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.