New Gadgets
I had to get a new cell phone. I liked my LG800 touch-screen well enough, but the battery would not hold a decent charge. I got another battery, but it was no good because if the phone wasn’t charged every night it would die, and if you were on it for even close to hour, it would die. Something was wrong with the charging circuit, because a lot of people were complaining about the same thing.
A relative has a Samsung that he swears by, so I bought a 425 which looks like a conventional ‘brick’, but it has a slide out keyboard. I don’t text, but it would be nice to leave a note in comments if the DSL or power has died. I charged it a week ago and it still shows three of five bars on the battery. That is important when you expect to lose power for an extended period.
The other device I’ve been working with is a Kindle Paper White reader that was sent to my Mother. It looks like it will help her to continue reading without have to spend money on larger print books, but I’m a little concerned that the touch-screen may be too sensitive for her. I re-read The Hobbit on it, and it would work for me, but she might get irritated with it. I’ll have to see.
17 comments
I’ve had an old-style Samsung for about five years, and it still holds a 2 or 2½-day charge given a couple of short conversations a day plus maybe two text messages. (Stella and I text a lot because she can’t be interrupted by a voice phone call at work, but sometimes something really has to be dealt with right away at home.) The display is still bright and clear down to a one-bar charge. I detest the clumsy interface, but if they have retained the same manufacturer(s), I would buy another Samsung in a minute. Let us all know how yours works out.
Can you change the sensitivity of the touch screen? (I don’t know about these things.. I have been left in clouds of dust by my kids who have the latest and the greatest electronic gizwhitchy) My sympathies to your mom 😀
I had to get a new cell phone.
Well, there’s *another* coincidence! 😉 😀
I had to get one also. Got a great deal on an Android 4.2.2 smart phone for $199. Battery life isn’t great (has a 5″ HD display, 8MP camera, 2GB RAM and flash-drive, so I wasn’t surprised). Supports Multi-networks & has dual SIM’s. Got a 2nd Battery for $12 (cheapest phone battery I’ve ever seen!) and a 32 GB Class 10 microSD card for $35
Agora HD Quad-core Smartphone
Curiously, it’s made by the same company that makes the Aldi Bauhn SmartPhone, but is $100 cheaper (though the spec’s are the same and Aldi is usually cheaper than anyone else). It’s available in the uSA & UK from Kogan also. Also got a Smart TV because I wanted a new Tablet, but the good 10″tablets (like the Nexus 10) are expensive and the 32″ LED Smart TV (which is basically a big Tablet with Android 4.2) was way cheaper! Go figure. Who knows… I may even use it to watch news etc. 😆
32″ Agora Smart LED TV (HD)
One nice feature is I can use it as a 2nd display via WiFi, Ethernet or HDMI. It even has a nifty small keyboard with track-pad. Works really well actually, I was quite surprised given the price! And the display is very good. *shrug* See how long it lasts. 😉 I think it’s designed to be used anywhere as it has 12V DC power as well as universal AC.
I decided to pay for an extended 3 yr warranty on them because they had a discount deal (about $60 for both).
My Mother had a Samsung flip-down, but it had to be changed after the network went to 3G. My older brother carries her on his account, so he sent her a different phone that is supposed to be easier to use. She hated the small buttons, but loved the fact that it answered calls when you opened it, and shut down, when you closed it. The new phone makes her push buttons, and its battery doesn’t last.
She used to keep up, Ellroon, but now she leaves all of the tech stuff to me. Touch screens really aren’t adjustable after they are shipped, so whether she likes it will depend on her ability to get along with it. I think it will help, and keep her mind active.
Kryten, you are getting better pricing than we do, as I assume the pricing is in Australian dollars. Even in US dollars those are great deals, that might make it across the Pacific, if the Tea Party doesn’t lay waste to the economy.
Kogan pricing is pretty much the same Worldwide, adjusted for exchange rate of course.
The Agora HD Smartphone is US$189
(USA) Agora HD Smartphone
It sold out pretty fast in the USA, what a surprise at that price! 😀
Ruslan Kogan is an Aussie who started his business here in 2006. He eventually opened up a distribution center in the USA & UK. By 2012, he was making revenues of over AU$100m. There are no middle-men and no shop-fronts. He only sell’s online and direct from the manufacturer’s (OEM), and usually much cheaper than the manufacturer’s products through normal channel (the Smartphone is a case in point at $100 more via Aldi stores). I’ve been buying from them for years, and I’ve never been disappointed.
Curiously, he doesn’t sell his TV range in the USA, even though they are universal. I guess he decided the market was already saturated and it wasn’t worth competing, or maybe it has something to do with regulations. *shrug* He’s a pretty smart guy, and started from next to nothing. His first products was a re-badged LG TV with some added features Aussies wanted for about half what the original LG cost here! It sold like crazy, and the rest is history! 🙂
He’s well known here for taking on anyone he thinks is worth targeting! 😀 Here’s some examples:
FYI: I think both HN & JB are retail crooks. They charge max prices and I’ve had experience with them not honoring their warranties without serious legal threats! Seriously, people who shop there must be stupid.
😆 I admit, I like the guy! He can’t be bullied, and he hit’s back hard. 😀
At the end of the day, his success speaks for itself. Many other companies growth has slowed the past decade (especially the two mentioned above, Harvey Norman and JB), whilst Kogan’s has steadily increased. The company has won the following business awards:
* BRW 2011 Fast 100 at rank 27, ranking the fastest growing companies in Australia in any sector and any size.
* BRW 2010 Fast 100 at rank 15, ranking the fastest growing companies in Australia in any sector and any size.
* BRW 2010 Fast Starters list at rank 17.
* BRW named Kogan the 15th fastest growing company in Australia, with 106.74% growth.
* Australian Retailer’s Association Retail Innovator of the Year 2010
* BRW 2009 Fast Starters list at rank 37
I could envy him, but I don’t. 🙂 He’s smart, honest (so far as I’ve seen anyway) and should be an inspiration to anyone.
Because of where I work and what I do, a smartphone is a requirement. And it can’t be just *any* smartphone, it has to be the latest hot smartphone. Which when I bought my phone was the Samsung Galaxy S3. Now it’s the Samsung Galaxy S4. The good part is that the screen is big enough for old eyes to read it. The bad part is that you need a purse to carry it, because it won’t fit in most pockets. Well, or you’re an embarrassing old fart who wears baggy pants like me, in which case it fits in the pocket. But that’s us old farts and our non-skinny jeans for ya.
When I was in the business full time I had to have the leading edge stuff, and essentially paid to beta test a hell of a lot of hardware and software. It was a major PITA. After things matured a bit, I got to hold off and buy stuff that mostly worked. Now I wait until I’m sure it works before I even bother to look at it.
Fortunately I don’t need a smartphone, so I can get my with my not-quite-a-moron phone that does everything I want and has a decent battery life.
Kogan sounds like Michael Dell in the early years when he sold computers out of his dorm room. ‘Ruslan’ is a very folkloric name among Slavs, close to Lancelot for the English speaking world. He’s making money, so he doesn’t need to back off – his business is growing.
See Badtux, there are some benefits to growing old 😉
One of the guys in the neighborhood works on cell phones and his biggest complaint about iPhones is that they have so many limits on them, while the Androids let you do stuff that no one else wants to do. [OK, the power switch is actually his biggest bitch, but he makes a lot money replacing them …]
The upside of the iDevices is that they Just Work(tm), while the Androids might or might not work depending on the time of day, phase of moon, and whether Samsung broke Kies again (which they do on a regular basis, Kies being their equivalent of iTunes… luckily the only thing it’s really useful for is upgrading the OS to fix the last batch of bugs that annoyed you silly, unluckily if it crashes while doing so, as it is wont to do, you’re taking your phone in to the AT&T service center to have it re-flashed).
“Agora HD Smartphone”
As long as you don’t suffer Agora-phobia… <grin_duck_run />
Well, my neighbor makes a decent living dealing with problems, but iDevices only work for people who can figure them out, and there are a lot of people who aren’t as smart as their phones.
That was really terrible, Steve 🙂 in a punny kind of way…
there are a lot of people who aren’t as smart as their phones.
there’s a reason why i stick with the $14.99 old-timey clamshell….
It is truly amazing how hard it is to find a phone and service that is designed primarily for making phone calls and is big enough to find when it rings.
I have had people mention that my ringtone is ‘annoying’ [it is a stuttering ring, no music, just ringing]. Excuse me, but isn’t that its purpose, to make me want to answer it?
My Mother would have loved to keep her Samsung, but it was made obsolete.
I used to go into a Telstra Shop and really annoy the young bobbleheads that work there by saying “I’d like a phone please. Just a phone, for talking. No camera, no internet, nothing… Just a phone, you know… for talking to people! Do you have one?” 😈 sometimes I’d get a look like I was an alien from Mars or something. 😆 I know, it’s sad really, but it’s my little revenge on Telstra and the idiots that work for them!
Unfortunately, now I need a “Mobile Communications Device”(tm). I get maybe two or three actual voice call’s a month, and an average of two-three SMS texts a day, and 20+ eMails a day! Trying to reply to a bunch of texts with the tiny old phone number-pad (especially when you have big hands like I do!) is a real PITA! And now that I’m doing an online business, I need an internet enabled device. But a full tablet or notebook is a PITA to carry around all day when I have to go out-and-about, so a SmartPhone with a 5″HQ display is a good compromise, and means I only need a single device to carry around. One nifty feature of the Agora is that the camera can be used as a document scanner, and there is a good OCR suite for Android also. I’ve already made good use of that. 🙂
But, I still have my trusty old Ericsson A108s! It has the best range of any phone I’ve had, and works in areas most won’t get a signal! And it has a small clip-on keyboard! 😀
LOL @ Steve! 😀 I thought that was funny (punny?) actually m8! 😀 😉 Heh…
“The upside of the iDevices is that they Just Work”
yeah… right! They sometimes do… eventually. 🙄
Considering that I was once responsible for repairing *iDevices* before they could actually be sold, you’ll excuse me if I disagree. Nobody is a more red-eye’d fanatic than an iDevice owner! If it was any other product that was known to need repairing before sale, they’d be screaming for blood! (and sure, not all required repair – unless it was an actual manufacturing fault, which did happen – but the percentage was high-enough to be troubling). Also the fact that Apple will very quietly update the hardware/firmware during the device life (unless it’s a blatant & obvious fault where they can’t get away with that), whilst keeping the model & serial codes the same so that the ignorant fanatics will stay content, means that all the *early adopters* are getting screwed, and paying for the privilege of those who buy later getting a device that may actually work!
*shrug*
BTW, check out the latest “Red Couch” (a weekly video program by CyberGhost VPN). It’s usually informative, sometimes funny. 😉
Red Couch E06: Smartphone Feelings Detector; Bitchy Microsoft Anti-Google Ads
Episode 3 was interesting, mainly about CyberSpying (NSA etc). 😉
Red Couch E03: Your Online Value; Spies on Twitter
There is a very old concept in retailing called : sell the customer what (s)he wants. These days it’s push whatever we want to sell on the customer after a megabuck ad blitz to convince them they ‘need’ it.
It doesn’t occur to them that there is a profit in selling phones that are just phones to people who just want a phone. You stock different models with different capabilities and let people buy what they want.
No one introduces a new model of anything anymore that doesn’t have bugs, which is why the clowns who stand in queues to buy the newest whatever are true morons. They are telling the world that they paid in time and money to beta test the newest product.
I acknowledge that Apple has been very good about maintaining a consistent user interface so that upgrading is not the alien experience of Microsoft, but they still push things out the door that aren’t thoroughly tested.
Bryan, I suspect the presence of an Apple store nearby makes a significant difference. In particular they hold classes, have knowledgeable people on staff to answer questions and help you figure out how to do what you want to do, offer rapid turnaround for repairs, and otherwise make the experience of buying a device more like the old-fashioned small town customer service experience than the modern paradigm of salesmen who know nothing about the product selling you things they don’t understand and there’s nobody there who knows anything to help you if you have a problem or a question. I suppose if you’re in an area where the only place to get Apple anything is at Wal-Mart or the AT&T Store, your experience with Apple might be different from mine.
Regarding bugs, modern Apple hardware is overpriced but when I said it Just Works, I wasn’t kidding. For example, the Bluetooth on my HP laptop isn’t working. I don’t know why it isn’t working, I’ve installed drivers, uninstalled drivers, tried different drivers, etc., but it was working once but now won’t work. HP’s only solution is to wipe out the hard drive and start over from scratch with a pristine system image. I’ve *never* had an Apple product do anything like that to me. For another one, I was upgrading my Samsung Galaxy S3 to a new version of Android and the phone basically bricked and I had to take it to AT&T’s service center to have it reflashed. I’ve *never* had an iDevice brick. And lest you say, “but Linux”, I wanted to write a CD-ROM (not a DVD) with Linux. I tried every program that came with Fedora 18. None of them worked to write a CD-ROM. They would write a DVD, but not a CD-ROM. Every single one of them locked up the SATA bus attempting to write a CD-ROM, causing the whole system to lock up for minutes at a time. Thinking I had bad hardware, I then tried an external USB writer. Same thing, except at least there it was just locking up the USB bus, a slightly better user experience.
Again, with every Apple computer I’ve owned since I bought my first one in 2007 (in response to Windows Vista), not a single one of them has ever had a problem writing a CD-ROM or DVD.
I have my beefs with Apple too — their hardware is overpriced, they don’t have a nice big 17″ dual-drive 1080p desktop replacement laptop like this big HP that I have on my desk, and WTF is with the lack of Blu-Ray support? But I have way fewer problems with Apple anything than I have with Android or Windows. They don’t do some things I wish they would do, which is why I have this HP laptop and an Android phone, but at least they Just Work when I want them to work, rather than giving me some cryptic error message or just silently not working at all. When I want to throw together a movie real quick or record a song, I don’t use the Windows laptop. I use my old Macbook Pro. Because nothing multimedia works well on Windows or Linux. It just doesn’t. Been there, done that, have the scars to prove it, multimedia Just Works on the Mac while it’s a PITA on Linux or Windows.
Kryten — sounds like your experience with Apple predates my experience with Apple (I bought my first Macbook in 2007 because I needed a laptop and I would rather have been boiled in hot oil than buy a laptop running Windows Vista). Since then Apple has had a few clunkers (antenna-gate anybody?) but nothing show stopping. Wish I could say the same about most other vendors, all of whom have released unstable unusable garbage from time to time. Like the trackpad on this HP laptop, which is a clone of Apple’s Touchpad. Except that Apple’s Touchpad actually works. This piece of cr*p doesn’t, it has the exact same bugs that my last HP laptop in 2005 had. Sigh!
I started with an Apple ][, 6502, 48K RAM, and a 143KB 5¼” floppy. I worked with the 2s, the ///, and the Lisa. Then the Mac was introduced and I dropped Apple because it didn’t solve the problems of my clients – overwhelmingly small businesses. It was a graphics and desktop publishing machine, while I was dealing with accounting and data base work.
Microsoft has followed the same path at a slower pace and isn’t as polished as the Apple solution for graphics and multimedia because there is no unified platform for programs, the hardware is too diverse.
In this area there is no support for Apple computers. You have to go to New Orleans if you are serious about buying them, or deal with the ‘Net. If you have problems you are on your own. The iDevices may be available at MalWart, I don’t buy things there, so I don’t know, and iPhones at the AT&T store.
The best device is the one that works best for what you want to do.