Techie Ramblings

Author: Ryan

  • iPhone 16e – Reality check needed

    Image credits msn.com

    I had been eagerly awaiting the release of the iPhone SE4. We thought that was happening at the event yesterday. Clearly it did not happen. Regardless of how Apple try to spin this the iPhone 16e is not the successor to the iPhone SE 2022.

    The iPhone SE platform was Apple’s budget line up. The working man’s iPhone, if you will. You got tried and tested hardware, with long software support for a lower price because Apple were using up the parts they had left over from their old devices.

    This new release is something else entirely. When this device was announced the iPhone SE 2022 and iPhone 14 were removed from the Apple store and discontinued. Currently third party retailers are now offering their remaining stock of iPhone 14’s for £50 off at £549 for the 128GB model. The new 16e starts at £599 for the 128GB model. Immediately we can see that this is priced to high to be an SE replacement.

    For contrast we’ll compare the Apple lineup in 2022 to current. On the left 2022 with current on the right (cheapest version of each model) were:

    • iPhone SE 2022: £419
    • iPhone 11: £489
    • iPhone 12 Mini: £579
    • iPhone 12: £679
    • iPhone 13 Mini: £679
    • iPhone 13: £779
    • iPhone 13 Pro: £949
    • iPhone 13 Pro Max: £1049
    • iPhone 16e: £599
    • iPhone 15: £699
    • iPhone 15 Plus: £799
    • iPhone 16: £799
    • iPhone 16 Plus: £899
    • iPhone 16 Pro: £999
    • iPhone 16 Pro Max: £1199

    Straight away you can see there is one device less on the current list. This is because Apple have prematurely removed the iPhone 14 from sale. This was clearly because the iPhone 14 was also £599, and it would’ve highlighted that this new product isn’t great value at all. Secondly you can see that the rest of the devices haven’t increased by the same percentages over the past 3 years as the SE vs the 16e. The 13 vs 16 has increased by £20, the 12 vs the 15 has increased £20. If this is the new SE then why has it increased by £180? Inflation can’t be used as an excuse if it doesn’t apply to the whole range.

    Reinforcing further that I don’t think this is simply a renamed “SE” are the components used. Yes it appears to be a iPhone 14 chassis and screen, which would be in keeping with an SE but the rest is something we haven’t seen before. Apple are using rejected GPU’s on this model, this is a common practice in desktop CPU’s but not common on mobile. In this case the iPhone 16 has a 5 core GPU, in die creation yields vary and when one core is faulty from production it will now be disabled and used in the iPhone 16e as a 4 core GPU. The modem is also brand new, it is the first modem that Apple has developed in house and they are claiming reduced power consumption, but we’re also seeing reports of lacking speeds.

    The usual raft of omissions has been made for the 16e to ensure it’s not too much of an appealing choice. They have removed magsafe (bizarre choice, locking people out of first party accessories), kept a notch, locked the display to 60Hz and only included 1 camera.

    A lot of people have been left confused by this launch. It feels rushed an poorly thought through, even though there was no expectation for its release. It’s been given the full suite of Apple “Intelligence” including visual “intelligence” (15 Pro series isn’t getting this), it’s bizarrely priced and has strange specs. I don’t know who this device is supposed to be targeted towards and the naming convention doesn’t help. What does the “E” stand for? At this point it feels like it’s most appropriate meaning would be “Experimental”.

    At the beginning of the post I stated I’d been eagerly awaiting the SE release. The excitement was not for myself, Apple devices do not fit into my workflow. No, it was for other people. Because of my profession I’m relied on by a lot of people I know to help them choose a new phone when the time comes, generally people who have no interest in technology outside of normal usage. An iPhone SE was always a solid recommendation for someone who was used to iOS, or was used to the form factor of having a home button and touch ID. Some people simply don’t like or want an Android device, and that’s ok, I don’t aim to change anyone’s opinions, my goal is just to help them get a device they’re happy with.

    I won’t be recommending this device to anyone.

    The average person has zero interest in Apple Intelligence. Most people do not want to spend £600 or more on a phone. I also wouldn’t recommend a device that’s essentially a testing platform for an unproven modem.

    When someone asks me now what iOS device I’d recommend, it’ll be the 14 for now. Retailers will still have new stock for a good length of time, it still has many years of update support left and it’s a reliable and proven device.

    Apple have become even more disconnected from their users. Not everyone is an enthusiast, not everyone is willing to spend rafts of money on a phone and yet some people still want an iPhone. Apple are alienating them, forcing them to hold onto their old devices for longer and longer, hoping that an affordable device that meets their needs will be released at some point. I have a sneaking suspicion it won’t.

    It seems the SE line of devices ended yesterday.

  • Planned Obsolescence; an endemic issue in the Tech industry

    Background

    Looking at the majority of the spending habits of consumers and you’ll see that for the most part with quite conservative with our purchases. We keep our domestic appliances until they don’t work any more. We keep our furniture until it no longer serves it’s purpose or is worn out. We keep our cars until they’re no longer reliable (although this trend is changing with leasing becoming more prominent). We keep our tools usually for a lifetime.

    Why then is the tech industry so different? Arguably there are different levels to the frequency of peoples purchases as the term “tech” is broad. For example my TV is 13 years old and so is my Blu-ray player, my over ear headphones are at least 7 years old, my laptop is 6 years old and my desktop was built from used parts. The newest games console I own is a PS4 released 11 years ago. My phone however is less than 6 months old, and the one I replaced it with worked perfectly fine.

    The problem differs from person to person. Some people will constantly buy the latest games consoles. Some people want the latest TV’s. Others want the latest graphics cards. I’m fairly certain everyone will have a sub-category of technology where they replace their items more often than they would anywhere else in their lives. For the majority of people though, the sub-category is smartphones, which is what I’ll focus on for the rest of this article as it seems to be the most extreme example and most people will be able to relate to it.

    The smartphone

    Just 15 years ago smartphones as we know them today were just beginning to hit the market. At that point you didn’t need one and really would only have had one if you were high up in business or were an enthusiast. There was no part of daily life that required anything other than a mobile phone or landline telephone. Since then the market segment has exploded, and infrastructure has raced to keep up. Covid-19 sped this worldwide adoption up even more. Anyone who doesn’t use a smartphone today would be doing it intentionally, and it would almost certainly add friction to their daily life by not having one. From contactless payments, banking, boarding passes, menus even through to healthcare a smartphone is expected. I’d argue that never in history has an invention become so crucial and integral in such a short space of time before. Close 2nd would probably be the car, however these were around in the late 19th century and only reached mass adoption by the mid to late 20th century. In contrast the smartphone (not including standard mobile phones) did this in less than 20 years.

    As the technology developed rapidly the reasons to upgrade a device were tangible. Each time you purchased a new device there would be major upgrades upon the last one. Be that storage, battery life, features, quality of device or connectivity. However the cost of these devices was substantially higher than their feature phone counterparts, and subsequently many people began opting to split the cost of their phone over a 24 month period by signing up for a “contract”. At this point in time 24 months would feel like a very long time to own a single device, and by the end of it you’d be ready for a new device so users ended up in perpetual contracts, renewing every 2 years.

    Fast forward to today and it could safely be said that the technology has matured. Year on year updates still happen (and they likely always will due to the need of these companies to have ever growing profits), but each year the progress is getting less and less. Therefore the organic reasons for users to upgrade their phones is dwindling:

    • Update promises are now up to 7 years, with about 5 years being the average.
    • Displays have been 120Hz OLED panels for years now.
    • Performance upgrades past a certain point aren’t noticeable to anyone but the 1% of users who really push their phones to the limit.
    • The form factor is standardized, phones have hit their maximum limit in size before they become impossible to hold.
    • Battery technology hasn’t made any major leaps in years, 5000MaH is the average capacity of any modern smartphone.
    • Android versions now aren’t really adding any new features. It’s a mature operating system just polishing up.
    • Manufacturers don’t dare to be different. They are all playing it safe doing the bare minimum year on year to justify a new release, rather than adding new functionality and breaking the mould.
    • Camera technology isn’t improving quickly. For example Samsung has been using almost the exact same camera setup in their “Ultra” series for the past 4 releases.

    Tactics to get you to upgrade

    So what can Manufacturers do to keep you buying their products as regularly as you were doing, despite not gaining enough to warrant the purchase? This is where planned obsolescence, or at least the illusion of obsolescence come into play.

    The simplest way of ensuring you don’t use a phone for too long without explicitly stopping it working is to stop supporting it with Operating system and security updates. If a device is not supported with the latest updates the majority of users will get a new one. However consumers and regulators have been fighting for manufacturers to support their devices for longer periods of time in the name of sustainability, so flagships are now “supported” for much longer. What isn’t specified however is the frequency in which they will do this. At the time of writing this article the S25 series from Samsung has been out for around a month running OneUI 7 (Android 15), while the previous generation and any before it are being held back on OneUI 6 (Android 14). There is no excuse for this other than trying to entice users to buy their new devices.

    The second way would be to artificially make a new device look more enticing. Each year a new phone will be released from the big 3 (Apple, Samsung, Google) and all of it’s headline features will be software based. The current buzzword is AI. They will all come with a shiny new AI feature that will be shouted from the rooftops, but unfortunately for a engineered reason the previous generation of their phones won’t be able to have it (Generally this proves itself to be nothing more than talk and the feature trickles down in a later update).

    Thirdly, marketing. Marketing departments in these big companies will consists of thousands of university educated people in hundreds of teams across the world. In every country they operate they will have a team, and that team will localise their marketing effort to have the maximum impact on the targeted demographic. How many times have you decided you don’t really something only to see advertising in one form of another and find yourself justifying the purchase in your head? Just me? I don’t think so. We are just individuals with teams of thousands of people trying to convince us to do something, the odds are against us.

    So what can we do to fight back?

    The answer is a simple one, but not so simple to put into practice: Whatever it is, don’t buy it.

    In reality though this isn’t practical. With the best intention in the world eventually we will all need something new, but there are ways to combat these tactics:

    • Buy used; buying on the second hand market, especially from a private seller takes away a sale from these companies. If you buy new the company will get two sales (one from the person selling theirs, and another from you buying one brand new). If you buy second hand they only get one phone sale. This hurts their sales figures (which is in turn lets them know you don’t support their practices), saves you some money over buying new and helps the environment.
    • Keep using what you have: Unless your phone is beyond repair or is uneconomical to repair and you’re thinking of a new device, chances are you’re a victim of marketing. I would argue that mobile banking would be the most security crucial activity most people perform on their phones. The current requirement for all UK banking apps is a minimum of Android 8. This released in 2017, so even if you phone received its last update 8 years ago it would still be deemed secure enough by banking institutions to access their app and receive their fraud protection. Food for thought.
    • Be conscious in your choice: If being completely current with updates is a primary concern of yours then choose your device wisely. Opt for a device that promises a long update duration, from a brand that actually keeps their promises. The only brands that are currently doing this and sticking to it are Google. Yes other brands are promising it, but quickly falling behind on frequency and sometimes not even keeping their promises. On the other hand you could opt for a device that has a big community of developers around it. Certain devices with unlockable devices and hardware that is easy to create for tend to continue being supported for years after official support ends. Secondly if you’re planning on keeping your device for a long time you need to make sure it’s going to continue working. Go for a brand with a good track record for durability, ideally one that also has spare parts readily available and is easy to work on. Ifixit would be a good place to start when researching repairability.
    • Vote with your wallet/purse: Finally remember that we are the driving force that ultimately chooses what these companies do. Without our money funding them these companies would not exist. We need to make changes to make this more of a symbiotic relationship than a parasitic one. If you see a company using underhand tactics to make you replace a perfectly good device (recent examples; apple locking iPhones less than the 15 pro series out of Apple intelligence, Samsung withholding the Android 15 update from previous devices, Google locking features to their latest devices) simply do not buy it. We should only be upgrading our devices when we need to, and unless the phone is actually a lot better than the previous one and our current device is still working as intended there is absolutely no need to push more money their way.

    Unfortunately the majority of people won’t do any of this and will continue to upgrade their devices every 1-2 years. The devices will continue to increase in price, masked by the false economy of breaking the cost down into smaller monthly payments. We will see the continuation of drip fed incremental improvements rather than actual innovation. Control over our own devices will continue to be stripped from us, with apps refusing to work on rooted device and removal of the ability to unlock the bootloader.

    Read more on planned obsolescence in the tech industry:

  • Samsung SM-N960F (Note 9)

    The Note 9 was the last of my “greats”. I actually think this phone was part of the issue I began switching phones so frequently after this one, I was chasing the experience of it. That and the absolute boredom of the Covid-19 authoritarian times.

    This phone was released in the third quarter of 2018, however I think I only got this early 2019. My boss, who by this time I’d developed a decent relationship said pick the best phone for you (me) that helps you do your job to the best of your ability. I pored through the corporate price list and came across this Note 9. The S-pen caught my attention as it would make precise clicks in tiny remote sessions a lot easier. So I settled on it.

    Immediately I could tell this device was worlds above anything I’d owned before. The screen stood out, with such a high resolution and colour depth. Samsung really did throw everything they had at this thing. It had an iris scanner, standard face recognition and a rear fingerprint reader just for biometrics. It had Dex mode which was fantastic for me often travelling. It even had a heart rate monitor and blood oxygen sensor next to the camera. It had different levels of touch force recognition and haptics that just made the whole user experience a joy.

    If in the UK we’d had the Snapdragon chipset this really would have been a 100/100 device. However after about a year and a half of usage, problems started to arise. The phone started to get very hot in normal usage, and battery drain became more prominent. The phone actually got so hot on regular occasions that the adhesive on the rear glass degraded and it became loose. The battery began to swell and cracked the glass.

    By this point, the boss I had that enforced the one phone policy had left and I wasn’t overly impressed with the new leadership. I decided it was time to get my own number again, and split my work and personal life properly as it should’ve always been. The Note 9 got a fresh battery and back glass and was resigned to just work phone duties for around another year before it was replaced with a Note 10 plus. As that was a dedicated work device I won’t give it a dedicated review, but in short it was underwhelming. However it didn’t have the same issues the Note 9 did, but the Note 9 was the last of Samsung throwing everything they had at their flagships and they started stripping back features.

  • Xiaomi Redmi Note 4X

    Image credits skroutz.gr

    After 2 years of imposed limits from the iPhones I was sick of it. Using my phone as both work and personal, with all the requirements of being in IT it was starting to hold me back. My remote access software didn’t have an iOS version, I needed a terminal program to access linux servers over SSH and I was also just missing the freedom of Android. I bought this device myself and put the iPhone 6s in a drawer, but when my boss found out he paid me back for the device to keep it as a company device.

    Xiaomi have always been absolutely chaotic in the amount of devices they release and their terrible naming conventions. It’s almost impossible to gauge when a device was released and where it stands in their line up by name, and this was no exception. I still don’t really know where this device stood, however it was quite cheap at £150 brand new.

    I remember the phone shipped with a Chinese ROM, and to flash the global ROM you had to unlock the bootloader. This was a laborious process and it involved signing up to their online account, performing certain actions (can’t remember what they were) and then putting a request in for an unlock code. It took a few days either way. However when done I had the correct ROM flashed and once again had my rooted Android experience I’d been missing.

    MIUI was a bizarre skin of Android though, it felt like a knock off iOS in that it had no app drawer with everything being on home pages. They’d also heavily changed all aspects of the operating system such as the status bar, quick settings and normal settings menus. All in all it wasn’t a bad experience, it took quite a bit of extra effort to get the phone to a place where I was happy with it but it was something I was willing to accept considering how cheap it was for the hardware specs offered.

    This phone met it’s demise on my Birthday. I was on holiday and sat out having drinks by the pool one evening. A few people I’d got friendly with there knew it was my birthday and had decided to buy me lots of drinks. Inebriated I stumbled out of my chair and my phone took a tumble out of my pocket. It hit the tiled floor, smashed the screen and fell straight into the pool. The phone actually survived, but the screen didn’t. I ordered a replacement screen but with Xiaomi being so fragmented with multiple revisions of the same model I unsurprisingly ended up with the wrong screen. At this point I decided it wasn’t worth chancing another incorrect screen and retired the phone.

  • iPhone 6s

    This phone was Apple’s answer to “bendgate”. It was slightly thicker, and had better performance than the iPhone 6. Looking back at these release schedules this is probably the release cycle Apple should revert to. We’re at the point now where year on year there are very little changes to devices, having an “S” variant still allows the company to release a new model to please their shareholders but also makes it clear that this is still a very similar device to the previous one. However I think moving away from this was almost certainly intentional, people want to feel like they have the latest and greatest model of phone and if just 1 year later a new product is released with a new model number they’ll be that bit more tempted to buy it!

    I don’t really have much to say about the iPhone 6s, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There was nothing wrong with it, and it did nothing special. It wasn’t a memorable phone in any way, but it served it’s purpose perfectly fine.

    I do miss the days when fingerprint scanners were placed centrally on phones though, at the front at the bottom or on the rear near the cameras, I’m not fussy but as a left handed person having it integrated into the power button on the right hand side is just not practical for me. Obviously a lot of phones today have them integrated into the screen but I don’t find these as accurate or fast as the physical sensor, and they generally never play nicely with a screen protector.

  • iPhone 6

    Image credits apple.com

    The iPhone 6 wasn’t my first experience with iPhones. I’d previously been provided with an iPhone 5s at a previous job, but it had been a separate work device so I’d never really got to know it and I didn’t consider it a device I owned. When my job gave me this iPhone 6 I was pressured into consolidating down into one device, and giving up my personal phone number in favour of just having the one. Still being fairly fresh faced I agreed to it (I’ve since split back to having two devices and two numbers, and I’d never have just one device again, having some separation between work and play is very important). Nevertheless this agreement allowed me to own some phones that I probably wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.

    At the time everyone in the company I worked for used iPhones, so it made sense that I had one too so that I fully understood them and was better able to support my colleagues. Even back in 2016 when Android and iOS still had some notable differences the learning curve was minimal. The only difference I really noticed was that the control that I’d been used to with a rooted android device had been taken away from me and placed back firmly in the hands of Apple. It immediately felt like I didn’t really own the device. Nowadays this has intensified, with Apple intensifying their level of control over your device and Google trying to follow Apple’s trend by taking some of the control away from their Pixel users.

    If you hadn’t already guessed I’m a firm advocator for open source software, the right to repair and keeping tech out of landfills by keeping it going for as long as possible and finding new uses for things. This operating system did not sit well with me. I tolerated it because I was given unlimited data and I had no phone bill but I didn’t enjoy it.

    The phone itself was fine, battery life was better than the aging HTC One M8 I was coming from and the camera was good too. I couldn’t help but notice just how dull the phone was, it felt corporate.

    The iPhone 6 didn’t last long in my possession though. After a night of drinking with friends I got into bed, I sent one last message, squinting through one eye and threw the phone onto my soft chair. Or so I thought I had. When I woke up in the morning it turned out I’d completely missed the chair and thrown the phone at the wall. It didn’t take me long to notice that the phone was now banana shaped. I’d become a victim of the notorious “Bendgate”.

    I un-bent the device as best I could and gave it to a new starter, the still slightly bent frame hidden by a protective case. I then took the iPhone 6s that had originally been destined for them!

  • HTC One M8

    Image credits lesterchan.net

    The HTC One M8 was another one of my few near perfect devices I’ve owned. I loved everything about it for the time I owned it.

    The design and build was fantastic. The whole frame was a curved metal with the device being really thin and comfortable to hold yet sturdy. The only trade off to this brilliant design was the omission of a removable battery.

    It’s camera setup was controversial at the time, as it only had a 4MP main camera with a 4MP depth sensor. HTC claimed their “Ultra Pixel” technology was the next big thing. I’m not sure about that, but the photos the camera produced were fine and being able to adjust the focus after the shot was taken was a nice feature.

    When released this phone shipped with Android 4.4.2, and throughout it’s life got upgraded to Android 6. However the community around this phone was massive. It got official LineageOS support which took it all the way up to Android 10.

    Once I’d finished my contract on this phone I moved into the period of combining my work phone and my personal phone (wouldn’t recommend this in any situation, however at the time I was practically forced into it) so didn’t pay for a phone for quite a while after this.

    This phone continued it’s life for another few years after my ownership. With LineageOS continuing support for this device it was passed on to my Grandfather, who returned it back to me after his usage. By this point the battery was heavily degraded, and repairs weren’t easy on this device. I flashed the latest version of LineageOS and sold it on the used market. If you look now the HTC One M8 sells for very little money, but going back to around 2020 it still fetched around £100 used!

    If you wanted a very cheap device, with lots of extra features and custom ROM support the HTC One M8 was a brilliant option at the time, and would still be a fun device for playing around with today.

    Unfortunately HTC as we knew it is long gone, however I just had a look for their website and they currently have just 1 new smartphone for sale. I would love to see them make a comeback, our brand choices for smartphones in 2025 is getting more and more limited. Let’s take a moment for the fallen brands; Nokia, Blackberry, LG, Siemens, NEC, BenQ, Palm, Sagem and of course HTC.

  • Samsung GT-I9305 (Galaxy S3)

    The Galaxy S3 was a device of quite a few “firsts” for me. It was the first device I ever got on a contract, being an expensive device and being on a low wage in my first job in 2012 I would’ve struggled to buy it outright. It was also the first flagship phone I ever owned, a trend that carried on from this uninterrupted for almost a decade.

    Functionally it was another big leap from the Galaxy Y and although that was only a budget device the technological leap between two devices released only a year apart was huge.

    This phone had a beautiful high resolution, AMOLED screen that still looks great to this day (I own this device again so I can still see it!). The screen and overall device was much bigger than the 3 inch device I was coming from, and yet it was still slimmer.

    I consider devices from this time period up until around 2019 a golden era for Smartphones. Manufacturers were cramming everything they could into their phones, and trying new features in every generation. They couldn’t yet rely on their brand name and image alone yet so they actually had to put some effort in. We still had removable batteries, we had headphone jacks and SD card slots and still managed to have sleek devices.

    This was around the time I discovered how Samsung short change their European customers. Apart from a couple of exceptions (2023 and 2025) customers in Europe, and most locations outside of the US get devices with Samsung’s in house “Exynos” chipsets. They use these chipsets in all of their products from smart TV’s to their Fridges. This maximises profit margins for them as they don’t have to pay out to Qualcomm or Mediatek. This would be acceptable if it weren’t for the fact the US customers get a better deal. They get Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipsets in all of their S series devices. Not only are the Exynos chipsets inferior (with notorious poor performance, overheating and worse battery life), developers only really focus on the Snapdragon versions of the phone. As someone who was still really keen on custom ROMs and customisation this was extremely disheartening to discover after I’d made my purchase. I could see hundreds of fantastic ROMs available but they weren’t compatible with my device. I am quite vocal about my disdain for this practice and after having suffered these devices a couple more times leading up to the current day I’ve vowed never to buy Samsung again. However that’s a story for another day.

    Other than that I owned this device for nearly the entirety of the 2 year contract. I was very happy with it for the most part. The camera took great photos, I no longer had storage and limited RAM issues and the phone just worked. I liked it that much I even bought one of those bulky Otterbox cases to keep it safe. Battery life was still an issue on phones like this though, and at only 2600Mah capacity with an Exynos chipset draining it things were never great. I had an extended battery for this phone, with a bulkier back cover that remedied the issue. However it meant I couldn’t use a protective case as none would fit.

    At some point I dropped the phone and cracked the screen. It was a small singular line and nowadays I’d probably just leave it be until it got to the point I couldn’t avoid repairing it. At the time though I was a fresh faced young man just getting my feet into the IT industry. Being naive and overly keen I decided I could get away with just replacing the glass (Even today I wouldn’t attempt a repair like this, with much more knowledge and equipment). Armed with a replacement top layer glass piece, some UV resin and a pen knife I attempted the repair (this feels ridiculous even typing it 13 years later). Needless to say I never got as far as even getting the old glass off before I’d caused irreparable damage.

    The S3 met it’s untimely demise at my hands, and that meant it was time for a new phone!

  • Samsung GT-S5360 (Galaxy Young)

    I don’t remember what lead me to purchase this phone, whether anything went wrong with the Chat 335 or if I just fancied something new. But this would’ve been the 2nd big jump in mobile technology I’d experienced. The first being the Nokia 3210 to the Nokia 3200.

    I now had an Android device, albeit a very basic, budget one but I had proper connectivity, access to the “Market” which would later become the play store and the customisation options that come with the Android operating system.

    I owned this device whilst I was completing my IT apprenticeship after college, and at the time I had a particularly annoying commute between home and the apprenticeship centre. It involved a 10 minute walk, a 30 minute train and another 20 minute walk. On the way there this was manageable and took an hour but on the way home the time we finished for the day and the train times didn’t coincide, so I’d often be left waiting at the train station for 40 minutes to an hour. I’d charge up the phone before I left and then play games on it solidly through my wait and train journey. On a bad day the battery would be flat before I got home. I still have memories of playing “Dragon! Fly” and early builds of “Hill Climb Racing” on this little thing. While this phone was no powerhouse when it came to specs it worked OK, the capacitive touch screen, while still plastic was responsive to input rather than the resistive hell of the Tocco Lite. I certainly used it to its limits and beyond.

    Strangely I remember this being the first phone I ever purchased a case for. I had recently joined eBay and found a cheap, red silicone case for it. I don’t recall too many other people using cases around this time but I remember thinking it needed some protection. Most likely because of the dreadful wage we were given on our apprenticeship I’d have had no chance of affording a replacement!

    This is another phone I’ve re-purchased since it’s practically worthless now and it just reiterates to me how far technology has come in the 14 years after this device’s release. This phone has a single core 830mhz processor, 384MB RAM and a measly 512MB of internal storage (Thankfully it had a Micro SD card slot and I remember rooting this device to be able to install apps on the SD card). It has a 3 inch screen with a 320×240 resolution. The last Android version it officially received was 2.3.6. We now have phones with 10 times the resolution, 2000 times the storage and more processing power and RAM than the best gaming machines and servers of the time. However all this has come at a cost. This phone has a removable battery, expandable storage and a headphone jack. None of which is commonplace today. Testament to the build quality of these devices this one still holds a charge on it’s original battery, and if I put a SIM card in it can still connect to the network and use mobile data, it connects to my modern WiFi. Obviously not much else works, the web browser is too outdated to load anything other than Google, it can’t connect to the app store and I can’t sign into my accounts. These are all software limitations though. This device still functions just as well as it did when it was new, and had it’s OS updates not been abandoned and API levels of apps not been increased this would still be a functional (although limited and slow) device today.

    Considering this was my first true smartphone it didn’t take long before I started to tinker. It spent a year as my primary device where aside from rooting to uninstall some unneeded software and transfer apps to the SD card it was left untouched. Once I no longer relied on it as I phone I began learning about custom ROMs, installing Cyanogenmod and various other ROMS I could find. I began tweaking the Android operating system to slim it down as much as I could to ease the pressure on its limited resources.

    The last duties I remember this phone having were as a seed box for torrents. It had files stored on the SD card, living permanently on charge connected to WiFi. It managed this quite well, often going weeks or months with no interaction from me. I’m not sure what happened to the little Galaxy Y after that, being so small maybe it was lost! I’m glad to have another in my nostalgic collection, even if it was basic and underpowered even for it’s time it will always be my first smartphone.

  • OLED or LCD on a smartphone?

    Look at the specifications of any midrange or flagship smartphone today and I can guarantee with a degree of certainty that it will have an OLED screen. Look at the budget segment of the smartphone market and all but a couple of exceptions will have LCD screens. It wouldn’t be a stretch then to assume that an OLED is the premium option, which it is but would it also be correct to assume it’s the better option? Lets delve in.

    OLED benefits

    An OLED (or Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen is the newer technology that many of today’s more premium phones are equipped with. They have unmatched contrast, in part due to the design of these screens in that there is no backlight, each pixel is individually lit and can be turned off entirely to create a much darker black. They consume less power, again due to the individual LED’s being able to turn off (a big driving factor for “Dark mode”). They have excellent colour accuracy. They can have very fast response times due to the speed the LED’s can change state. OLED screens can be flexible, create the market of folding smartphones we’ve seen over the last few years.

    OLED Drawbacks

    The cost to produce an OLED panel is high, due to the organic compounds in the OLED’s having a short shelf life and a complex manufacturing process. Over extended use the OLED’s luminance, or ability to produce light decreases. This leads to a problem we refer to as “Burn in”. When these OLED panels display a static image for extended period of time they get dimmer, whilst the other OLED’s around it that were not left in that state keep their brightness, leading to a shadow of the image being permanently on the panel. On phones this commonly occurs on the status bar, or home screen. PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) is the method in which an OLED panel controls its brightness. An OLED is either in an on or off state, there is no in between. Therefore to appear dimmer the OLED will turn on and off hundreds of times a second to trick our brains into seeing a less bright image. Some people can perceive this flicker and it causes them headaches and eye strain in a term that’s now commonly referred to as “PWM Sensitivity”. Durability is also a concern with OLED panels, depending on the quality used they can be quite susceptible to impact damage and deterioration over time.

    LCD Benefits

    An LCD (or Liquid Crystal Display) is a more mature technology used in everything from digital watches and train departure boards to TV’s, computer monitors and mobile phones. It’s more complex in how it works compared to OLED with it’s RGB LED’s, but essentially there is a backlight which shines through colour filters to create an image. They are cheaper to manufacture because the manufacturing process is simpler and uses readily available materials. They are not susceptible to burn in. They do not have issues with PWM due to the fact the backlight brightness can be directly adjusted by simply lowering or increasing the voltage. LCD’s can achieve a higher peak brightness due to the backlight technology. LCD panels also generally have a very long lifespan.

    LCD Drawbacks

    On higher brightness settings LCD panels can draw a lot of power due to the backlight. Also due to the backlight the contrast between black and white is limited, this varies by quality of the LCD used. LCD’s can also have poor response times, again this varies by quality of panel and isn’t as prominent in modern LCD displays but essentially the light filters cannot respond fast enough to the input they receive and a “ghost” image can be displayed for a fraction of a second but enough to be perceivable.

    Which is best for a smartphone then?

    That was a lot of information, but its important when making a comparison to have all the facts. How do we go about comparing both of these technologies just for the application in a smartphone? We have to bring real use cases and user requirements into it. We also have to appreciate that not all LCD and OLED panels are created equal. There is a vast difference in quality between the best and worse panels for each of these technologies.

    There are extreme ends of the user spectrum here for which the decision will be very easy: For a user with PWM sensitivity, or someone who needs to display static images for an extended of period of time they need a phone with an LCD screen. For a user playing high intensity games, or a professional photographer demanding colour accuracy they need an OLED screen.

    A couple of niche features OLED panels can provide may also sway your decision too. If you need an always on display or want the deepest blacks when using dark mode, only an OLED can provide that.

    Personally I fall into the category of LCD being a better choice for me. While I don’t get headaches or eye strain from an OLED screen I can detect the flicker, especially in my peripheral vision which can get annoying. I also keep my screen timeout set at 10 minutes, and often display text or an image for reference while I’m working on something, so not having to worry about burn in is a plus. I also appreciate the lower cost, my current personal phone (HMD Pulse) cost me just £60 new and sealed, whereas my work phone (CMF Phone 1) cost £165, and aside from the OLED and faster chipset it’s missing features that the HMD Pulse has. The cost of replacement is also a benefit to me too, it’s reassuring to know that if I break the screen I can replace it for £15 delivered whereas on some of the premium flagship phones a replacement OLED panel can be £200-300 just for the part, considering most users can’t fit a screen themselves it becomes worryingly expensive.

    What should the average user do then? Assuming you don’t have any of the specific requirements I’ve mentioned above. In reality you don’t have much choice. In today’s market as I mentioned in the first paragraph budget phones get LCD panels and more expensive phones get an OLED panel. Unfortunately it seems this trend is only increasing and in some cases budget phones such as the CMF Phone 1 and Samsung A15 and A16 have now got OLED screens.

    In an ideal world I’d like to see customers presented with a choice: The same phone with the only difference being a choice of an LCD or an OLED. Even more optimistically the LCD variant would be slightly cheaper too, passing on the reduced manufacturing cost. An LCD is arguably the best choice for most people, and the environment. It only takes a quick search on 2nd hand online marketplaces to see thousands of phones being sold as spares and repairs due to OLED burn in and broken panels.

    How many of these phones would still be in use if they didn’t have this fault, and if when broken the screen could have been replaced cheaply? In a room of average people none of them would be able to discern or tell you the difference between a quality LCD and an OLED, it seems like the ingenious marketing departments of the smartphone companies have struck again.

    Below I’ve taken two photos of four phones displaying the same image at maximum brightness.

    From left to right we have a Samsung Galaxy Y (2011, TFT LCD), HMD Pulse (2024, IPS LCD), Samsung Galaxy S3 (2012, Super AMOLED), CMF Phone 1 (2024, AMOLED).

    As you can see there are differences here, and in particular the older devices have lower max brightness levels. However even in the case of the 2011 Galaxy Y other than its miniscule size you can’t look at the display and say it looks awful. On the newer phones the bezels are smaller and the screens are much bigger but the difference between the two is marginal and these two aren’t even close to being equal. The Pulse has a PPI (Pixels per inch) of 265, whereas the CMF Phone 1 has 395.

    What I’m getting at here is that specs on paper can look like a night and day difference but in reality the differences are barely noticeable. Buy what works for you best and don’t get sucked into marketing tactics!