Making It Up

as we go along

Phones and kit

Making money for old phones with CEX

by 2 Comments

Before anyone gets excited, this isn’t a sponsored post. (I’m very open to working with phone brands or recycling /decluttering folks if anyone is offering mind.)

A little while before Christmas I won a new Huawei P20 Pro mobile phone, I may have enthused about it at the time. Which meant that my trusty Samsung S4 was surplus to requirements. Tim had made noises about stashing it as a backup phone, but when I was in CEX with the kids a couple days ago I noticed they were selling phones off that age for a fair bit of money. Sure enough when I checked online, it looked like they might offer me around 50, or more in vouchers and *that* could go towards the camera lens I want for taking gig pictures. (Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 thank you for asking and no, I’ve no idea what that means. Yet.)

I factory reset the phone after checking everything was backed up and retrieving the SD card and trotted down to CEX. The process is fairly straightforward – you do need id if it’s the first time you’ve done it, but I have a membership card from when we streamlined the DVDs a couple of years ago. They give you a preliminary offer and it takes around 40 minutes to test the phone. I used my time wisely with a trip to the library where I paid off my library fines and got them to reset my email address so that I should get reminders and not fines from now on.

Back to CEX and I got a voucher for £69. Would have got slightly more if I’d thought to find the charger and cable too, but as the lens I want is £88 online for the STM version I’m quite happy. Particularly when you think I bought the phone on ebay for £115 vs have had several years use out of it.

So when you get around to upgrading your phone, do think carefully about what you do with the old handset, it could be worth more than you think. Particularly if you’ve looked after it with a decent case and a screen protector too ?

New camera: Canon SX700 HS

by 4 Comments

I’ve had a Canon camera for a few years now, a present from Tim. It was a Powershot SX110.

It takes very nice pictures. And sometime last year I started playing with what I could achieve when I moved off manual, and the answer is, some very nice things. Some are on my much neglected photography blog – I may merge them in here.

But the 110 had a couple of problems. The major one being battery life. It’s depressing to set out to take pictures and have the batteries go flat 30 shots in. 

So I’ve been looking at other cameras. And just before Kentwell, Tim tipped me off to the Canon SX700 HS on offer at £149. Now, that’s still quite a lot of money, but I felt I could justify it as a tool for the blog, so I went ahead and bought it.

Regrets, I have none.

For starters, the SX700 is smaller than my 110. Meaning that I’m more likely to slip it into a pocket or bag and take it out and about with me. It has a dedicated rechargeable battery (I will be buying a second) that lasts for hundreds of shots. And it has a phenomenal 30x optical zoom. It also has all the manual controls I’ve been getting used to on the original Powershot, in mostly the same places, so I’m getting to grips with it pretty quickly.

You can hook it up to mobiles/tablets using the Canon app – you can even remotely control the camera to take those family timer shots without having to dive across the room. You can also access pictures without having to find a card reader or other compatible device. And it takes very nice pictures.

Blackbird in garden

Girl with rose petals

Golden moon

If you like the look of it, here’s an Amazon affiliate link: Canon PowerShot SX700 HS Compact Zoom – Black (16.1MP, 30x Optical Zoom) will try to find cheaper versions tomorrow!

Samsung Note 2 Android 4.3 upgrade issues.

by 4 Comments

Hi, my name is Hac, and I’m a samsung Note 2 addict.

At least I was. I loved so many things about it. I adored the connective typing, the predictive text, the way that I only had to send a phrase a couple of times and it learnt it. I used to be able to send my snail mail address in 10 taps of the keyboard. Do you have any idea how much time things like that saved?

Since the android 4.3 upgrade though, it’s just not been like that. My phone forgot where we live. Not a problem, I thought, it’ll pick it up again quickly. So I tried, patiently typing in my entire address repeatedly. But not only has it not learnt the phrases, it’s refusing to relearn individual names or words. Whenever I try to swype Jax, it fills in Hac. It’s a stranger to me 🙁

Apps aren’t working either. Photoshop express looks like it is doing fine, right up until the point that I save the image I’ve painstakingly cropped. Then it saves something else entirely. Which gave me some good comments on my last Silent Sunday I’ll admit, but still isn’t quite what I was looking for.

My browser frequently doesn’t load the link I’ve clicked through on. It sits there stubbornly displaying the short link. So I go back, and click through again, and this time it loads 75% of the page before hanging obstinately and ignoring my attempts to refresh.

20140108-234201.jpg The GPS went haywire and added 0.25k on to my last run. Which did give me a really good time for the first split, but rather throws out the whole point of using a GPS enabled app in the first place.

And the camera. For some reason it keeps taking multi shots instead of the single picture I’m aiming for. Opening the gallery to view the shots takes so long that several times I’ve forgotten what I was trying to do and gone off to make a cup of tea instead. Not always a bad thing (I like tea) but does make sharing pictures to social media a little more challenging.

Small tales of woe in comparison with the twitter user I found who was left with a Note 2 that no longer connects to wifi. She rooted it and installed a different version of the OS in the end, without the Samsung overlay. Or the other one who has to carry a charger with her at all times as the battery life is suddenly unpredictable. And do Samsung have any response to this? Their twitter bot advised me to factory reset the phone and sent me a link to the S4 instructions. Helpful. Not. Factory reset? What about all my apps? All my data? Do a backup with Kies they advised the next day (it’s not a very speedy bot sadly).

I’m not impressed. I held off on installing the upgrade just in case when I was away from home, but you only get postponement options that I saw, no option to just decline. So eventually I accepted it, and the tool that allowed me to be more efficient, more effective online and therefore off, was reduced to a pale shadow of its former self, forgetting my name.

I managed to reset some things that had changed, turned off the irritating clicky keyboard, took out all the images that were suddenly littering my gmail inboxes. I do resent when upgrades change basic settings like that. What I resent even more is when they upgrade your expensive tool and break it.

Later today I’m going to try to make time to do a full backup and then a factory reset and see whether that fixes it. But even if it does, I’ve had a costly lesson reinforced. Samsung may make beautiful kit, but they don’t care about the people who use it. Not enough to offer any real support. If I manage to get this phone sorted out so that I can make it through the rest of the contract, I’ll remember that. And go back to either Nokia or HTC, who value their users and connect with their communities online.

Have you had any problems with your smartphone following OS upgrade? Tell me all about it. I really do want to know.

Quick test on blogging from HTC One X

by 1 Comment

When I do phone reviews, I have a number of little tests I like to do. One of them is blogging from it. Right at the moment I’m trying google voice input which is surprisingly good. Can’t work out how you delete though.

Now I’ve found the Swype equivalent. It’s called HTC trace and is in the keyboard settings. Big is also reviewing this for her new tech blog, don’t expect she’s going to be desperately happy I’ve turned it on 😉

Last thing to test is the camera.

image

Doing all right in a tough light setting.

Full comparative review to follow on technology solved.

Disclosure: phone is on loan from three for the purpose of review.

Oxpwr One review – with added discount code.

by Leave a Comment

I think I may have mentioned in passing recently that I’ve been camping for two weeks without any access to power to recharge my much loved Smartphone. As you can imagine, this is a bit stressful for me. While I fully understand the idea that disconnecting from the internet can be good for you, it’s not ideal when some of your family is in different places and you’ve no transport, so the chance to review the Oxpwr One came at a perfect time.

The unit is compact and sturdy, which is good. It charges via USB – with the number of PCs we have littering our house this is no big problem. There are nifty little connectors to charge a variety of different items – as we’re an Android household, all our phones run off the flat small USB connector, so we didn’t need the whole range of connectors. I think that’s the mini one, and it’s the micro one that the unit needs to charge (although it could be the other way around) so I don’t need the full range of heads. Checking out the website I see the review on there mentions a handy bag to keep everything in – I don’t remember seeing one in my box, so I’ve queried this and will update later.

It holds a charge of 2000 something or other (it really would have helped if I’d brought the box with me to do this review wouldn’t it? I’ll come back to fill in more details later) which appears to be nearly enough to fully recharge my HTC Sensation, but not quite. Still, given that I’ve now learned how to stretch out battery life to several days, it was ample to see me through the second week of camping. I let the phone charge overnight in the tent – on another test I took the charger with me into London and discovered how very slowly my phone charges. It took hours – but I do think that’s my phone, not the powerpack. When I had an iPhone for app test purposes on loan from Three I do remember it charging much more quickly, and apparently the Oxpwr products are designed for iProducts.

All in all, this is a clever solution to the convoluted world we’ve now built for ourselves, with smartphones so power hungry that they don’t last a day of activity. Carry a pack around the size of your smartphone and you can recharge to make it through to evening. I did find it worked much better in the car than the plug in to cigarette lighter method, so it kept the satnav running on the way back from Butlins this week.

If you pop over to Oxpwr you’ll discover that they do a range of different devices, starting at £30 for the unit I tested, and going up to one that will recharge your iPad *and* iPhone, and for the next month (17th July to 17th August), if you use the code “makingitup” at checkout you can get 10% discount and free delivery. Not a bad deal eh? Let me know how you get on with it if you buy one!

(Disclosure: I was sent this product free for review, have not received any further payment, and all opinions are my own.)