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New Phone!
Dec. 28th, 2017 10:27 pmEarlier this month, my old Samsung Galaxy S6 bit the dust. Rather, the pavement. Well, kinda.
I was climbing out of the minivan after delivering Kent to the metro station when it fell from my pocket. It does have a case, but it somehow managed to land flat on its screen, successfully avoiding any contact with the protected surfaces. And the brunt of the shatter pattern was over the selfie camera. The beast worked still, but it was distracting to read because of the shatter pattern, and well, no selfies.
I considered the S8 since I've had a good run with Samsung, but they want $800+ for one. No.
Even the older S7 was going to be $600, much more than I'm willing to pay.
In the end, I went with the Asus Zenfone V. Frankly, I didn't know Asus was making mobile phones but Verizon Wireless was offering it for $240. In my testing, it was slightly less responsive than high end phones but still ran everything I needed to with the same built-in flash storage & RAM, a great screen and higher resolution cameras on front & back.
After a couple of weeks, I'm happy to report it's working well for me. My only significant complaint is that it sometimes doesn't transition nicely from wifi to 4G: occasionally I leave the range of the connected wifi network and it simply refuses to latch onto anything, including the regular mobile network I know is functioning around me. A reboot of the phone brings it back, but that's a bit inconvenient sometimes.
The performance though is more than what I need and the battery life is a big improvement over my old aging S6.
I was climbing out of the minivan after delivering Kent to the metro station when it fell from my pocket. It does have a case, but it somehow managed to land flat on its screen, successfully avoiding any contact with the protected surfaces. And the brunt of the shatter pattern was over the selfie camera. The beast worked still, but it was distracting to read because of the shatter pattern, and well, no selfies.
I considered the S8 since I've had a good run with Samsung, but they want $800+ for one. No.
Even the older S7 was going to be $600, much more than I'm willing to pay.
In the end, I went with the Asus Zenfone V. Frankly, I didn't know Asus was making mobile phones but Verizon Wireless was offering it for $240. In my testing, it was slightly less responsive than high end phones but still ran everything I needed to with the same built-in flash storage & RAM, a great screen and higher resolution cameras on front & back.
After a couple of weeks, I'm happy to report it's working well for me. My only significant complaint is that it sometimes doesn't transition nicely from wifi to 4G: occasionally I leave the range of the connected wifi network and it simply refuses to latch onto anything, including the regular mobile network I know is functioning around me. A reboot of the phone brings it back, but that's a bit inconvenient sometimes.
The performance though is more than what I need and the battery life is a big improvement over my old aging S6.
