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| Lord Percy |
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Lord Percy
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 Posted: 02:43 - 24 Jun 2015  Post subject: Cheap smartphone..? |
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Smartphones have been around for ages now. Once upon a time if you wanted a cheap phone, you accepted you'd have to take a step down and get one of those ones which might have a camera and music player if lucky.
But these days there must be plenty of old-but-still-totally-smart phones.
Any suggestions? I guess I'd be looking to spend £50-£100. Or cheaper if that's actually possible.
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| CaNsA |
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CaNsA
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| Lord Percy |
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Lord Percy
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Posted: 13:03 - 24 Jun 2015  Post subject: |
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| CaNsA wrote: | You're in China right?
Surely you can get some super cheap awesome clone. |
Haha I was hoping someone would bring up Chinese phones... Prepare for a TL;DR rant about Chinese tech, Chinese production and China in general.
I bought a TLC J730U, it's the Chinese contender to the Samsung S5 I think (or the S4 - whichever came out last year). It cost £100.
Main specs are, 1.2GHz Quad core CPU, 1Gb RAM.
Started out pretty good, very fast, vivid screen, etc. Like any smartphone really.
Almost a year later and I absolutely hate the thing.
It runs fine, but then for no reason it'll start to go sluggish. You can feel the heat of the processor in your hand, and it's bad. This is just when running basic apps such as whatsapp. It sometimes gets worse when the charger's plugged in  . I guess it's because of things running in the background, but still it's a new model and shouldn't do that. My Samsung S2 could handle things better. Something about the way the firmware does it's thing, I guess. It just bungs up the whole phone and it's terrible to work with.
Plus it has no idea about memory management. I presume most phones are designed to have a way of handling temporary data, the stuff that comes and goes when you use apps which use data and stuff. Well my phone has at least 1Gb of data dumped on my own SD card, full of pointless little icons, folders with names like 'aechga88j3kk', thumbnails, and pictures from people's profiles and their newsfeed images on wechat (Chinese facebook, kind of). It's the kind of stuff that you'd usually have to specifically choose 'save to phone' if you want to keep it. But this phone just stores the lot. I also downloaded 'Momo', which is the Chinese version of Tinder. Got bored and deleted it about a week later. Then one day I decided to tick the 'show hidden files' button on my picture gallery and found the phone had stored literally about 10'000 little thumbnail images of girls' faces from Momo, all on my own SD card. I barely used the app either. So yeah the memory management is terrible.
Also, the camera... I had to download a separate camera app because the in-built one is shite. You can't tap the screen for autofocus, you just have to wait. And then if you wait too long, it autofocuses again. If you tap the screen it sometimes just goes out of focus permanently and you have to force-close the app. The video recorder is worse. It autofocuses literally every one second. So all videos go like this: focus...blur...focus...blur...focus...blur......
And so my conclusion is: Chinese manufacturing is the worst in the world. TCL is a top brand phone company, competing with the likes of Samsung, and even they can't get it right. It really shows me the depth of Chinese culture. In a country of 1 billion, they can't produce a phone manufacturer to compete with the Koreans, Yanks or Europeans. It's shocking. The whole joke about 'smart Asians' is a stupid myth, they only look clever because it's their culture to sit and rote memorise things for exams. China is full of dull, copycat idiots without a jot of understanding of originality, quality or usability.
And then I could go on to mention other completely different things... Such as the problems I encountered with a 'good' (high-ish priced) mountain bike I bought soon after arriving here. Fell apart in weeks! They literally just take the concept of (mountain bike that looks good), bung things together to build a product that looks the part, then stand back and think the job is done. They're idiots. They have no idea.
This even stems to the way they do sports. On my campus there's a chin-up bar at the side of a sports field. They can't even do chin-ups properly. They hang there, then kick their legs for a sort of starter boost to ensure they have some acceleration, and have covered half the distance with this little 'jumping' technique before they even need to use their arms. So they even take short cuts with exercise. Seriously. For the Chinese, it's all about the end-product, with no consideration for the true purpose of what's actually being done. They're idiots..!!!
Alright rant over  
It's gonna be a long, long time before I trust anything Chinese ever again. No way in hell would I ever buy a Chinese motorbike now, that's for sure.
Last edited by Lord Percy on 13:05 - 24 Jun 2015; edited 1 time in total |
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Accuhaler
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BigShow
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T1z3R
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johnnyarctic
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panrider_uk
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Posted: 23:50 - 24 Jun 2015  Post subject: |
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Another for the Moto G
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andys675
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Lord Percy
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| Posted: 02:42 - 25 Jun 2015 Post subject: |
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Moto G looks to be a strong winner so far here.
Thanks a lot |
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Lord Percy
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goto10
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| Posted: 10:44 - 25 Jun 2015 Post subject: |
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| Lord Percy wrote: | | CaNsA wrote: | You're in China right?
Surely you can get some super cheap awesome clone. |
Haha I was hoping someone would bring up Chinese phones... Prepare for a TL;DR rant about Chinese tech, Chinese production and China in general.
I bought a TLC J730U, it's the Chinese contender to the Samsung S5 I think (or the S4 - whichever came out last year). It cost £100.
Main specs are, 1.2GHz Quad core CPU, 1Gb RAM.
Started out pretty good, very fast, vivid screen, etc. Like any smartphone really.
Almost a year later and I absolutely hate the thing.
It runs fine, but then for no reason it'll start to go sluggish. You can feel the heat of the processor in your hand, and it's bad. This is just when running basic apps such as whatsapp. It sometimes gets worse when the charger's plugged in . I guess it's because of things running in the background, but still it's a new model and shouldn't do that. My Samsung S2 could handle things better. Something about the way the firmware does it's thing, I guess. It just bungs up the whole phone and it's terrible to work with.
Plus it has no idea about memory management. I presume most phones are designed to have a way of handling temporary data, the stuff that comes and goes when you use apps which use data and stuff. Well my phone has at least 1Gb of data dumped on my own SD card, full of pointless little icons, folders with names like 'aechga88j3kk', thumbnails, and pictures from people's profiles and their newsfeed images on wechat (Chinese facebook, kind of). It's the kind of stuff that you'd usually have to specifically choose 'save to phone' if you want to keep it. But this phone just stores the lot. I also downloaded 'Momo', which is the Chinese version of Tinder. Got bored and deleted it about a week later. Then one day I decided to tick the 'show hidden files' button on my picture gallery and found the phone had stored literally about 10'000 little thumbnail images of girls' faces from Momo, all on my own SD card. I barely used the app either. So yeah the memory management is terrible.
Also, the camera... I had to download a separate camera app because the in-built one is shite. You can't tap the screen for autofocus, you just have to wait. And then if you wait too long, it autofocuses again. If you tap the screen it sometimes just goes out of focus permanently and you have to force-close the app. The video recorder is worse. It autofocuses literally every one second. So all videos go like this: focus...blur...focus...blur...focus...blur......
And so my conclusion is: Chinese manufacturing is the worst in the world. TCL is a top brand phone company, competing with the likes of Samsung, and even they can't get it right. It really shows me the depth of Chinese culture. In a country of 1 billion, they can't produce a phone manufacturer to compete with the Koreans, Yanks or Europeans. It's shocking. The whole joke about 'smart Asians' is a stupid myth, they only look clever because it's their culture to sit and rote memorise things for exams. China is full of dull, copycat idiots without a jot of understanding of originality, quality or usability.
And then I could go on to mention other completely different things... Such as the problems I encountered with a 'good' (high-ish priced) mountain bike I bought soon after arriving here. Fell apart in weeks! They literally just take the concept of (mountain bike that looks good), bung things together to build a product that looks the part, then stand back and think the job is done. They're idiots. They have no idea.
This even stems to the way they do sports. On my campus there's a chin-up bar at the side of a sports field. They can't even do chin-ups properly. They hang there, then kick their legs for a sort of starter boost to ensure they have some acceleration, and have covered half the distance with this little 'jumping' technique before they even need to use their arms. So they even take short cuts with exercise. Seriously. For the Chinese, it's all about the end-product, with no consideration for the true purpose of what's actually being done. They're idiots..!!!
Alright rant over
It's gonna be a long, long time before I trust anything Chinese ever again. No way in hell would I ever buy a Chinese motorbike now, that's for sure. |
Blimey, lucky we didn't say anything about the dirty knife!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwZaqZaRe78
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BigShow
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Lord Percy
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| Posted: 06:06 - 29 Jun 2015 Post subject: |
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Thanks for the advice, just bought myself a Moto G 2nd gen 4G LTE for £137.
I did a load of comparing, the Moto E version seemed just as good really, if not a fraction better in some things (namely battery life and processor ability - only very very marginally though), but the one thing that won me over was that the G version has a flash/torch/generally useful light. Hah. I suppose the higher megapixel rating of the rear and front camera is a bonus too, although high megapixel = high memory usage so I tend to reduce my photo settings anyway.
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| WD Forte |
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WD Forte
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| Posted: 12:57 - 30 Jun 2015 Post subject: |
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Hang on a minute
the vast majority of consumer electronics are made in China
I still have an elderly Galaxy Ace on 2G so no particular axe to grind
but hear some of the chinese phones are quite good or at least improving.
I'm guessing its a bit like the bikes
The built to a price ones are shite
but when better design and manufacturing practises are used
they improve but still have the bad rep to shake off.
I'm not one of those folk that have a phone stuck to my face all day and don't want to do friendface and all that shit on it anyway
but when I want to eventually upgrade I'll be checking out what's hot cheap and Chinese
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Lord Percy
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WD Forte
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Old Thread Alert!
The last post was made 11 years, 57 days ago. Instead of replying here, would creating a new thread be more useful? |
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