Tag: phones

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LG Optimus Black: Paint It Black

I needed an Android phone to test the Android version of PSMonitor. I wanted a low-end phone, a least common denominator, so I checked out the Samsung Galaxy Ace. While it has better than usual low-end specs (800MHz processor, 3.5″ 320×480 display), it didn’t have a front camera and is not expected to have Ice Cream Sandwich. So scrap that.

This led me to search some more and eventually to the LG Optimus Black which is a bit higher-end (1GHz processor, 4″ 480×800 display). Expectedly, it was quite expensive. But that changed when LG lowered the price and, even better, announced that Ice Cream Sandwich will be available for it. After a few more days of considering, I finally went ahead and got it.

My first impression is that it’s a well-designed, minimalist, and low-key phone. Almost everything is black. Even the LG logos are in subdued shades of gray. Once you hold it, you see it’s also very slim and very light. Probably the one thing that really screams “Look at me!” is the Nova display. It is just BRIGHT! Unfortunately, it has a yellowish tint when viewed from the front which is a bummer.

The user-experience is typical Android, a whole lot of power and flexibility. Frankly, it’s way more than what you actually need to get real work done.  It’s not drastically more complicated or worse than iOS, we know they each got their particular quirks. It’s just different.

However, it does feel like it needs a bit more polish (but that’s supposed to change with Ice Cream Sandwich). Also, it’s a little bit laggy due to the low-end specs as well as all those virtual machinery and hardware abstraction layers. The price of multi-hardware support. But it’s nothing that you can’t get used to.

Performance with the built-in Frozen Yogurt is good although I expect it would improve once the promised updates comes out. Gingerbread after all is an enhancement, optimization, and bug-fix version. Performance with Ice Cream Sandwich would probably suffer. I’m hoping it would still be passable though. At least still enough for its primary purpose as my Android test phone.

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Mobile OS Updates

Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich is one of the best things since sliced bread Gingerbread. Unfortunately it seems not everyone is going to get it. It has been officially announced that the barely 2-year old Nexus One won’t be getting it. There was also a rumor (since quashed but only after a few long days) that the  barely a year old LG Optimus 2X won’t have it. Someone even made a chart of the sad history of Android updates. It’s a dismal picture for Android.

For the iPhone data, it’s pretty accurate. The by then 3-year old original iPhone (released Jun 2007) was not supported by iOS 4 (released Jun 2010). The 3-year old iPhone 3G (released Jul 2008) is not supported by iOS 5 (released Oct 2011). Basically, iPhones have a supported life of 3 years.

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Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich

Watched the YouTube live stream of the launching of the Samsung/Google Galaxy Nexus and Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich. The Galaxy Nexus has nice specs (1280×720 display!) though I’m not too hot on the form factor. I’ve never liked banana-shaped phones (Nokia 7110/8110 anyone?) nor humongous screens (which unfortunately is the trend). But Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) stole the limelight. Slick new UI, powerful new features (Face Unlock, Beam, folders, screenshots, etc.). Both the phone and ICS seem to have patent-issue avoidance in mind, e.g. the phone cannot be mistaken for any iDevice, the new folders don’t have the content-view of iOS.

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Speck ToughShell

I mentioned before that putting the gorgeous iPhone 4 inside a case generally fuglifies it. So I prefer the iPhone naked or wearing a Sena Ultraslim Pouch. And for the times when I do need a measure protection I use a Speck PixelSkin.

But if the going gets tougher, the only answer, at least previously, is a heavy-duty case like the Otterbox Defender. Unfortunately, it costs a lot, P2,500 the last time I checked, and it has an ugly circular cutout to show off the Apple logo (why?!?). So I searched and found the Speck ToughShell.

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Galaxy S2 vs iPhone 4S

A lot of people are disappointed by the iPhone 4S. I’m not, so I tried to understand the disparity. The easiest thing to do is to look at the numbers. Numbers tell a lot, but not everything. As can be seen from the CPU clock speed wars and later the camera megapixel wars. So with that in mind, I laid out a side-by-side for comparison against the de facto Android flagship, the Samsung Galaxy S2.

What the numbers tell me is that the Galaxy S2 has set the bar and that the iPhone 4S merely matched it. But that’s by the numbers. People who are numbers fixated were disappointed because of this. But the previous generation Galaxy S more or less matched the iPhone 4 in specs. Yet, in sales it was pretty far behind. This can be attributed to marketing and the merits of the phone. How much of each, or even simply which one, depends on your particular bias. Other people were caught up in the hype and were disappointed. They practically set themselves up for it.

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