Making the Most of a Minimal Budget. Contact me at: skintsailor@yahoo.co.uk or on Twitter: @skintsailor

Tuesday 21 November 2017

New Phone

Long-time readers of my blog will know that I use my mobile phone a lot when boating. It's quite handy to take pictures and also for navigation using the Navionics mobile app.

However, my Samsung Galaxy J5 has been suffereing recently. I did an update to Android Marshmallow in the summer which grabbed a larger than usual chunk of the 8GB of storage and left me with naff all storage for applications. That in turn meant that some of the boaty applications had to go due to the lack of storage, a very poor state of affairs.

Ever since then, I've been saving up for a new phone. My contract with Tesco Mobile ended and the only reasonable contender for a replacement was the Samsung Galaxy A5, which has 32GB storage and fingerprint reader and a HD screen, etc. All the usual bells and whistles. However, at nearly £400 quid for the phone over 2 years, I decided that it was a bit too expensive.

Time to look at cheaper alternatives. I looked at the usual Chinese mobile phones to see if I could get a bargain. Xiaomi are a pretty good manufacturer, they make quite good equipment, up there with the Japanese. Doogee (yeah, what a dodgy name) are another that tend to be well-specced for the money. They can be had pretty cheaply, but watch out for import duty if you buy them through the Chinese websites like Banggood, Wish and AliExpress.

But unfortunately most Chinese phones won't work on all networks and in my case won't work on the 4G frequency band that Tesco mobile use. Its always worth checking  https://willmyphonework.net/ to see if any of the cheaper phones work on your current network.Chinese sourced phones tend to support only a limited number of mobile bands. I assume due to some restriction in China.

In the end I settled on a British-designed phone. Flying the flag and all that. :-)

It's the Wileyfox Swift 2x from er, these people: https://www.wileyfox.com/

It has 32Gb internal storage, so all my old nautical apps and more have been loaded onto it and I've still only used a third of the storage space. If I need more I can fit a 64Gb SD card and format it to become part of the internal storage.

It comes with a pretty low-headroom version of Android Nougat, so there are very few bundled apps that you can't get rid of. That helps save space and makes me a happy bunny.

It also has a 5.2 inch 1080p HD screen, fingerprint reader, 16Mp camera at the rear, 8Mp at the front for selfies, a 3010mah battery and uses USB-C to charge up so it charges to 75% in less than an hour.

I'm mightily impressed. I can now use apps like Android Pay too because it has NFC communication (it can talk to contactless devices)

And the icing on the cake is Amazon have got it on offer at the moment for £145. Considering the RRP is £219 that's a bargain.

It's also British designed, so you're indirectly helping British jobs.

I was so impressed with mine, I've bought another one for the wife for Christmas.

Of course having finished paying off the Galaxy J5, I've gone back to a sim-only contract. I also updated that because Tesco Mobile are doing a sim-only deal with 4Gb of data and lots of texts and mimutes for £11 a month.

UPDATE:

So far after playing with the phone, one thing has needed attention: the original camera app that comes with the phone is pretty naff. I downloaded the free "Open Camera" app from Google play and that seems to work a lot better on focus and colour balance. It's amazing how using a different application can make such a difference using the same device. I will try and post up some comparisons.

8 comments:

  1. As it happens I've just taken delivery of a Samsung a5!

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  2. And I’ve just got a Xiaomi Redmi 4x! And jolly good it is too with more bells and whistles than an old chap can handle.

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  3. Steve, The A5 was my choice until I worked out it would cost about £35 a month for the phone, calls and insurance. About double what I was paying with the old J5. The A5 looks to be a good phone, it's just that in 2 years I thought that maybe a 16GB or 32Gb phone would cost the same as the J5 did. You know, march of technology reducing the cost, etc. But instead it looks like the high end phones get more expensive and drag the mid-priced phones up with them.

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  4. ...think it's costing me £20 a month over 2 and a half years... with a gig of data/month and the usual calls/texts... I'm happy.. shoved a 64Gb card in it yesterday to put music and stuff on.. unlike my Moto you can't use that as integrated storage but I'm not too bothered - on the Moto that feature was buggy...

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    1. On Tesco mobile it was £26 a month for 1Gb of data. Upping the data pushed it to nearly £30 and and then insurance on top pushed it over the £30 a month barrier, my personal price limit.

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  5. Paul, I checked out the Redmi 4x and the Doogee Mix2 (sexy looking and 4 cameras!) but the lack of NFC stopped me going for them. Android pay is so handy and so far I've earned a bunch of Costa vouchers through it! At £145 the Swift 2x is a bargain. Had to load a different camera app on it as the original is a bit rubbish though. More testing is ongoing. So far all is good. If you look around there are plenty of really good phones out there.

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    1. Hi Mark i just Bought myself the doogee s60 from aliexpress, (dual sim, ruggedised chassis, NFC etc) with duty it cost £209, absolute bargain after my samsung s5 got snapped in half. Cant recommend the chinese manufacturers enough, they make phones with more bells and whistles than i'll ever use for the fraction of the cost of either a samsung or apple product.

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    2. Roger, I looked at the Chinese phones, but not all of them work on the Tesco mobile network. The swift 2x cost 209 with an Amazon dot and 144 without,not bad for 32gb, dual sim, NFC, etc.

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