Be Excellent To Each Other

Can i play that over the course of a day with my mate?

Oh right you mean a sort of play-by-email type thing, in that case, no.

That space one that Craster and I like that I've forgotten the STAR REALMS!

And I think X-com, too.

Not really my thing, and I only played it on PC, but Frozen Synapse supports asynchronous multiplayer.

That's the word Mali should have used.

There have been rumblings of a mobile version of Naked War by The Pickford Brothers for ages but it doesn't seem to have happened yet.

That would be off-the-scale incredible if it came to pass as it was a stunningly good game, and it is asynchronous.

Chess. Scrabble.

Darts

It's a shame more people don't play Snap Attack, the Scrabble-like spin-off of Wordament. Great little word game but worldwide, you get about 100 people max playing it at the same time (in English anyway.. I suppose the other languages might be popular).

I loved letter press on iOS, but they only seem to have an imitation on android. Nevertheless, seems pretty much the same and is an excellent asynchronous game. Like risk crossed with boggle.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.infinite_imagination.letterplex

Star realms is fun.

I am Grimddd if you want to play against me.

If he accepts your challenge, that is

Shh

MaliciousA. But you knows that, already.

New phone time for Mrs H today as her contract is nearly up. (They let you renew 4-6 weeks early if you sign your life away again.)

Last time she got a Galaxy S4 Mini on a two year £35pm contract and broke it inside of three months, so I replaced it with a Moto-G V2 and said she wasn't allowed to have nice things.

We're going to the Manx Telecom shop today and it's entirely her choice as to what she'll get, she deffo wants to stay with Android as she's very much into the Google eco-system and has loads of apps and stuff, so that's the fifty-six billion different flavours of iPhone that exist these days straight out of the window.

Also the list of phones they stock isn't comprehensive (the Pay Monthly drop down menu on this page lists them all https://shop.manxtelecom.com/ ).

I'm minded to recommend the Xperia Z5 Compact as it's a bit smaller than a full-size smartphone, but packs full-size specs. Mrs H has gravitated towards smaller phones in the past. (Hence the S4 Mini, as she found the regular S4/S5 too big to use comfortably - I think the S5 was out at the time and the S4 was end of line.)

I know Sony's Android skin is pretty crappy and long in the tooth now, but I could just do what I did to my S7, which is to replace all the manufacturer shit with the lovely clean Google stuff from the App Store, and uninstall everything else.

Looking at the list there's really not much of a choice when it comes to slightly smaller phones anyway, they're either iPhones, low-end shit from LG and the likes, or the Z5 Compact.

We shall see anyway.

Z5 Compact get. It pretty much won by default really as it was the only 'small' smartphone that wasn't an iPhone or a shitty budget sort of affair. (I'm not saying other options in the Z5 Compact's category don't exist, but MT don't stock them if they do. I note for example however, that Samsung don't do a 'Mini' anymore.)

It's currently munching its way through over 1GB of various updates. Amusingly it refused to even start a system update because the battery had less than 50% charge (48%), despite the fact it was plugged in.

There are currently three different types of iPhone available to buy, colour and storage size notwithstanding. How many different Android phones are out there?

MT have the 6, the 6 Plus, the 6S, the 6S Plus, and the SE - in a variety of capacities.

so 5 then

Five basic models, with an assortment of capacities and colours (the capacities of course making huge differences to price, with no expandable storage, thus making it a serious extra consideration). It's a pretty convoluted product range IMO, especially compared to what it used to be like.

it was 2 before, the n & the nS with colour and capacity. the rest is just screen size, isn't it?

So for the average customer it's do you want a small, medium or large one, with a small, medium or large capacity. If you want to pay less you get an older one. Not exactly rocket science, eh?

The MT Android range, for comparison:



So both LG and Samsung alone have more handsets to choose from than Apple does. There are plenty of things to criticise them for, but range of handsets isn't really one of them...

Well the Sony UI didn't last long.

Google Now, Google Keyboard, and Google Clock all installed. (And Google Authenticator, natch.)

Why do manufacturers even bother to waste their time trying to skin Android when Google have absolutely nailed it?

They want to differentiate themselves from plain Android to try and make their devices 'sticky' so customers don't just buy someone else's device next.

Well they certainly achieve differentiating themselves from plain Android, by making their phones shitter than it.

My boss got an S7 because he found mine so sexy, but he's left the Samsung UI on his. It's fucking awful and drags the whole phone down.

You hate it, but does he?

So you got a phone that's more likely to break itself than for someone to break it?

He has indicated a preference for the UI on mine but when I explained that in installing the Google Now Launcher he'd have to do all his icons and folders and generally the whole UI organisation all over again he decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

He particularly wanted the Google Now screen but you can't just get that by itself as it's the whole launcher, as I found out when I installed it.

Kaboom!

One-all!

That dreadnaught was useless

Moto 360 owners! Are you happy with your purchase? Any buyers remorse? Do you find it incredibly useful or incredibly good at gathering dust on a shelf of your other techno-follies?

I'm considering getting one for jogging and listening to music and also navigation while cycling.

Yes. No. Yes. No.

We appear to have had this discussion: viewtopic.php?p=872809#p872809

Ha, so we have. Even better the second time.

I think it's superb. I would recommend it.

cheers Mali. How do you eat use yours?

Hope she fares better than I did with the Z5C. It's a lovely phone but I had to return it after 3 weeks because the bluetooth was incredibly flaky when connecting to my headphones and car, and the device had a tendency to get insanely hot while browsing the internet, which made me feel like I was reading Beex on a Pop Tart. And the camera was too slow for my liking. All of which is a shame as it's a nice form factor and a really nice device otherwise.

Incidentally that means I now have one of these in yellow cluttering up my desk , so if she's after a case, it's yours for postage.

Cheers Mr Fop, but she already has a lovely hand-knitted case that one of her friends made for her. Whilst we were in the MT shop she tried to slide a few standard sized smartphones into the case and none of them fit, whereas the Z5C went in all lovely and snuggly, I think the deal was pretty much done at that point TBH.

As for the wider issues, the reading I did suggested that the Z3C had more than its fair share of problems but these were ironed out for the Z5C, I guess time will tell. Lord knows the Z5C applied multiple massive system updates once it first got its hooks into a wireless network so maybe there have been a few fixes and improvements over the months.

Fingers crossed it's been behaving itself impeccably up to now and Mrs Hearthly is very happy with it. Takes a cracking picture too, and she likes the Sony media player thing that's on there as well.

Directions when driving, quivk replies to texts, seeing if email/facebook notificatioms worth looking at, telling the time, quock weather forecast checks.

Charge lasts about a day and a half.

Two different misspellings of quick in one post. Impressive

Keyboard is really small on s5 and i turned autocorrect off.

Fixed

?

Hmmm yes this does seem to be a thing. Mrs H was fannying around on Pokemon Go for a reasonably extended period a little earlier and said to me her phone felt hot and was it OK?

She handed it over and it really was rather toasty, certainly the hottest I've ever experienced a mobile device to get. It's almost like stuffing the same high-end components that power the regular Z5 into a more compact chassis comes with some issues.....

It didn't seem to suffer any ill effects mind, but it was definitely on the wrong side of a heat level I'd be comfortable with.

Hopefully it won't melt or combust or burn the house down.

Do arm chips have thermal throttling?

I'd be surprised if they didn't, it's been a pretty standard feature of CPU technology for quite some time now.

One likes to think that Sony did some pretty decent testing on the Z5C, and as such it will hopefully do what's required in terms of throttling or suchlike to prevent it getting so hot that it inflicts injury upon itself.

As Mr Fop said in his post though, it really is on the wrong side of 'a bit too hot for comfort'.

Yes, of course. (So do the GPUs, which are an even more acute heat source.)

Close one, Mali! Surprised I got that.

28! 28! That was one hell of a turn.