HTC One - Best phone out there?

So contrary to what I said earlier, I found a deal on the HTC One that I just couldn't pass up. I am now a fan of HTC, bar their twitter feed, and an owner of the One. It was a mixture of a cheap contract and not being able to put up with my temporary phone that made my decision a pretty easy one. If I'm honest, it was a good decision. After using the phone for five days with it being rooted, I can't see myself looking over at anyone with an S4 with jealousy.

Now that I have a HTC One, I might as well review it. There are a lot of reviews for the One, but they are either too technical, focussing on just one aspect of the phone (such as the screen) or not very thorough. I'll aim to keep it simple and go through as much of the phone's features and some of the negative points, of which there aren't many.

Display
The phone has a full HD screen, very clear and sharp and for a 4.7 inch screen, it has a very high resolution. In direct sunlight, it is still relatively easy to see the screen but you may struggle a little bit even on full brightness. We don't get the sun very often in the UK so it's not a big problem but generally speaking, most phones don't perform as well as this in the sun so it's probably as good as it is going to get.

Phone design
This is one area where I cannot stress just how beautiful the phone is. In my opinion, it's much better looking than the iPhone 5. You only have to hold it in your hand to feel the build quality to fall in love with the phone. I was a big supporter of plastic phones but no more, design such as this will definitely catch people's eyes. Front speakers are also something which it is a fantastic addition to this phone. You'll find watching videos, playing games, and listening to music a totally different experience with these speakers. They also deliver very crisp and clear sound, with HTC's Boomsound technology. Many videos dotted around to show comparisons with the S3 and other phones and it's pretty incredible for playing and for recording music.

Functionality
First off, let's discuss Blinkfeed since there's no way of getting rid of it! It's not as bad as I first thought but not that useful for me either. Blinkfeed basically tries to mesh your social networks and news onto one RSS like feed so you can get everything you want from one place.

As you can see, it brings news from various media sources and merges them all together, you can scroll down for news and social updates in chronological order. It also brings up other stuff such as calendar reminders and TV shows (which you can personalise) but I do wish you could switch it off, as some people just won't find enough use for it and the amount of battery it uses is no doubt pretty high.

Next is Sense 5 which is definitely the best skin out of any Android manufacturer I've seen so far. I go as far as saying that it's better than vanilla Android and that is saying a lot. There are a lot of nice touches that Sense has that makes me need less widgets on my homescreens, one of which is the weather which is displayed at the top of your app drawer by default.

I admit that I didn't use Sense at first. I rooted the device, restored Nova Launcher and thought I was happy but then my friends wanted to see what the HTC skin looked like and afters showing enough of them, I found myself preferring it too and removed Nova and rebuilt my app and widget layouts on Sense.

HTC haven't opted for on-screen keyboards but instead left two touch sensitive buttons, the back button and the home button. The home button has the functionality of accessing Google Now and multi-tasking. Long press to get to Google Now and double press to access multi-tasking. Took me a while to figure out!

This is the multi-tasking window you see when you double tap the home button, you can swipe up apps to remove them from the list. As you can see there are just nine spaces, I haven't figured out if more than nine apps are open then would the tenth one be closed or not...?

The phone has a notification light behind one of the grills of the top speaker, but I found out the hard way that it only has one colour for notifications. So no more having personalised colours for different people, the green light just flashes when you have an email, text etc. and it's actually quite small! Bit of a shame they didn't go for a normal RGB notification light like the S3. If I had my way I would have a different coloured notification light under each grill and make them shine light a disco ball! How cool would that be?

The phone has a kid mode which restricts various different functions when enabled so that you can easily let children play on the phone. Very easy to enable and disable, I think it's a nifty feature worth mentioning for people with children.

The one thing I will mention, which isn't phone related but more web related is searching for help online will mean you'll have to sift through all other HTC phones before finding the right article, like the HTC One X or S! It can be very frustrating if I'm honest. I'm sure as time goes on, HTC One results will come up further on search engines so this might become less of a problem.

Camera
This is where HTC aren't doing themselves justice, after buying the phone I was a little disappointed that the One would not have the features the S4 has like removing passer-bys from a photo. In fact it does, using a feature called HTC Zoe, you can take a three second 'photo' and then edit the photo to remove someone using object removal. It has a whole host of other features on the camera which I have yet to fully explore but I'll definitely be using the camera on my holidays and hopefully being very happy with the results. There are a lot of comparison of photos taken on the One compared to the S4 and most are in favour of the One even if it does have 9MP less on it's camera.

Speed
2GB RAM and a very snappy processor makes running many apps at the same time a piece of cake. For so long I've had to put up with simple apps on my S3 taking more than five seconds to load up, quite embarrassing when you want to take someone's number and the contacts app is loading, many awkward situations of me staring at my phone...never again! I guess it comes with the territory of these new generation phones but it is such a relief, especially when I want to run more than three tasks at the same time. There's not much else to say here and no point doing a benchmark test, I prefer to play with a phone and see how smooth it is rather than some number on Quadrant which I can only use to show off with.

Accessories
Pretty standard here: headphones, USB cable, wall charger. The headphones are pretty good, capable of producing a lot of bass, similar to Beats headphones but without the logo. Not a surprise since the phone has Beats audio built in and HTC own Beats.

Storage and battery
The phone comes with 25GB Dropbox storage for two years and comes in 32GB and 64GB models. Moving from a 16GB phone with a 64GB memory card has been hard but I've managed it. Time to utilise the cloud! The battery is a big issue, or so I thought. The only time I remove the battery is when the phone locks up, but you can easily hold the power button to reboot so a bit of a non-issue. Apart from that, the bigger problem of replacing the battery is still there.

Overall
In my opinion, this phone is better than the S4. It's a breath of fresh air in a world of incremental updates. I hope HTC claim some marketshare for their own sake (struggling profits at the moment) as this phone is underrated and its features hidden until you try the phone for yourself. I've never been this happy with a phone and left it relatively unadulterated, which I guess doesn't mean much to people who don't know me but it is supposed to say a lot! Either way, I think this phone should be given serious consideration if you're looking to upgrade soon.

Mo

Low-end Android smartphones?

So in an effort to be savvy and save as much money as possible, I decided to sell my Galaxy S3 a couple of weeks before the S4 is released. In the meantime I have to put up with a low end Android phone, the Orange San Francisco 2 (OSF2) aka ZTE Crescent. I'd like to say right now, I have a lot more respect for people who can get by on using these types of phones because they are not for me, at the same time I wouldn't wish this phone on my enemies (slight exaggeration...). I've also come to the realisation that I used my S3 across many aspects of my life. Quite scary that someone can have so much dependence on a single device.

What's so bad?
Let's start with the speed. the OSF2 has a measly single core 800 MHz processor, compare to the S3 which was a quad core 1.4 GHz processor. For normal day-to-day processes, the phone struggle. SwiftKey has gone out of the window and Kii keyboard is being used as a replacement. SwiftKey just locks up the phone and predictions would often be behind my typing and the frustration was too much. Then there's the matter of games, the phone is rooted and it's on Android 4.2.2 and I still haven't been able to come across a single game that I've had on the S3 that works on this. That might be partly to do with the fact that I can't access the Play Store for some reason, but even using my Titanium Backup games, none are working! Boring lectures are now going to be just that for me...boring and without distractions.

The amount of screen time I've racked up on this phone is pretty much the same as my S3, which might be down to the fact that any task on the phone takes about 5 times as long to complete than on my S3, even a simply text or call. Another very important point is the lack of internal storage, it's nearly non-existent. After you account for the ROM partition and cache you are left with 160mb to use for apps. You do have a microSD slot but unless you move apps to the SD card (only some will let you do this), you'll be able to install a couple of apps and you're full up!

What's so good?
It's a cheap phone. That's really it.

Uses for a smartphone?
Compared to the average smartphone user, I think I use my phone a lot more and so my predicament is made even worse. On an average day these are some of the different uses I found for my smartphone:

• Alarm clock
• Phone calls
• Instant messaging
• Games
• Online Banking
• Exercise (Endomondo and Jefit)
• Voice recording
• Pictures
• Videos
• Music
• Organiser
• Calendar
• Getting directions
• Browsing the web
• Social networkings (Twitter and Facebook)
• Viewing documents/presentations
• Emails
• And some more which I can't remember off the top of my head

Basically, my phone is a pretty big part of my life, which I'm not saying is something to be proud of, but it does make it much harder. I envisage walking to lectures without being able to listen to music and have to admire and take in the sights and smells that I've experienced near enough everyday for the past 4 years as opposed to having my head firmly in my phone and music blaring in my ears. The phone can't play a song without interruptions when the screen is off let alone when I need to use it for something else.

Improvising is hard, there isn't a good substitute or way round for some of the things listed above but my Nexus 7 has stepped up to help. It's also made me realise just how useful cloud storage is for some apps. Let's take Jefit as an example, for those of you who don't know what it does, the app tracks your workouts and keeps a log of how much you lift so you can monitor your progress. It syncs your workouts at the end of each session and so you can get the app on a different device, log in and it will download all your logs and routines ready to go. This is one thing ticked off that list, plenty more obstacles to come across yet!

11 days until the Galaxy S4 is released, I imagine I'll have to take it one day at a time. Yes, I know some people might think I might be exaggerating but believe me, I wish I was.

Mo

Jellybean up, Gingerbread down - full steam ahead

The Jellybean iteration of Android experienced a bit of a jump this month, claiming 25% of the whole Android platform, up from the 16.5% it had last month. Part of this is down to the way Google now collect this data, as they noted that:

'Beginning in April, 2013, these charts are now built using data collected from each device when the user visits the Google Play Store. Previously, the data was collected when the device simply checked-in to Google servers. We believe the new data more accurately reflects those users who are most engaged in the Android and Google Play ecosystem.'

Now I can't really tell how sincere this is, as it could just be an attempt to make it look like Android is moving forward rather than staying about the same in terms of software versions, but then again Google doesn't gain much from doing so as this argument usually rages amongst fanboys and the 'old fragmentation is rife on Android' war. So I guess you'll have to judge for yourselves, but it's worth noting that in essence Google is trying to cut out those who don't regularly access the Play Store, which I think is a bit unfair as they still could be using their phones.

Other flavours and their performance
Since the way the data is collected has changed, you should be a bit cautious comparing figures month-on-month this time around but I've done it anyway for comparison  It seems Gingerbread is starting to fade (finally), claiming 39.8% of the overall share, down from 44.2% last month. Still a majority but falling very quickly. Ice Cream Sandwich is gaining slightly with 29.3% of the shares, up from with 28.6% last month and as mentioned above, Jellybean is up from 16.5% to 25%.

This chart taken directly from the Google blog represents the numbers as a pie chart.

What does this mean?
Well, not much as there is still a division between three different versions of Android and with Key Lime Pie coming up very quickly (touted for a summer release) it will likely cause more fragmentation. What's clear is that Gingerbread is stubborn as it's likely that older devices which are no longer officially supported are stuck on the OS but Jellybean is powering ahead and should overtake as the main OS in the near future, with the sales of the Galaxy S4 no doubt accelerating that.

Is it a problem?
I don't think it's a particularly big problem, most apps on the Play Store are compatible with phones that have Froyo and above on them, which translates into 98.2% of all Android phones, with only a slew of new apps now requiring Ice Cream Sandwich and above to operate. As long as developers create apps that are compatible with legacy phones then it's not a problem and since there is no sign of it stopping then I'm not worried about older devices becoming a relic that have no compatible apps available for them. It also wouldn't make sense for developers to create apps specifically for the later versions of Android as the older one still have a commanding slice of the shares.

Mo

Facebook Home and HTC First

Yes! Finally I can have Facebook on my lockscreen. But I never really wanted it nor does it even fill me with the least bit of excitement. I don't know what goes on in Facebook HQ but this just seems like a last ditch attempt to monetise their business model further. It's also a U-turn on what they've been saying for years now, they wouldn't make a Facebook phone. Does make me wonder how much data they need for targeted ads though.

Why on Android?

Well that's pretty easy, because of how versatile Android is and how the lockscreen has been developed allows Facebook to come along and implement this. This is why it's so closely linked to Android and iOS is left slightly in the rain as developers can't replicate the same thing on an iPhone. This is the same with the HTC First, the Facebook phone, similar to the skins that Samsung, HTC and other phone developers put on top of Android and the forked version of Android that Amazon use on their Kindle Fire, Facebook and HTC have put together a Facebook version of Android which is supposed to have Facebook at the heart of it. 

Who's this for? 

Good question! I really don't know, I use Facebook less and less and their app for Android is so poor in my opinion that I just need a final push to uninstall it and save myself so much battery in the process. I just can't quite make myself yet as it's still quite a convenient way of messaging some of my friends. I really think the HTC First must be for the younger generation because I can't see anyone older than me wanting to use this phone or Home for that matter. Why would I ever want to see my newsfeed on my lockscreen, I don't particularly want other people to be able to see my newsfeed with the click of a button either.

So...privacy?

Facebook quickly tried to make sure that they wouldn't let privacy become an issue if anyone uses their app or phone. This hasn't stopped analysts predicting the software could "destroy" privacy though. Facebook claim that the only data they will receive is the apps you run and nothing more but I don't think it's that clear cut, doesn't seem enough for them to be honest and I can understand if they were trying to quash privacy fears only to slowly intrude on your privacy a little further down the line. This is just my natural inclination to be wary of big companies who want as much data from you as possible to sell or use to make money.

Conclusion

Like I said earlier, I don't know what goes on in Facebook HQ but I hope they don't think people view Facebook as the most important thing in their life because they are going to be bitterly disappointed. I think they're also overestimating the number of people who will purchase the phone and download Facebook Home as a result, maybe it will be a wakeup call that Facebook is becoming less and less relevant in this world and I welcome that wholeheartedly.

Mo

Best deals for the Galaxy S4...

...or lack of!
I mentioned in my previous blogposts my next phone purchase was going to be the Galaxy S4. There's still about a month left before it's released but my sister had recently managed to get the Sony Xperia Z for £26 a month so I was optimistic for myself. How wrong I was, having scoured all the comparison sites and different outlets, the cheapest deal I found was for £32.04 per month for 24 months after cashback, giving a grand total of £768.96. This deal gives a mediocre package of 600 minutes, unlimited texts and 1GB of data, pretty decent for a normal smartphone but not so much for a top end phone nowadays. I put together a comparison table for various deals but unfortunately for me, I'll have to keep looking...

Network	Mins	Texts	Data (mb)	Upfront cost	Monthly cost	Duration	Total cost	Link
Vodafone	Unlimited	Unlimited	4GB	£29.00	£57	12	£713	Click
Orange	600	Unlimited	1GB	£0	£32.04	24	£768.96	Click
Three	300	5000	Unlimited	£0	£33.31	24	£799.44	Click
O2	Unlimited	Unlimited	1GB	£0	£34.29	24	£822.96	Click
T-mobile	2000	Unlimited	Unlimited	£99.00	£36	24	£963.99	Click
Vodafone	Unlimited	Unlimited	2GB	£0	£42	24	£1,008	Click
EE	Unlimited	Unlimited	3GB	£29.99	£41	24	£1,013.99	Click

Buy now? Buy later?
Let's wait and see, these are only a small number of deals but I wanted to find some from across the board for comparison. Only EE offers 4G, the rest will all be on the 3G network but I think EE have got a greedy pricing structure and would advise anyone to wait until other networks get their 4G up and running to get it cheaper. You should also note that T-mobile will slow your data connection down after you exceed their fair usage policy, whereas 3 will not.

What's a good deal?
I've found the Xperia Z and the HTC One for £26 a month, so I know the S4 should fall to around that price too, until then I'll hold out. Bear in mind there's still a month left before the S4 is released so you won't be missing out if you want the phone on launch day and because of that I think you should hold out for a better deal too.

Mo

Permissions and Warnings - should we pay more attention?

If you've ever installed an app on your phone (who hasn't?) then you'll have seen a list of permissions an app requests before being installed. You've probably also come across warnings on Android, but how much attention do we really pay to either of them? I think too many people blindly agree to a lot of things on their phone without fully understanding what they're asking for, similar to how we always click the little check-box asking if we agree to the T&Cs when we're signing up to stuff.

You have been warned
You rarely get warnings on Android but when you do, make sure you know what you're agreeing to before clicking to go ahead. I've picked the two below that I want to talk about, partly because I was quickly trying to find warnings to use as examples (it's harder than you think!), but mainly because I think they are very important to have a think about. The first is the location services using Google's database, it might seem innocent enough but have you ever had WiFi at your house and gone on Google Maps only to find your location given to a couple of feet without GPS? Chances are that it was your phone that transmitted your WiFi and its location to Google, who are now able to give you an accurate location by only using WiFi. This service constantly runs in the background when WiFi is on and you are not connected to any network. This happens because data is collected from all the networks your phone comes across. As it states, data can be sent back to Google even when there are no apps running, so when your phone is in your pocket this is likely to be happening too. 

Now I might make this seem really evil, but in fact it's not that bad. If you think about it, a database such as this is most effectively built by using thousands of phones to relay data back because of the nature of what's being collected. Basically because WiFi networks come and go quickly, it would never make sense for Google to independently collect this sort of data. Still, bearing in mind what it actually does, at least now you can make a better informed decision about whether you want this going on or not right?

The next warning I want to look at was the input method whereby it warns you about any application potentially being able to collect sensitive data you input onto your phone. I think this one is more serious than the last as it depends more on the app that will handle your input. There are a lot of keyboards on the Play store, but how can you be totally sure that the one you're using right now isn't storing and sending your data to a server about what you've just written? I'm not saying that keyboards on the Play store are doing that, but I think people should take care when trusting apps with their sensitive details. As with all apps, if you're getting it from somewhere that's not the Play store then you should really be wary as apps are very easy to manipulate and what might seem like a legit copy of a keyboard app could be an altered version to record all your keystrokes. You just never really know.

Permission to do what?

Well permission to do a lot of things actually! Permissions are basically rights you give an app in terms of what it can and can't do on your phone. I've taken Viber as an example as it requests a long list of permissions but I think you should have a little flick through the permissions any app requires before installing it just in case you find something that doesn't quite add up. This isn't a witch hunt against Viber as it's an over-the-top service provider like Skype or Whatsapp so they require various permissions, whilst sometimes a permission might only be required for a small thing, such as verifying your phone number at the beginning. You might also notice the system tools permission, which might seem a bit scary at first and hard to work out why an app would need it but for something like Viber, if you receive a call then the app needs to be able to disable your lockscreen to allow you to answer.

These permissions are somewhat expected of a messaging and calling app, to be able to access your contacts and logs to extract and match who uses Viber on your phone. Nothing really that worrying here but again, it's always good to have a think about how an app would use these permissions and how they could potentially abuse them too. 

I don't mean to scare anyone or cause paranoia, but giving permissions a bit of thought before you blindly accept it on your phone might save you a headache or two further down the line, especially at a time when Android is becoming so popular that malware is being created specifically for it.

Mo

Google's answer to Evernote - Google Keep

As some people might have seen, Google has released a new app to compete with the likes of Evernote. It's a pretty simple app and I think that's exactly what it needs if it wants to stand any chance of toppling a market leader like Evernote. The app was released just three days ago and has already racked up more than half a million downloads, not many other apps can boast the same feat, then again not many apps have a developer of such reputation.

Features

The features include being able to create to-do lists, take on the fly notes, capture photos and annotate them and  colour code notes to make it easier to sort and keep track of them. In terms of features, it's still pretty basic and updates will no doubt bring more features but at the moment I find myself using it more than Evernote and even if they didn't bring out any new features, it's definitely an app that satisfies my needs. It's the simplicity that Google always brings to the table I find myself attracted to. Before using either of these, I was using Tasks as it was so easy to use and everything I needed, a basic to-do list app that would sync with Gmail so I didn't always need my phone to access my to-do lists. 

The app itself

When you open Keep, you are presented with this screen:

Very clean and very simple, you have four options to select from, create a note, create a to-do list, use voice dictation or take a picture. It's pretty hard to say much else about the app as it's very straightforward and doesn't require you to create a separate account as it will link to a Gmail account of your choice. Give Google Keep a try and see if you'll be converted from one of its competitors or become a user of an organiser app.

Coming or going?

The only worry I have is how long this will be around for, you might have read that Google Reader is being retired in July, which has left a lot of people wondering if this will be around to stay or become a casualty of Google's spring cleaning a few years down the line...

Mo