Coming from the S23 Ultra this was a big downgrade on paper. However with the Samsung credits accumulated from the S23 Ultra purchase I was able to purchase this device entirely with no money leaving my hands.
At the time we were providing these devices as entry level business devices, so I knew them well. They have their limitations but for the price point they excel as a full package. For starters the 4G variant utilises a Mediatek Helio G80 chipset, rather than an Exynos option (Avoid the 5g model for this reason!), so whilst performance isn’t ground-breaking the efficiency is. With light usage this phone can make it through a week on a single charge. The phone is also a great all rounder. It has 2 SIM slots, a Micro SD slot and a 3.5mm audio jack (something the majority of the more expensive phones on the market can’t match!). It has NFC and a surprisingly high quality LCD display (Excellent colours and 400PPI!).
This phone was the one that reset my expectations and got me questioning everything I’d come to believe about Smartphones. Back in 2012 the user experience was very different between a budget phone and a flagship, you needed a flagship just to have a fully functional device. If a phone with the functionality of a 2012 budget phone today I genuinely think people would return them as faulty, they were that bad. You can read my full thoughts on this here. Don’t get me wrong, I still think there is a substantial gap in performance and quality between the upper and lower ends of the market but our usage requirements of phones haven’t scaled at the same rate performance has. Everything we need is available in most of the budget phones on the market. The only difference being instead of using maybe 5-10% of the power of a flagship we would use 75-100% of a budget phone, but at the end of the day the task is still accomplished.
There were many more mistakes I made with impulsive purchases after this one, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and impulse buying driving most of them, but this phone put the thought in my head that lead me to where I currently stand today.
The one thing that would really make this phone a complete package would be Optical Image Stabilization on the main lens, but that’s nit-picking and would most likely drive the price up too high.
I kept the A14 around for a long time, when it wasn’t my main phone it was a secondary device. Through the time of finding balance with my screen time this was the backup phone I would keep apps on while I used a “Dumbphone”. Some of these devices are still in daily use at my work today, and they’re still working fantastically. They are durable, easy to repair and are proving themselves to have longevity on their side too. I do believe a lot of manufacturers put out more consistent offerings in their budget line-up’s than their premium ranges. Generally they use a proven chipset, with technology a generation or two old, so there’s less to go wrong that hasn’t already been solved. We also don’t have as high expectations when we’ve spend a 10th of the money!
I purchased the S23 Ultra outright from Samsung, using credits I’d accumulated to get a decent discount and also utilised the trade in deal. Never-the-less I still had to put down a considerable amount of money to get this device. Flagship smartphones were becoming eye wateringly expensive.
Make no mistake this was the most capable phone I’d ever owned, and I absolutely loved the party piece of it’s 100x digital zoom. I’m just not sure it justifies it’s hefty price tag. It started at £1249, I think I still had to pay around £800-900 with my discount and trade in.
I went full in with customising OneUI with Goodlock and all the other add-ons that Samsung provides to really make the phone my own. I still don’t think any manufacturer comes close to this level of tweaking without having to revert to third party apps. I do remember having problems with some of these apps though. I had apps disappearing from my app drawer, my home screen would sometimes just show blank amongst other little glitches.
This was also around the time I was going out hiking a lot with a group of friends, the pictures I’d bring back were phenomenal and it saved me lugging my DSLR around with me. In the back of my mind though, I was always worried about dropping and damaging this valuable phone. This wasn’t helped by the curved screen. Yes I had a rugged case, but trying to find a quality tempered glass screen protector that fit properly was nigh on impossible. In the end I opted for a TPU film protector, however this slid around the screen and doesn’t offer the protection of glass.
In the end I resold the device after a few months as the worry of damaging the phone and losing its value was weighing me down. This was replaced with a Pixel 7a which I’ve already written about, a mistake that at the time I wasn’t wise to.
I was planning to wait until the end of my phone history mini series I’ve been doing to write about the HMD Pulse (my current smartphone), and perhaps I still will write about it in the series. The reason I’m writing about the phone today is that I’ve been reading a lot of bad things about the HMD Pulse, and a lot of this negative press seems directed at the HMD Pulse “Pro” specifically. I own the most basic HMD Pulse, so technically this device should be worse than the “Pro” model.
I simply cannot echo or resonate with what other reviewers are coming out with. I’ve read comments that HMD are being greedy with this line of devices from one reviewer, I’ve read that they’re overpriced and that for the money there are better devices you can get, the phone is underpowered, it feels cheap. The list goes on.
In reality, anyone reviewing the Pulse “+” or the “Pro” has fallen for a couple of very basic marketing tricks and not done their homework properly. The first tried and tested trick is that given a choice of options ranging from cheapest to most expensive most people won’t choose the cheapest, because they’ll perceive it to be the worst. The second is just a naming convention, call something “plus” and you’ll assume it has something worthwhile over the non “plus, call something “pro” and you’ll assume it’s much better.
Lets start by comparing the 3 devices in the range visually:
Straight away you’d struggle to tell the difference. Left is the entry level pulse, middle is the “+” and right is the “pro”. When you compare the specs it’s a similar story. Each of these devices has the same Unisoc T606 chipset, the same 4GB RAM, the same 5000mAh battery, the same storage and the same display. The Pulse and Pulse + are the exact same weight, with the Pro weighing 9 grams more at 196 grams. The only difference between these 3 phones are the cameras and in the case of the “Pro” 20w charging versus 10w on the other two.
The pulse has a 8MP front and 13MP rear camera, the plus has a 8MP front and 50MP rear camera, the pro has a 50MP front and 50MP rear camera. There is one thing that I agree with these other reviewers on. My HMD pulse takes awful photos. I will guarantee though, that the other two more expensive versions take photos just as terrible. Why is that? Physics. You can tell just by looking at the above 3 photos that none of them are using bigger sensors. With these tiny pinhole cameras it really doesn’t matter how many “megapixels” the camera has, the results will be poor. A sensor needs to be physically larger to allow more light to enter, in turn giving you a better photo.
Lets have a look at the pricing. On HMD’s website the Pulse is currently £99.99, the Pulse + £109.99 and the Pulse Pro £129.99. Buying any of these phones other than the Pulse at this price would be a mistake, and I can see why people would say they’re a waste of money. The “Pro” is around 30% more expensive than the base model and offers no meaningful upgrades for that extra money. I’d even argue that £99.99 is too much for the standard Pulse. I’ve purchased these as work devices for colleagues for £79.99 from HMD as they regularly offer sales, and that price is a lot better. You will struggle to get anything that’s such a complete package for that money. Shop around a little though and you can get one for even less. My personal HMD Pulse cost me just £60 and it was sealed in the box. When you can purchase it for that much there’s literally not another new phone on the market that comes close to what this phone offers.
So coming back to my title, if you were fooled into buying the HMD Pulse “+” or “Pro” you got a bad deal. If you got the base model for the RRP I’d argue you still got a good deal, try to find another phone on the market for £100 or less that’s running full Android 14 with 2 OS upgrades promised, NFC and isn’t riddled with bloatware. Go on, I’ll wait.
The HMD Pulse has a charm that’s hard to put a finger on. It’s very comfortable in the hand, it’s 20:9 aspect ratio helps with that being narrow enough to get a good grip on one handed, the 2.5d glass screen with slightly curved edges aids in comfort too. It has a very clean version of Android which is intuitive and free of bloatware. I’ve never managed to kill the battery in one day, which negates any concerns about charging speeds. It’s operating system is very stable, I’ve never had any apps crash or needed to reboot the device which gives a feeling of reliability. It’s an honest device, it has very modest specs and wouldn’t handle heavy gaming but for everything else it performs admirably, never feeling annoyingly slow. It’s cheap and repairable, meaning you don’t have to baby the device, a replacement screen is just £15 and for that money I don’t even need to think about a case or screen protector.
Yes the cameras are basic but it’s not a big deal to me. If I have nothing else to hand I will use these cameras for photos or videos and in good lighting they’re passable. If anything it’s just given me more reason to use my actual cameras which were just collecting dust. Using them I’m taking better photos again than I would with any smartphone.
I do wonder if a lot of the hate comes from the fact they had the licensing rights for the Nokia brand. For a long time HMD rode on that reputation, and played on Nostalgia to sell devices. Had they spent that whole time building up their own brand name would they be in a better place? Maybe, who knows.
If you ask me HMD nailed it with Pulse, and I really do wish them all the best as a company and hope for their success. They’re building budget devices that tick all the boxes that other brands don’t. Samsung, Google and Apple don’t even price devices this low. Motorola omit NFC from their budget range and any of the other brands at this price point load their devices with bloatware to subsidize the cost. On top of that HMD sell genuine parts through iFixit, design their devices to be easy to work on and offer full guides on how to do it. As a community why are we trying to keep a brand like this down rather than bring them into the mainstream? We’re already struggling for choice with 3 brands dominating the market, riding on their reputations to keep us buying rehashes of the same devices year in year out. Surely it’s time for us to start focusing on the smaller brands like HMD and Nothing.
I’ve chosen to bunch these 3 Pixel phones together into one post because in general the experience was the same and the reason I didn’t keep them was also the same.
I owned the Pixel 6a between the iPhone 13 and the Samsung S23 Ultra. The 7a between the S23 Ultra and the Samsung A14 and the Pixel 8 between the Unihertz Jelly Star and the Samsung S24 Ultra.
Each time I’ve bought into the idea of the Pixel more than the device itself. They are supposed to be a “pure” Android experience, they never really have flagship specs but the software is supposed to make up for that. They are usually cheaper than other devices from big brands. They offer long software support and have readily available spare parts and repair guides.
All of that on paper sounds like the dream phone, couple that with an easily unlockable bootloader and a wealth of custom ROM availability and this should really be the perfect device for me every single time. But there is one thing that these devices have in common that lets them all down.
Tensor Chipsets.
I absolutely detest Samsung’s Exynos chipsets, they are inferior in everyway compared to their Qualcomm and TSMC counterparts. They get hot, have awful modems and drain the battery like nothing else I’ve ever used. Why am I talking about Exynos chipsets when Google use Tensor? As it turns out a Tensor chipset is an Exynos in disguise. It is made in the same foundry, by Samsung and only has a few tweaks made to it to differentiate it from an Exynos chipset. With that it shares all the same downfalls.
Google Pixels get hot, they have poor reception, they drain their batteries (particularly on mobile data) and have lackluster performance when compared to their counterparts. You will always get the Exynos and Tensor sympathisers, that will try to tell you it’s not a big deal, they’re not that bad and in some case they’re better than the alternatives. I will tell you categorically that this isn’t true. They are awful.
Every time I’ve fallen for it, only to realise shortly after purchase. Yes the camera is great, yes the devices are really well designed, yes the software experience is great but fundamentally these hardware issues are always there and always causing problems.
There are rumours circulating on the internet that Google will be moving away from Samsung’s foundry over to TSMC’s for their Pixel 10 series. If this bears any truth this will be the first generation of Pixel devices I could really recommend. Until then unfortunately my advice has to be to steer well clear of any Pixel with a tensor chipset. The last Pixel device that had a Qualcomm chipset was the Pixel 5, which was one generation previous to the nice hardware redesign. You could still purchase that device today and use it without issue, community support takes even the original Pixel (sailfish) up to Android 15 so I doubt that will become an issue any time soon.
At this point in 2022 I was firmly stuck down the rabbit hole of privacy, “de-googling” and security. The problem was I was taking it all very seriously without having a threat model. What was I striving to protect and what was it that I needed to keep private? Obsessing over these things without this information defined is destructive and dangerous to wellbeing. Thankfully I’ve figured this out now, and while I’m well aware of what happens to our information when we hand it over to these companies I’m at peace with it, security and convenience are more factors that I value at this point in life.
Regardless this was the point I was at. GrapheneOS wasn’t for me, for various reasons and I didn’t want to be handing my data over to Google. So I opted for an iPhone 13. I purchased it very lightly used for a big saving over the RRP. iPhone’s always have very nice build quality and this was no exception. One thing I immediately noticed too was that there was so much more 3rd party accessories of a much higher quality available than I was used to. The screen protectors were a perfect fit, the cases were high quality and fit with such precision it was hard to get them off. This is something I’d never appreciated before and I suppose is a natural effect of a smaller device range with such a large user base.
I did my usual of going all or nothing when I got this phone. I ended up with an M1 Macbook Air, Airpod Pro’s and an Apple watch. In hindsight this was way too big of a change to be making all at once, and there was no real reason for it. I was excited to experience the Apple ecosystem but in the end it was also the reason I got back out.
After a short period of use I felt like I’d become trapped in it. My custom domain email was routing through iCloud, all my photos were saved to it, my passwords were all synced to their password app making it near impossible to access anything on a non-apple product. For some I imagine this level of compatibility (for example the Airpod’s would just automatically connect to whichever Apple device I was using) would be a joy, but to me it felt like walls were being built around me preventing me from using anything else. I was also having major buyers remorse at the sheer amount of money I’d spent on all of these products (recurring theme?) and the fact that in just a few short years all of these devices would be near worthless.
As usual I resold all the devices, and actually lost very little money if any at all as the iPhone and Macbook had already been purchased used to hadn’t really depreciated any more. Another benefit of Apple products is their slow depreciation. If you buy a device that’s a month old or even a year old you can own it for a period of time and generally resell it for the same money or a very slightly lower amount. This isn’t really echoed in the Windows/Android device economy where device prices fall off a cliff very quickly.
As a stop gap device while I decided what I wanted to do I picked up a cheap Nokia G11. This phone won’t get it’s own post because it wasn’t a device I owned for long. It was very basic but fully functional. HMD generally use Unisoc chipsets in their budget devices, which is fine and allows them to price their devices very low but they’re notoriously difficult to unlock the bootloader on. In that current period of paranoia this was unacceptable to me. I did keep the device around as a backup device for a while, but I think it ended up getting broken in a drawer.
The Samsung M51 was a bit of an unexpected release in the UK. Normally we don’t get access to the M series, it’s usually restricted to India and other eastern regions. For some reason this one was officially sold through Samsung UK and I went for it.
Following my new love of big batteries at the time this one had the biggest yet and has still been unmatched since: 7000mAh. It was a battery titan, paired with a Snapdragon 730G it had a 2 to 3 day battery life no matter how you used it.
I was actually very fond of this, a Samsung without an Exynos chipset is already on to being a winner in my books and paired with a massive battery like this it was a recipe for success. With a high resolution AMOLED panel and 6GB RAM as well it was not simply a budget phone with a big battery, it had specs to match. It’s only downside was weight, but that’s unavoidable with a cell that’s physically bigger than almost every other phone. It weighed 213g. For reference, a little iPhone SE 2020 weighs just 148g. This thing was hefty.
I owned this phone for around a year taking me into 2021, around this time I was getting paranoid about tracking and developing an interest in privacy focused software, all while trying to battle an ever spiralling screen time problem. I discovered GrapheneOS and with that this phone went and I replaced it with a Pixel 3a.
I won’t write a whole segment about the Pixel 3a because it turned out GrapheneOS wasn’t for me. In my eyes it’s still the highest quality, secure smartphone operating system out there but it comes at a cost of having to make some sacrifices. I’ll probably write another post at some point about different mobile operating systems so I’ll save the full details for then but essentially privacy and ultimate security do come at a cost of convenience.
For the first decade of my driving I was like a kid in a sweet shop, I wanted so many different cars but could only have one at a time. My average ownership was about 6 months before I’d swap it for something else. It took a good few years before I even had to experience the yearly MOT inspection because I never owned a car long enough. I would generally flip between polar opposites of cars. I’d get something huge with a big engine, and then get sick of struggling to find a parking space big enough or the excessive fuel consumption. I’d then get something absolutely tiny with a engine that would be better suited to a motorcycle to resolve the issue, only to hate the lack of power and space. What I’d not learnt yet was that sometimes a compromise in the middle is the best option.
This phone was a purchase similar to the manner of how I’d buy cars. I’d suffered with powerful phones with tiny batteries and gone completely the opposite way. A underpowered phone with a huge battery.
This Motorola G8 was a decidedly basic phone with basic specifications apart from one thing, a 5000mAh battery. This was one of the biggest on the market at the time, with the average only being 3000mAh in 2020.
Being able to use the phone without having to worry about the battery percentage at all was refreshing and I didn’t want to go back. However everything else about it was lacking in comparison to the phones I was coming from with flagship level chipsets. At the time this was a big deal to me so I resold it after a fairly short time.
I remember it having a strange stutter, which drove me mad. Scrolling would have micro stutters, even watching high resolution videos did it. Which is strange because I’ve used much lower powered devices since this one and never experienced this again. There’s not an awful lot else I remember about this phone, it was in those murky Covid times where we were all sat about extremely bored and days merged into years.
As the English saying goes: Out of the frying pan and into the fire, meaning escaping one bad thing to succumb to something worse.
Another phrase more commonly used by Americans is: There’s no replacement for displacement, meaning the best car is always the one with the larger engine.
Both of these relate to my experience with this phone. The first due to having issues with a 2800mAh battery and trying to resolve the issue with a phone that has a 1821mAh battery. The second only applies loosely, as if we were comparing phones to cars the battery would probably be the fuel tank, but for the sake of this phrase it’s the engine. With all the optimisations in the world, and the most energy efficient components a bigger batter is always going to perform better than a smaller one.
Battery life is and always will be a function of a phone that I prefer to be as good as possible. I’ve got rid of multiple phones that didn’t hold what I would determine a satisfactory charge, and purchased phones solely because they advertised massive battery life. This and the previous phone was the point where I realised how much I valued this. In 2020 we were at home a lot, so I was never far from a charger but even so I use a mobile phone so it can be mobile. If I wanted a device that was permanently tethered I’d use a landline and a computer!
The strange thing about this phone was that technically it was very efficient. Left on standby overnight this phone would only lose 1-2% battery, and through mild usage it lasted very well. The problem was when you started ramping up the CPI usage. This phone had the flagship chipset the Apple A13 Bionic from the iPhone 11. It could decimate it’s tiny battery in around an hour if you were really pushing it. Apple device have always been very good at idling without using much power at all I will give them that.
At the time of owning this phone I had what I’d call a beater car. It cost me £500 and was a Citroen C4 1.6 Turbo Diesel, the one where the centre of the steering wheel stayed still while the outer rim turned. It ran OK but the radiator fan didn’t work. In the UK this was never really much of a problem, until it was. It was an extremely hot day and I was stuck in traffic as there’d been an accident somewhere down the road. Traffic was moving a car length every minute or so but just enough that I couldn’t switch off the engine. The temperature gauge started rising until it was in the red. Desperate I put all the windows down and turned the heater and fan on full. I was sweating but the coolant temperature came down, I was using my heater core as a makeshift radiator. What I didn’t think of was that my little iPhone SE was on a vent mount in direct fire of the main heater. I only realised when the phone, which was also being used for GPS did a thermal shutdown. I took it off and almost burnt my fingers it was that hot. When it eventually cooled down and powered back up I’d lost 10% battery health! It was quickly resold after that.
This was the beginning of my descent into mobile phone buying madness. This phone was bought on a contract that heavily subsidised the cost of the device (I later found out why, hint; battery life) and worked out cheaper than a SIM only contract. It seemed a no brainer at a time when I was ready to have my own personal handset again.
Initially I thought the Pixel 4 was great. The pictures this camera produced were the best I’d ever seen from a smartphone, it also had some quirky experimental features under project “Soli” which gave the phone a little front facing radar scanner. this allowed for very secure face unlocking and meant the phone could detect hand movements and gestures in a bubble area around it. In theory this meant you could swipe the air to change track, it knew when your hand was approaching it to pick it up and other things. Ultimately it turned out to be a gimmick and the entire project was scrapped when the Pixel 5 released.
My one issue with this phone that made it an absolute deal breaker was battery life. This phone had a powerhouse chipset (Snapdragon 855) and a measly 2800mAh battery. In my ownership I never once made it through a full day without needing to charge. On full days away from a power source I could end up without a phone by 2PM. Google promised the battery would be big enough because their software optimisations would make up for it, they didn’t. They then promised it would be fixed in the next software update, it wasn’t. I lost patience with this, resold the device and paid the contract off. It turns out I was right to jump ship, the battery life issues were never resolved and this device went down as one of Google’s failures.
The 4XL did slightly better, because of it’s bigger size it packed a larger battery which masked the issues the device had. People still hold that version in fairly high regard today.
I wonder if blunders like this are why we see little to no innovation from manufacturers today? Fear of failure and losing a generation to their rivals. It only takes having a brief look at the notorious Samsung Note 7 to see what can go wrong in extreme cases.
Spot the difference! These are the last 4 “Ultra” devices from Samsung, I certainly wouldn’t know which one was in your hand.
Just one short year ago the S24 series was released, and with it came a new promise of 7 years of OS and security updates. Fantastic news! Or so we thought. We are now a month after the release of the S25 series and starting to see the reality of this promise, and realising it might not be the deal we thought it was.
I’ve talked about planned obsolescence at length already (Read here) and did touch on the Samsung situation. However it is only getting worse as more time passes, I’m assuming this is due to the sales of the S25 series not being as good as Samsung had initially hoped for.
As it stands (Feb 25) OneUI 7.0 is currently locked behind a paywall. The paywall is that you must buy a S25 series device to access it. Samsung are claiming they haven’t got the operating system ready for their previous devices yet, I call “Bull Faeces” on that one. Surely porting a OS update to a device the in house developers are already familiar with would be quicker than making it for an entirely new device? At this point when OneUI 7.0 (Android 15) finally releases for the previous generations of devices that are still within their update promise, Android 16 will already be out and being pushed out on other manufacturers devices. It will be outdated from the day it releases.
We are reaching a point where I feel owners of the S23 and S24 series need to pool together and file a class action lawsuit against Samsung. How can it be legal that a key selling point of a device (staying up to date for x years) can be ignored within a year of release?! I would give more leeway if this were happening on year 6 of year 7 of updates, as the device gets older and more different from the current generation of devices, updates would become more difficult, working within hardware limitations etc. But no, this is 1 year from release, the first Android version the S24 series should have is being held back from them.
This is clearly an underhand tactic to try and push sales of their new devices, but honestly what impression does this leave on the owner of these devices? I certainly wouldn’t spend anymore money on a company that immediately breaks a promise and tried to extract more money from me. Thankfully I already personally boycotted all Samsung products for the release of substandard Exynos chipsets in our market, so this won’t have any effect on me, but I really feel for all the enthusiast owners of the S24 series that have been the victim of a very shady marketing tactic.
Samsung are also locking even the S24 Ultra out of certain software features the S25 series has, under a premise of the S24 Ultra not having the performance to handle these tasks. NONE of the AI processing is done on these devices, it is all handled on cloud servers (hence Samsung making their AI features a paid service in 6 months time, they have bills to pay!). In theory this means that even the A06, Samsung’s cheapest device, could run all of these AI features just as well as the S25 Ultra if it weren’t for the fact that Samsung don’t allow it. What hope do S24 owners have 5, 6 or even 7 years down the line through their software updates when 1 update in they are already being locked out of features?
Samsung need to go back to the drawing board, and fast because I am not the only one noticing this. If the only way they can differentiate their yearly releases is by which software features they allow access to then they clearly are not innovating enough. If progress has slowed down that much they either need to put more effort into their new devices or stop the annual release cycle. Selling essentially the same device and locking last years behind an artificial paywall is not a sustainable way of milking more money from their loyal followers. Loyalty only lasts so long.
Funnily enough I just checked Samsung’s website to make sure my facts were correct and stumbled upon the following banner:
This is clearly Samsung’s endgame that they are trying to make seem more appealing. You pay an exorbitant monthly to rent a device from Samsung. You will never own your device and you will be a guaranteed, regular and predictable income stream for them. Prices will increase whenever the Shareholders say so, and you’ll be able to do nothing about it other than cough up the extra because otherwise you’d have to purchase a phone you can afford in full!
People really need to start pushing back against this behaviour from companies. Yes it disgusts me, but can I blame them? Not really, we keep letting them get away with it.
