SLURM23blog

Finally, three months after my trusted S3 gave up on me, I once again have a smartphone to call my own. The choice was a surprisingly difficult one. I briefly owned the OnePlus One and seriously considered the OnePlus 2, but in the end Motorola XT1572 turned out to be the right device for me. Being sold under various names, be it Moto X Pure Edition or Style, it has a slightly different set of functionalities in some parts of the world. Yet, in all cases the XT1572 is a superior device at an affordable price.

I opted for a black phone with gray accents and ebony wood back. The customization worked well, the delivery was transparent and quick – this aspect stands out compared to OnePlus. What impressed me most, was the ease and unobtrusiveness with which the phone could be unlocked. After having irreparably bricked a OnePlus One in July, this positive experience was most welcome. I went for TWRP with this phone and have been nothing but impressed…

What’s more, the phone doesn’t come pre-loaded with bloatware – I didn’t even need to install Titanium to freeze a bunch of apps. Overall, I significantly cut my app footprint, adding instead some very useful Xposed modules to the mix. The most awesome feature of the XT1572 though, is without doubt its 21MP camera. Unlike some other owners, I love the stock camera app, the photo quality is amazing, and I finally get to shoot 1080p video content myself (haven’t tried the 4K option yet).

To summarize – this phone blew me away and was well worth the long wait…

Two years have passed since I bought my first smartphone and it has been beyond useful. Unfortunately, my faithful SGS wasn’t able to keep up with the latest apps and the various use cases that I thought up for it. A single processor core and only 512MB of memory just don’t cut it anymore in terms of performance.

Even when running the latest Jelly Bean custom ROMs from XDA the device felt sluggish and lagged considerably. Especially frustrating though, was the odd timing of occasional freezes which seemed to happen just when I relied on it most.

Watch Samsung’s i9305 enter the stage… This amazing piece of technology boasts a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, NFC, and on top of it all the lightning fast LTE wireless standard.

The i9305 isn’t just a phone, but a fully-featured and incredibly powerful computing device, small enough to fit in any pocket. The 4.7-inch display has brilliant contrast and vivid colors, but most of all it is just the right size for me. The moment I held it for the first time, there was no going back to smaller screens. And it has a very strong LED light at the back, which is something that I have truly missed on my SGS.

After the obligatory rooting and a week of use I can only wonder how I ever made it thus far without such a device. And what did become of my SGS, you might wonder? Well, let’s just say that my wife is beginning to wonder how she could cope without a smartphone in the first place…

Smartphones have become quite prominent recently and I finally decided to get one for myself. The choice wasn’t too hard, as I don’t really like the iPhone, while the Android OS has made huge strides with its latest releases. Buying Samsung’s top-of-the-line i9000 Galaxy S, I was surprised to find that Skype doesn’t work out of the box. Unfortunately Samsung has delayed the release of Android 2.2 for a few months now, which only goes to show how our corporate overlords think about “customer service” and keeping their promises.

On the other hand the phone itself is a nice piece of technology and can easily hold its own against the iPhone 4. I really hope that once Froyo has been finally released the GPS and other issues are going to be resolved and Skype can be used properly (which was my main reason to get a smartphone in the first place)!

Finally some related resources… If you want to know more about specs and inner workings of the phone I can recommend this comprehensive review by GSMArena.

The AppBrain website makes digging through the jungle of Android apps a lot easier – actually it does a much better job than Google’s own marketplace.