Month: September 2023

Phones

~ e.v. ~ Leave a comment

The time is coming to upgrade my phone. I have a Xioami Pocophone F1, which has been a pretty good phone for the price I paid (£200), but is now quite a long way out of date and hasn’t had security updates for years, which is not great. I think the priorities I have are: 1. The camera, because I take a lot of photos of my dog and 2. It has to be a pretty OK general purpose device.

Despite it being a cheap phone I find it can take very striking photos, with a bit of coaxing in bright light. Photos are very, very subjective, especially regarding colour, and you could criticise the camera here for artifically increasing the vibrancy of the greens, but to me it looks good and I like it (though sometimes it makes the reds of the harness and lead look pink). I’m less bothered by that kind of processing than cameras that use AI to add detail where there is none, like faking moon photos, which is just ridiculous.

But it can struggle with exposure, and it’s particularly poor in artificial light. I think I might be at a disadvantage with the auto focus in low light because my favourite model is black and he probably wouldn’t let me dye him white.

Hasn’t focused in artificial light
Bad exposure
A bit overexposed
Not bad for an action shot, but the sky is a bit bright and the focus isn’t great

We have various possible sales coming up soon – Prime Day in a few weeks, Black Friday in November, so I’m trying to get a head start in understanding the market.

The best cameras are the Google Pixel series. The Pixel 7a is about £450 (I could just about be convinced to spend this much) and the 7 is £550 (I could not be convinced to spend this much) but you can get a 7 for about £400 from marketplace sellers on Amazon. But I am suspicious and think these are probably ‘grey market’ sellers, so, assuming you actually end up with the phone, Google might not honour the warranty. I’m not sure about Pixels. They seem to be a camera with a phone attached to them and there are plenty of complaints about the non-camera aspects of the phone (overheating, battery, unreliable fingerprint sensor), so while I would probably love the camera I might not love the phone. The price may come down officially though as the Pixel 8 is launching in a couple of weeks, so I’m keeping an eye on this. The official Google store is currently leading with “Pixel 8: Coming in hot”, which is an interesting choice of phrase for a phone with a reputation for overheating.

Other possibilities in the £300-450 range are the Nothing Phone(1), Samsung A54, OnePlus Nord 2T 5G, and a confusing array of Xioami phones. Generally all of these have a camera that is either slightly or substantially worse than the Pixel’s, with the Pixel’s being especially competitive in low light. But every other feature is probably the same or better.

Xioami probably offers the best value for money for the hardware but the short software support time I got with my Poco F1 puts me off. Maybe they have improved that now. The Samsung A54 is probably the safe choice.

Again…?

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I woke up on Monday with a sore throat, and then as soon as I started eating breakfast my stomach announced it was upset too. Three days later and, yep, it’s definitely a virus of some kind. So far it’s not been too bad. My stomach is still a bit iffy but not terrible, and the sore throat has progressed to a bit of a cold but nothing much. Is it COVID? I don’t know, I don’t have any tests. The first time I had COVID it started with an upset stomach a few days before other symptoms appeared and the second time (in January) it started with a sore throat. So… maybe? Not that it makes any difference either way, except that hopefully since I had it relatively recently I’ve still got enough immunity that it won’t be too bad this time.

In computer game news, I finished Shadow of Mordor. I enjoyed it a lot and as it’s a long time since I last played a big budget computer game I was surprised by how polished it was. Maybe that’s just the standard now, but it I felt it was really well made. It also prompted me to start watching Rings of Power (the Amazon Lord of the Rings series), as the stories kind of overlap a little bit. Except that in the game Celebrimbor is a force to be reckoned with, whereas in the TV show he looks like a geography teacher.

I thought I’d have a break from Lord of the Rings before moving onto Shadow of War, the sequel. In the mean time I went with the Mad Max game. The Mad Max game is conceptually quite similar to Shadow Of Mordor (in terms of gameplay mechanics), but I’ve been underwhelmed by it. It feels like they made about 80% of the game really well but didn’t think about the final 20%. The writing is immature. It’s been a very long time since I saw Mad Max, so maybe this is in, but the first person you meet is called “Scrotus” and it doesn’t improve from then onwards. Almost everyone you meet is an angry psychopath who in the kind of lawless reality depicated would have been killed for being a total liability to themselves and everyone around them. Overall, though, the game is very polished but repetitive and not all that fun. Even just playing in short bursts on my Steam Deck I’m feeling bored by it. The driving feels nice, but wandering around on foot is dull.

I might try Subnautica next. People keep telling me that it’s amazing.