy & still competitive.
I bought one of those as my flashy top of the range phone (admittedly for $20 because some store did the maths wrong on what it costs to buy out the contract).
Then I leaned too far off a dock to grab a rope.....
Now I'm back to my no name Android 4.4 "smart" phone
Way back when the M40 had only just opened it was possible to drive from just west of Telford to Folkestone using the M54->M6->M42->M40->M25->M26->M20 without encountering a motorway service area. That was the best part of 250 miles I reckon, but plenty of services on the route now. Which does leave Toddington to Pease Pottage as the current long distance holder
"Sure, I’ll take a look at your crappy little cheapo smartphone, I said. By the time I had phoned around my contacts, only to discover that magazines and websites are no longer interested in reviews of affordable, entry-level kit"
I am. It sounds very much like the one I bought in September - my selection process was "the cheapest possible thing that actually qualifies as a smartphone and doesn't look like it's going to break within 2 minutes". It replaced the even cheaper, but better, QWERTY Nokia that I unfortunately lost, and which was no longer available on my contract. I'd wager there are many more like me who aren't obsessed with the latest "ooh, shiny". But of course we don't make sufficient money for the marketing spods.
"On Thursday, I’m guessing you spent most of the day explaining to the hapless deskbound masses how to filter their 20,000 unread emails that turned up over the holiday break."
Thats a point Mr Dabbs, where the hell do those 20,000 emails turn up from - when everyone else was apparently also on holiday??
Its a bloody conspiracy I tell you!
That way it will appear as if they have been busy at work while the rest were slacking off for xmas.
Err
That way their e-mails will appear buried in an enormous pile of fetid festive 'offers', and the odds against anyone ever reading beyond the title are really quite long. And, in advanced cases, any tricky questions that later come up can be referred to 'the e-mail that I sent you that you could never be bothered to read'.
The idea of a party phone is a good one. There is also the concept of "night out at theatre phone" which needs to be small, discreet, silent and only really carried in case the car breaks down on the way, or the babysitter rings to ask where the coffee and sugar is. Versus the "waste time at work phone" which has a large screen and large data allowance etc.
The one thing holding this concept back are the bloody mobile operators of course. What I want is to be able to buy multiple sims for use in multiple devices simultaneously, that share the same number, same minutes and same data. The sim that receives the phone calls is the one in the phone that was most recently turned on.
Simples.
What I want is to be able to buy multiple sims for use in multiple devices simultaneously, that share the same number, same minutes and same data.
I would so love that! I have a couple of places I visit regularly where having a smartphone is not a smart idea. Got sick of swapping sim between the "this is shit but could save my life and will survive in this environment" phone and the "this qualifies as a smartphone and lets me use the nice BT feature of my stereo among other things" phone. These days the smart phone barely gets touched while the crap one gets used. I could use call forwarding and an extra account, but why should I pay money twice for what really is one connection?
One of the local telcos was trying to sell my partner and I on us scrapping the landline and having the shop calls routed to our cell phones. Our separate phone #'s would ring simultaneously and whoever answered first got the call. If they can do that, surely they could give us multi device on one account. It doesn't seem that hard (given modern tech and similar product/plan offerings as above), and I can be the first telco to offer that in any country would make a mint.
"So what [insert name of mystery manufacturer here] has done is design a smartphone that serves a generally similar purpose for the young, self-obsessed, hedonistic, hipster generation, as well as the old, morbidly obese, snot-nosed, entitled generation that can no longer fit into fashionably naked, espadrilled heels, yet want their tech cheerfully cheap, made off the backs of low-income workers while they complain about off-shore job emigration while wondering if said actions will truly increase their stock dividends.
FIFY
My burner phone -and until not so long my proud main phone- is the lovely Nokia 700. The last of the Symbians, it is (or rather, could have been) a great little piece of kit.
Last year, it wowed a long time Android user by having.. *grasp*.. offline maps and navigation!
It really annoys me how market droids, and by extension buyers, get head over heels with the newest smartphone model because it is 1 Angstrom slimmer than last year's model and then encase it in a huge, fugly plastic and plexiglass suit of armor that negates any size reduction and then some... My 700 showed it glorious nakedness for years without fear and once got to swim in an urinal (long story...) only to come out of it reeking but unscathed.
Why the fsck do one get sentimental over a goddammned phone?
The 80's were great. I fell out of a 1st floor window onto the roof of my own car just as the father of the "blond twin sisters" was dropping them off. He tried to drive off but both rear doors opened and out they came: "bye dad". I was wearing a Churchill romper suit on account of losing my friend's trail bike into a pond a few hours earlier.
Me and my mate used to piss about with this car. What can you do with an 850cc "big gearstick" puke coloured mini? Put four bikers into it, play Pinky & Perky and other silly songs. One of those songs was Russ Abbot's & we got to quite like it!
My mate & I got a date with the pair of unobtainiam sisters on the strength of my roof exploit. My 2.3ltr (only made 500) vauxhall firenza collectors item refused to start on date night so we had to go with my mate's imported "new"(*) mini. Sisters were crammed into the back. He got lost(**) and by the time we got where we were supposed to be food was off.
(*) He imported belgium mot failure mini's, converted & resprayed them - until the "Q" reg came out, whatever year that was.
(**) down a dead-end in lincolnshire, stinking of silage.
Things went downhill from there. The 80's were great because I don't remember them!
Remember how office phones developed from expensive boxes to unloved black things? I remember when my father had three phones - outside line, department and the drop-everything direct line from the Above - colour coded. Then along came PABXs.
Android is going this way and I can well imagine that in 5 years, whatever the benchmarks say, there is going to be hardly any practical differentiation. People may buy phones that are more durable because they will last - technical changes won't make upgrades difficult - but there's not much demand for diamond encrusted Monarch handsets and I can't see much demand for blingphones any more.
Apple will be completely in the Hertz type business, leasing IT kit and selling insurance. It's almost there now; it buys phones from China and then offers a leasing deal similar to that in the car industry, but with faster turnaround. It will still have US market dominance because of carriers. Perhaps a future Democrat government will have it broken up like AT&T.
Perhaps we have already reached Peak Shiny Gadget or are close to it. But if my crystal ball had been working I'd have bought AAPL in 2000 and sold in 2014, so I am hardly reliable.
Oooooh, Dabbsy, you really impress me with the paaaartays.
And especially you and your mates' ability to remember all of each others' numbers on your new disposable SIMs. No doubt while under the influence of bacteria excrement metabolites.
I will have another beer and see if it helps me remember my own phone number without looking it up.
:) 16 all
... but good as box fresh Sony M4 Aqua for under 80 quid including delivery. 6 quid on a nice slice of 9H glass to stick on the front and 3 quid for a rubberised case.
waterproof (and dustproof), surprisingly shockproof, decent battery life, good screen, fairly excellent camera ... for less than 90. Kids these days don't know they're born.
Bravo for writing an article at peak efficiency for driving us all mad wanting to know WHAT it was you reviewed. Are we going to get some more regular SftWS in the coming year or am I going to have to religiously refresh the Reg website every friday in hopes of finding an a BOFH or SftWS article? (Or maybe that's exactly what the Reg is after, sneaky bastards)
If you have a oldish Lumia like a 920 or even a 1020, you don't worry about your £600 phone cause it only costs £150 to replace. I have dropped both of them more than I can recall.
Except, of course. It is nice-looking, takes fabulous photos and there is no need to be ashamed of it being seen (despite what people on this site say).
**
The model I received first from Amazon was faulty, one of the magnets blew up. I was told I couldn't have an exchange model, it had to be repaired. It took an unacceptably long time. Not long after I got it back it electrocuted my Subway, which was annoying.
Then it turned out not to be very good for the main reason for which I bought it, it only found one heavy boson and that took a lot of faffing around. So it went back.
It's now several years later, I've got it back again, it seems to be working this time and it's had an upgrade, but really the manufacturer should have got it right the first time. I don't like being the beta tester.
So, only two stars. But if the manufacturer can fix updates and customer service I might rate the next one I buy a bit higher.