These were two devices I owned one after the other, The S24 Ultra first followed by the S24 base model. Both times these were bought as part of a SIM contract, and both times when I had to go through the returns process I had an absolute nightmare.
The S24 Ultra was the most uncomfortable phone I’ve ever held. It’s tablet sized and has really sharp corners. This was a 2 handed phone every time, and it had some serious weight too. The camera was a noticeable downgrade from the S23 Ultra’s which disappointed me. Coupled with strangely poor battery life it and went back within my 14 day returns window. The network completely messed up my cancellation and left me without my number that I’d ported in. It took me over a month to get this back.
After the dust had settled I saw a really good Black Friday deal on the base model S24, with the same network. I placed the order. Initially it got cancelled because I’d previously had issues with the S24 Ultra. I wish I’d let them cancel the order completely as this one was even more disappointing. The company initially shipped it to the wrong address. I then had to drive 20 miles to the nearest Curry’s store, and wait an hour there to take delivery. The phone was a much more manageable size, but having a smaller battery coupled with the Exynos chipset was just a recipe for disaster. For the 3 days I used this phone I had to charge it 2 or 3 times a day. It was a permanently hot, stuttering mess. Again I returned it in the 14 day window and went through exactly the same problems with trying to reclaim my phone number. After about another month of back and forth, and them sending me cheques and credits as apologies I finally had my number back and I was free to go.
There are two things I learnt from these experiences. Never buy a phone with an Exynos chipset, and never buy a phone through iD mobile.
Very much in keeping with the weird and wonderful theme I’d started with the AGM M7, the Unihertz Jelly Star was my next phone.
The idea behind this one being it’s a fully fledged Android smartphone in a miniscule package. The display is 3 inches diagonally and it weighs just 116 grams. You can do everything you would ever do on any other smartphone you just don’t have much screen to play with.
Day to day usage of this phone wasn’t bad. The battery lasted fine. I could do what I needed to, even have things like banking apps and contactless payments.
The problems came whenever I had to use the keyboard. I have quite large hands, and wide thumbs so trying to poke a letter on the keyboard was more a game of luck and chance than it was one of accuracy. Swipe to text worked to a degree, but I still struggled as I couldn’t see where the swipe pattern actually was on the phone.
While this phone serves some people very well, and actually seems to be the answer for people lowering their screen time without making too many sacrifices for me it was just a fun gimmick. It was fun to show people who were generally amazed a phone could be that small, the illuminated rear was novel (but still a shameless Nothing rip off) and it really was full featured.
In the end though it didn’t really matter. I was unable to use the phone. Thankfully this marked the last device in my peculiar device spree.
This is one of the more bizarre mobile phones I’ve owned. It’s made by a company who specialize in rugged phones and is really designed for people in lines of work where having to use a touch screen wouldn’t be ideal.
However this phone is more than what it first appears. It does have a touch screen, a capacitive glass screen in fact. It also has probably the loudest speaker I’ve ever heard of a phone and a very bright flashlight. It’s unsung party trick though, is that it runs Android.
This means that while it doesn’t have the play store or any Google services inbuilt you can install Android applications on it in the form of .APK files. In theory as long as the app doesn’t have any requirements like safetynet and GMS then you can run it (banking etc is unlikely to work).
It’s not an easy device to work with, partly due to it being a form factor that android was never designed to work with, and partly because this is not a normal implementation of Android. However with a bit of technological knowhow it is possible to make yourself a smartphone/dumbphone hybrid.
I spent a lot more time tinkering with this device than I actually spent using it. Once developer mode was on and USB debugging was enabled I could do a lot with this device. I spent quite a long time configuring the T9 keyboard as by default it doesn’t have predictive text. Eventually I had something that was a semi smartphone with enough friction in it’s use that you wouldn’t want to spend too long on it.
In the end this device was a bit too “out there” even for me. For one it’s big. It takes up a lot more room in your pocket than an average smartphone, it’s heavy too. Mainly though I was actually embarrassed to pull this out in public. It draws attention and generally not the good kind. I prefer to be a bit more subtle. This was resold online where it went to a farmer, where I’m sure it will have it’s ruggedness put to the test daily!
As I said in my previous post there were still hiccups along the way to get to where I am now. The iPhone 15 Pro was one of them. I fell right into the marketing trap with this one. The natural titanium frame, the new action button and the sleek design lured me in.
The phone was a very premium device. The magsafe range of accessories are great and at the time I used this with a car dash mount and a wireless charger. The device was seamlessly fast, had a great camera array and was very efficient on power.
Getting the phone (thankfully used) actually lured me right back in to the Apple ecosystem. Over the course of my ownership I ended up with an M1 Macbook Pro, an iPad, a watch and Airpod Pro 2nd gen earphones.
The strange thing was that this time rather than feeling like I’d spent too much, it was the ecosystem that drove me to get rid of this phone. The iPhone was the centre of the ecosystem, and in being that it basically became unused. At home I’d use the iPad, at work I’d use the Macbook and when I was out I’d generally leave the phone at home and use the Apple watch and Airpods over cellular. With an ecosystem so comprehensive the iPhone in the equation basically just becomes a hub to relay calls and iMessage to the other devices.
This phone was resold, for basically the same money I purchased it for and for a while I used a more basic iPhone (can’t remember exactly which model) as the “hub” for the ecosystem. However cracks were showing, there are programs I rely on that need a Windows operating system and I was having to use a VM on the Macbook more often than I was using MacOS. In the Apple world one a part of the ecosystem goes the rest crumbles around it. In the end I got out, sold all of the Apple products and decided I’d not be going back to it again.
Around this time I’d been struggling with screen time, and wanted to be more present. I decided to go down the route of a “dumbphone”, something I’d tried on and off for a while. Using it more as a tool for a digital detox, or a system reset to break habits seems to be the best option but I hadn’t worked this out at this point. So next I got an AGM M7, was this the answer to my problems? No, but it was certainly an experience!
Back on the 10th July 2023 a new law was passed by the European Union regarding the recycling of rechargeable batteries. Part of these law changes stipulated that “portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user”. These laws come into effect in 2027, the logic being that this give the manufacturers plenty of time to incorporate this into their designs.
Well 2027 is still 2 years away, the manufacturers still have time, you might say. That’s true however if we look at the other notable regulation the EU made targeting Apple you’ll see the difference. When USB-C was mandated companies were given time to implement the change, however Apple immediately implemented it before the due date.
I think as 2027 rolls around we will see one of three things. Either mass non compliance with this law, with smartphone and laptop manufacturers claiming they offer replacement services, or that the battery is already easy enough to repair. Second, they will hold out till the last possible moment to implement the change. Third, they will only offer these replaceable batteries in EU markets.
The reasons for this are simple. The main reason the majority of users upgrade is that the battery life of their device is no longer satisfactory. If you take that problem away with a simple pop out battery you take away the sole reason for an upgrade. These companies have grown complacent and reliant on our regular upgrades. Their profits will fall and share values will go down as a knock on effect.
I can’t see the first option being the most likely, the fines from the EU are too harsh to risk non compliance. The second option is probably the most likely, and I wouldn’t be surprised if release cycles are changed just so they can release a device late in 2026 just to avoid the change. You wouldn’t think the third option would happen but I wouldn’t rule it out. Already we are seeing different versions of devices for different markets. US iPhones don’t have a SIM slot. EU iPhones allow third party app stores whilst others don’t. It will all come down to the potential loss of profits to these companies. If they can develop a regional variant for the EU with a replacement battery for less than the profits they calculate they’d use through less device renewals you can bet they’ll do it.
That leaves us in the UK in a sticky predicament. Would we get the EU variant or would we get the rest of world one with a sealed battery? If so I would without a doubt be importing one from Europe!
There is a night and day difference between the longevity of a device with and without a replaceable battery. The obvious point being that replacements are more readily available, cheaper and easy to swap out. The other side of this is that if the device is being stored the battery can be removed. This stops the battery slowly draining past the point of no return.
As a footnote; anyone shilling for these manufacturers claiming that devices are only water resistant because of their sealed batteries only need look at the Samsung XCover series. This phone, from one of the big 3 has a user replaceable battery and an IP68 dust and water rating. I rest my case.
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 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.
