Is a Thinkpad Still Like a Rolls-Royce

November 6, 2016 | etbe

For a long time the Thinkpad has been widely regarded as the “Rolls-Royce of laptops”. Since 2003 one could argue that Rolls-Royce is no longer the Rolls-Royce of cars [1]. The way that IBM sold the Think business unit to Lenovo and the way that Lenovo is producing both Thinkpads and cheaper Ideapads is somewhat similar to the way the Rolls-Royce trademark and car company were separately sold to companies that are known for making cheaper cars.

Sam Varghese has written about his experience with Thinkpads and how he thinks it’s no longer the Rolls-Royce of laptops [2]. Sam makes some reasonable points to support this claim (one of which only applies to touchpad users – not people like me who prefer the Trackpoint), but I think that the real issue is whether it’s desirable to have a laptop that could be compared to a Rolls-Royce nowadays.

Support

The Rolls-Royce car company is known for great reliability and support as well as features that other cars lack (mostly luxury features). The Thinkpad marque (both before and after it was sold to Lenovo) was also known for great support. You could take a Thinkpad to any service center anywhere in the world and if the serial number indicated that it was within the warranty period it would be repaired without any need for paperwork. The Thinkpad service centers never had any issue with repairing a Thinkpad that lacked a hard drive just as long as the problem could be demonstrated. It was also possible to purchase an extended support contract at any time which covered all repairs including motherboard replacement. I know that not everyone had as good an experience as I had with Thinkpad support, but I’ve been using them since 1998 without problems – which is more than I can say for most hardware.

Do we really need great reliability from laptops nowadays? When I first got a laptop hardly anyone I knew owned one. Nowadays laptops are common. Having a copy of important documents on a USB stick is often a good substitute for a reliable laptop, when you are in an environment where most people own laptops it’s usually not difficult to find someone who will let you use theirs for a while. I think that there is a place for a laptop with RAID-1 and ECC RAM, it’s a little known fact that Thinkpads have a long history of supporting the replacement of a CD/DVD drive with a second hard drive (I don’t know if this is still supported) but AFAIK they have never supported ECC RAM.

My first Thinkpad cost $3,800. In modern money that would be something like $7,000 or more. For that price you really want something that’s well supported to protect the valuable asset. Sam complains about his new Thinkpad costing more than $1000 and needing to be replaced after 2.5 years. Mobile phones start at about $600 for the more desirable models (IE anything that runs Pokemon Go) and the new Google Pixel phones range from $1079 to $1,419. Phones aren’t really expected to be used for more than 2.5 years. Phones are usually impractical to service in any way so for most of the people who read my blog (who tend to buy the more expensive hardware) they are pretty much a disposable item costing $600+. I previously wrote about a failed Nexus 5 and the financial calculations for self-insuring an expensive phone [3]. I think there’s no way that a company can provide extended support/warranty while making a profit and offering a deal that’s good value to customers who can afford to self-insure. The same applies for the $499 Lenovo Ideapad 310 and other cheaper Lenovo products. Thinkpads (the higher end of the Lenovo laptop range) are slightly more expensive than the most expensive phones but they also offer more potential for the user to service them.

Features

My first Thinkpad was quite underpowered when compared to desktop PCs, it had 32M of RAM and could only be expanded to 96M at a time when desktop PCs could be expanded to 128M easily and 256M with some expense. It had a 800*600 display when my desktop display was 1280*1024 (37% of the pixels). Nowadays laptops usually start at about 8G of RAM (with a small minority that have 4G) and laptop displays start at about 1366*768 resolution (51% of the pixels in a FullHD display). That compares well to desktop systems and also is capable of running most things well. My current Thinkpad is a T420 with 8G of RAM and a 1600*900 display (69% of FullHD), it would be nice to have higher resolution but this works well and it was going cheap when I needed a new laptop.

Modern Thinkpads don’t have some of the significant features that older ones had. The legendary Butterfly Keyboard is long gone, killed by the wide displays that economies of scale and 16:9 movies have forced upon us. It’s been a long time since Thinkpads had some of the highest resolution displays and since anyone really cared about it (you only need pixels to be small enough that you can’t see them).

For me one of the noteworthy features of the Thinkpads has been the great keyboard. Mechanical keys that feel like a desktop keyboard. It seems that most Thinkpads are getting the rubbery keyboard design made popular by Apple. I guess this is due to engineering factors in designing thin laptops and the fact that most users don’t care.

Matthew Garrett has blogged about the issue of Thinkpad storage configured as “RAID mode” without any option to disable it [4]. This is an annoyance (which incidentally has been worked around) and there are probably other annoyances like it. Designing hardware and an OS are both complex tasks. The interaction between Windows and the hardware is difficult to get right from both sides and the people who design the hardware often don’t think much about Linux support. It has always been this way, the early Thinkpads had no Linux support for special IBM features (like fan control) and support for ISA-PnP was patchy. It is disappointing that Lenovo doesn’t put a little extra effort into making sure that Linux works well on their hardware and this might be a reason for considering another brand.

Service Life

I bought my curent Thinkpad T420 in October 2013 [5] It’s more than 3 years old and has no problems even though I bought it refurbished with a reduced warranty. This is probably the longest I’ve had a Thinkpad working well, which seems to be a data point against the case that modern Thinkpads aren’t as good.

I bought a T61 in February 2010 [6], it started working again (after mysteriously not working for a month in late 2013) and apart from the battery lasting 5 minutes and a CPU cooling problem it still works well. If that Thinkpad had cost $3,800 then I would have got it repaired, but as it cost $796 (plus the cost of a RAM upgrade) and a better one was available for $300 it wasn’t worth repairing.

In the period 1998 to 2010 I bought a 385XD, a 600E, a T21, a T43, and a T61 [6]. During that time I upgraded laptops 4 times in 12 years (I don’t have good records of when I bought each one). So my average Thinkpad has lasted 3 years. The first 2 were replaced to get better performance, the 3rd was replaced when an employer assigned me a Thinkpad (and sold it to be when I left), and 4 and 5 were replaced due to hardware problems that could not be fixed economically given the low cost of replacement.

Conclusion

Thinkpads possibly don’t have the benefits over other brands that they used to have. But in terms of providing value for the users it seems that they are much better than they used to be. Until I wrote this post I didn’t realise that I’ve broken a personal record for owning a laptop. It just keeps working and I hadn’t even bothered looking into the issue. For some devices I track how long I’ve owned them while thinking “can I justify replacing it yet”, but the T420 just does everything I want. The battery still lasts 2+ hours which is a new record too, with every other Thinkpad I’ve owned the battery life has dropped to well under an hour within a year of purchase.

If I replaced this Thinkpad T420 now it will have cost me less than $100 per year (or $140 per year including the new SSD I installed this year), that’s about 3 times better than any previous laptop! I wouldn’t feel bad about replacing it as I’ve definitely got great value for money from it. But I won’t replace it as it’s doing everything I want.

I’ve just realised that by every measure (price, reliability, and ability to run all software I want to run) I’ve got the best Thinkpad I’ve ever had. Maybe it’s not like a Rolls-Royce, but I’d much rather drive a 2016 Tesla than a 1980 Rolls-Royce anyway.

Another Broken Nexus 5

October 22, 2016 | etbe

In late 2013 I bought a Nexus 5 for my wife [1]. It’s a good phone and I generally have no complaints about the way it works. In the middle of 2016 I had to make a warranty claim when the original Nexus 5 stopped working [2]. Google’s warranty support was ok, the call-back was good but unfortunately there was some confusion which delayed replacement.

Once the confusion about the IMEI was resolved the warranty replacement method was to bill my credit card for a replacement phone and reverse the charge if/when they got the original phone back and found it to have a defect covered by warranty. This policy meant that I got a new phone sooner as they didn’t need to get the old phone first. This is a huge benefit for defects that don’t make the phone unusable as you will never be without a phone. Also if the user determines that the breakage was their fault they can just refrain from sending in the old phone.

Today my wife’s latest Nexus 5 developed a problem. It turned itself off and went into a reboot loop when connected to the charger. Also one of the clips on the rear case had popped out and other clips popped out when I pushed it back in. It appears (without opening the phone) that the battery may have grown larger (which is a common symptom of battery related problems). The phone is slightly less than 3 years old, so if I had got the extended warranty then I would have got a replacement.

Now I’m about to buy a Nexus 6P (because the Pixel is ridiculously expensive) which is $700 including postage. Kogan offers me a 3 year warranty for an extra $108. Obviously in retrospect spending an extra $100 would have been a benefit for the Nexus 5. But the first question is whether new phone going to have a probability greater than 1/7 of failing due to something other than user error in years 2 and 3? For an extended warranty to provide any benefit the phone has to have a problem that doesn’t occur in the first year (or a problem in a replacement phone after the first phone was replaced). The phone also has to not be lost, stolen, or dropped in a pool by it’s owner. While my wife and I have a good record of not losing or breaking phones the probability of it happening isn’t zero.

The Nexus 5 that just died can be replaced for 2/3 of the original price. The value of the old Nexus 5 to me is less than 2/3 of the original price as buying a newer better phone is the option I want. The value of an old phone to me decreases faster than the replacement cost because I don’t want to buy an old phone.

For an extended warranty to be a good deal for me I think it would have to cost significantly less than 1/10 of the purchase price due to the low probability of failure in that time period and the decreasing value of a replacement outdated phone. So even though my last choice to skip an extended warranty ended up not paying out I expect that overall I will be financially ahead if I keep self-insuring, and I’m sure that I have already saved money by self-insuring all my previous devices.

SSD and M.2

August 14, 2016 | etbe

The Need for Speed

One of my clients has an important server running ZFS. They need to have a filesystem that detects corruption, while regular RAID is good for the case where a disk gives read errors it doesn’t cover the case where a disk returns bad data and claims it to be good (which I’ve witnessed in BTRFS and ZFS systems). BTRFS is good for the case of a single disk or a RAID-1 array but I believe that the RAID-5 code for BTRFS is not sufficiently tested for business use. ZFS doesn’t perform very well due to the checksums on data and metadata requiring multiple writes for a single change which also causes more fragmentation. This isn’t a criticism of ZFS, it’s just an engineering trade-off for the data integrity features.

ZFS supports read-caching on a SSD (the L2ARC) and write-back caching (ZIL). To get the best benefit of L2ARC and ZIL you need fast SSD storage. So now with my client investigating 10 gigabit Ethernet I have to investigate SSD.

For some time SSDs have been in the same price range as hard drives, starting at prices well below $100. Now there are some SSDs on sale for as little as $50. One issue with SATA for server use is that SATA 3.0 (which was released in 2009 and is most commonly used nowadays) is limited to 600MB/s. That isn’t nearly adequate if you want to serve files over 10 gigabit Ethernet. SATA 3.2 was released in 2013 and supports 1969MB/s but I doubt that there’s much hardware supporting that. See the SATA Wikipedia page for more information.

Another problem with SATA is getting the devices physically installed. My client has a new Dell server that has plenty of spare PCIe slots but no spare SATA connectors or SATA power connectors. I could have removed the DVD drive (as I did for some tests before deploying the server) but that’s ugly and only gives 1 device while you need 2 devices in a RAID-1 configuration for ZIL.

M.2

M.2 is a new standard for expansion cards, it supports SATA and PCIe interfaces (and USB but that isn’t useful at this time). The wikipedia page for M.2 is interesting to read for background knowledge but isn’t helpful if you are about to buy hardware.

The first M.2 card I bought had a SATA interface, then I was unable to find a local company that could sell a SATA M.2 host adapter. So I bought a M.2 to SATA adapter which made it work like a regular 2.5″ SATA device. That’s working well in one of my home PCs but isn’t what I wanted. Apparently systems that have a M.2 socket on the motherboard will usually take either SATA or NVMe devices.

The most important thing I learned is to buy the SSD storage device and the host adapter from the same place then you are entitled to a refund if they don’t work together.

The alternative to the SATA (AHCI) interface on an M.2 device is known as NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express), see the Wikipedia page for NVMe for details. NVMe not only gives a higher throughput but it gives more command queues and more commands per queue which should give significant performance benefits for a device with multiple banks of NVRAM. This is what you want for server use.

Eventually I got a M.2 NVMe device and a PCIe card for it. A quick test showed sustained transfer speeds of around 1500MB/s which should permit saturating a 10 gigabit Ethernet link in some situations.

One annoyance is that the M.2 devices have a different naming convention to regular hard drives. I have devices /dev/nvme0n1 and /dev/nvme1n1, apparently that is to support multiple storage devices on one NVMe interface. Partitions have device names like /dev/nvme0n1p1 and /dev/nvme0n1p2.

Power Use

I recently upgraded my Thinkpad T420 from a 320G hard drive to a 500G SSD which made it faster but also surprisingly quieter – you never realise how noisy hard drives are until they go away. My laptop seemed to feel cooler, but that might be my imagination.

The i5-2520M CPU in my Thinkpad has a TDP of 35W but uses a lot less than that as I almost never have 4 cores in use. The z7k320 320G hard drive is listed as having 0.8W “low power idle” and 1.8W for read-write, maybe Linux wasn’t putting it in the “low power idle” mode. The Samsung 500G 850 EVO SSD is listed as taking 0.4W when idle and up to 3.5W when active (which would not be sustained for long on a laptop). If my CPU is taking an average of 10W then replacing the hard drive with a SSD might have reduced the power use of the non-screen part by 10%, but I doubt that I could notice such a small difference.

I’ve read some articles about power use on the net which can be summarised as “SSDs can draw more power than laptop hard drives but if you do the same amount of work then the SSD will be idle most of the time and not use much power”.

I wonder if the SSD being slightly thicker than the HDD it replaced has affected the airflow inside my Thinkpad.

From reading some of the reviews it seems that there are M.2 storage devices drawing over 7W! That’s going to create some cooling issues on desktop PCs but should be OK in a server. For laptop use they will hopefully release M.2 devices designed for low power consumption.

The Future

M.2 is an ideal format for laptops due to being much smaller and lighter than 2.5″ SSDs. Spinning media doesn’t belong in a modern laptop and using a SATA SSD is an ugly hack when compared to M.2 support on the motherboard.

Intel has released the X99 chipset with M.2 support (see the Wikipedia page for Intel X99) so it should be commonly available on desktops in the near future. For most desktop systems an M.2 device would provide all the storage that is needed (or 2*M.2 in a RAID-1 configuration for a workstation). That would give all the benefits of reduced noise and increased performance that regular SSDs provide, but with better performance and fewer cables inside the PC.

For a corporate desktop PC I think the ideal design would have only M.2 internal storage and no support for 3.5″ disks or a DVD drive. That would allow a design that is much smaller than a current SFF PC.

Nexus 6P and Galaxy S5 Mini

July 8, 2016 | etbe

Just over a month ago I ordered a new Nexus 6P [1]. I’ve had it for over a month now and it’s time to review it and the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini I also bought.

Security

The first noteworthy thing about this phone is the fingerprint scanner on the back. The recommended configuration is to use your fingerprint for unlocking the phone which allows a single touch on the scanner to unlock the screen without the need to press any other buttons. To unlock with a pattern or password you need to first press the “power” button to get the phone’s attention.

I have been considering registering a fingerprint from my non-dominant hand to reduce the incidence of accidentally unlocking it when carrying it or fiddling with it.

The phone won’t complete the boot process before being unlocked. This is a good security feature.

Android version 6 doesn’t assign permissions to apps at install time, they have to be enabled at run time (at least for apps that support Android 6). So you get lots of questions while running apps about what they are permitted to do. Unfortunately there’s no “allow for the duration of this session” option.

A new Android feature prevents changing security settings when there is an “overlay running”. The phone instructs you to disable overlay access for the app in question but that’s not necessary. All that is necessary is for the app to stop using the overlay feature. I use the Twilight app [2] to dim the screen and use redder colors at night. When I want to change settings at night I just have to pause that app and there’s no need to remove the access from it – note that all the web pages and online documentation saying otherwise is wrong.

Another new feature is to not require unlocking while at home. This can be a convenience feature but fingerprint unlocking is so easy that it doesn’t provide much benefit. The downside of enabling this is that if someone stole your phone they could visit your home to get it unlocked. Also police who didn’t have a warrant permitting search of a phone could do so anyway without needing to compel the owner to give up the password.

Design

This is one of the 2 most attractive phones I’ve owned (the other being the sparkly Nexus 4). I think that the general impression of the appearance is positive as there are transparent cases on sale. My phone is white and reminds me of EVE from the movie Wall-E.

Cables

This phone uses the USB Type-C connector, which isn’t news to anyone. What I didn’t realise is that full USB-C requires that connector at both ends as it’s not permitted to have a data cable with USB-C at the device and and USB-A at the host end. The Nexus 6P ships with a 1M long charging cable that has USB-C at both ends and a ~10cm charging cable with USB-C at one end and type A at the other (for the old batteries and the PCs that don’t have USB-C). I bought some 2M long USB-C to USB-A cables for charging my new phone with my old chargers, but I haven’t yet got a 1M long cable. Sometimes I need a cable that’s longer than 10cm but shorter than 2M.

The USB-C cables are all significantly thicker than older USB cables. Part of that would be due to having many more wires but presumably part of it would be due to having thicker power wires for delivering 3A. I haven’t measured power draw but it does seem to charge faster than older phones.

Overall the process of converting to USB-C is going to be a lot more inconvenient than USB SuperSpeed (which I could basically ignore as non-SuperSpeed connectors worked).

It will be good when laptops with USB-C support become common, it should allow thinner laptops with more ports.

One problem I initially had with my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 was the Micro-USB SuperSpeed socket on the phone being more fiddly for the Micro-USB charging plug I used. After a while I got used to that but it was still an annoyance. Having a symmetrical plug that can go into the phone either way is a significant convenience.

Calendars and Contacts

I share most phone contacts with my wife and also have another list that is separate. In the past I had used the Samsung contacts system for the contacts that were specific to my phone and a Google account for contacts that are shared between our phones. Now that I’m using a non-Samsung phone I got another Gmail account for the purpose of storing contacts. Fortunately you can get as many Gmail accounts as you want. But it would be nice if Google supported multiple contact lists and multiple calendars on a single account.

Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini

Shortly after buying the Nexus 6P I decided that I spend enough time in pools and hot tubs that having a waterproof phone would be a good idea. Probably most people wouldn’t consider reading email in a hot tub on a cruise ship to be an ideal holiday, but it works for me. The Galaxy S5 Mini seems to be the cheapest new phone that’s waterproof. It is small and has a relatively low resolution screen, but it’s more than adequate for a device that I’ll use for an average of a few hours a week. I don’t plan to get a SIM for it, I’ll just use Wifi from my main phone.

One noteworthy thing is the amount of bloatware on the Samsung. Usually when configuring a new phone I’m so excited about fancy new hardware that I don’t notice it much. But this time buying the new phone wasn’t particularly exciting as I had just bought a phone that’s much better. So I had more time to notice all the annoyances of having to download updates to Samsung apps that I’ll never use. The Samsung device manager facility has been useful for me in the past and the Samsung contact list was useful for keeping a second address book until I got a Nexus phone. But most of the Samsung apps and 3d party apps aren’t useful at all.

It’s bad enough having to install all the Google core apps. I’ve never read mail from my Gmail account on my phone. I use Fetchmail to transfer it to an IMAP folder on my personal mail server and I’d rather not have the Gmail app on my Android devices. Having any apps other than the bare minimum seems like a bad idea, more apps in the Android image means larger downloads for an over-the-air update and also more space used in the main partition for updates to apps that you don’t use.

Not So Exciting

In recent times there hasn’t been much potential for new features in phones. All phones have enough RAM and screen space for all common apps. While the S5 Mini has a small screen it’s not that small, I spent many years with desktop PCs that had a similar resolution. So while the S5 Mini was released a couple of years ago that doesn’t matter much for most common use. I wouldn’t want it for my main phone but for a secondary phone it’s quite good.

The Nexus 6P is a very nice phone, but apart from USB-C, the fingerprint reader, and the lack of a stylus there’s not much noticeable difference between that and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 I was using before.

I’m generally happy with my Nexus 6P, but I think that anyone who chooses to buy a cheaper phone probably isn’t going to be missing a lot.

A Long Term Review of Android Devices

September 5, 2015 | etbe

Xperia X10

My first Android device was The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i [1]. One of the reasons I chose it was for the large 4″ screen, nowadays the desirable phones (the ones that are marketed as premium products) are all bigger than that (the Galaxy S6 is 5.1″) and even the slightly less expensive phones are bigger. At the moment Aldi is advertising an Android phone with a 4.5″ screen for $129. But at the time there was nothing better in the price range that I was willing to pay.

I devoted a lot of my first review to the default apps for SMS and Email. Shortly after that I realised that the default email app is never going to be adequate (I now use K9 mail) and the SMS app is barely adequate (but I mostly use instant messaging). I’ve got used to the fact that most apps that ship with an Android device are worthless, the camera app and the app to make calls are the only built in apps I regularly use nowadays.

In the bug list from my first review the major issue was lack of Wifi tethering which was fixed by an update to Android 2.3. Unfortunately Android 2.3 ran significantly more slowly which decreased the utility of the phone.

The construction of the phone is very good. Over the last 2 years the 2 Xperia X10 phones I own have been on loan to various relatives, many of whom aren’t really into technology and can’t be expected to take good care of things. But they have not failed in any way. Apart from buying new batteries there has been no hardware failure in either phone. While 2 is a small sample size I haven’t see any other Android device last nearly as long without problems. Unfortunately I have no reason to believe that Sony has continued to design devices as well.

The Xperia X10 phones crash more often than most Android phones with spontaneous reboots being a daily occurrence. While that is worse than any other Android device I’ve used it’s not much worse.

My second review of the Xperia X10 had a section about ways of reducing battery use [2]. Wow, I’d forgotten how much that sucked! When I was last using the Xperia X10 the Life360 app that my wife and I use to track each other was taking 15% of the battery, on more recent phones the same app takes about 2%. The design of modern phones seems to be significantly more energy efficient for background tasks and the larger brighter displays use more energy instead.

My father is using one of the Xperia phones now, when I give him a better phone to replace it I will have both as emergency Wifi access points. They aren’t useful for much else nowadays.

Samsung Galaxy S

In my first review of the Galaxy S I criticised it for being thin, oddly shaped, and slippery [3]. After using it for a while I found the shape convenient as I could easily determine the bottom of the phone in my pocket and hold it the right way up before looking at it. This is a good feature for a phone that’s small enough to rotate in my pocket – the Samsung Galaxy Note series of phones is large enough to not rotate in a pocket. In retrospect I think that being slippery isn’t a big deal as almost everyone buys a phone case anyway. But it would still be better for use on a desk if the bulge was at the top.

I wrote about my Galaxy S failing [4]. Two of my relatives had problems with those phones too. Including a warranty replacement I’ve seen 4 of those phones in use and only one worked reliably. The one that worked reliably is now being used by my mother, it’s considerably faster than the Xperia X10 because it has more RAM and will probably remain in regular use until it breaks.

CyanogenMod

I tried using CyanogenMod [5]. The phone became defective 9 months later so even though CyanogenMod is great I don’t think I got good value for the amount of time spent installing it. I haven’t tried replacing the OS of an Android phone since then.

I really wish that they would start manufacturing phones that can have the OS replaced as easily as a PC.

Samsung Galaxy S3 and Wireless Charging

The Galaxy S3 was the first phone I owned which competes with phones that are currently on sale [6]. A relative bought one at the same time as me and her phone is running well with no problems. But my S3 had some damage to it’s USB port which means that the vast majority of USB cables don’t charge it (only Samsung cables can be expected to work).

After I bought the S3 I bought a Qi wireless phone charging device [7]. One of the reasons for buying that is so if a phone gets a broken USB port then I can still use it. It’s ironic that the one phone that had a damaged USB port also failed to work correctly with the Qi card installed.

The Qi charger is gathering dust.

One significant benefit of the S3 (and most Samsung phones) is that it has a SD socket. I installed a 32G SD card in the S3 and now one of my relatives is happily using it as a media player.

Nexus 4

I bought a Nexus 4 [8] for my wife as she needed a better phone but didn’t feel like paying for a Galaxy S3. The Nexus 4 is a nice phone in many ways but the lack of storage is a serious problem. At the moment I’m only keeping it to use with Google Cardboard, I will lend it to my parents soon.

In retrospect I made a mistake buying the Nexus 4. If I had spent a little more money on another Galaxy S3 then I would have had a phone with a longer usage life as well as being able to swap accessories with my wife.

The Nexus 4 seems reasonably solid, the back of the case (which is glass) broke on mine after a significant impact but the phone continues to work well. That’s a tribute to the construction of the phone and also the Ringke Fusion case [9].

Generally the Nexus 4 is a good phone so I don’t regret buying it. I just think that the Galaxy S3 was a better choice.

Galaxy Note 2

I got a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 in mid 2013 [10]. In retrospect it was a mistake to buy the Galaxy S3, the Note series is better suited to my use. If I had known how good it is to have a larger phone I’d have bought the original Galaxy Note when it was first released.

Generally everything is good about the Note 2. While it only has 16G of storage (which isn’t much by today’s standards) it has an SD socket to allow expansion. It’s currently being used by a relative as a small tablet. With a 32G SD card it can fit a lot of movies.

Bluetooth Speakers

I received Bluetooth speakers in late 2013 [11]. I was very impressed by them but ended up not using them for a while. After they gathered dust for about a year I started using them again recently. While nothing has changed regarding my review of the Hive speakers (which I still like a lot) it seems that my need for such things isn’t as great as I thought. One thing that made me start using the Bluetooth speakers again is that my phone case blocks the sound from my latest phone and makes it worse than phone sound usually is.

I bought Bluetooth speakers for some relatives as presents, the relatives seemed to appreciate them but I wonder how much they actually use them.

Nexus 5

The Nexus 5 [12] is a nice phone. When I first reviewed it there were serious problems with overheating when playing Ingress. I haven’t noticed such problems recently so I think that an update to Android might have made it more energy efficient. In that review I was very impressed by the FullHD screen and it made me want a Note 3, at the time I planned to get a Note 3 in the second half of 2014 (which I did).

Galaxy Note 3

Almost a year ago I bought the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 [13]. I’m quite happy with it at the moment but I don’t have enough data for a long term review of it. The only thing to note so far is that in my first review I was unhappy with the USB 3 socket as that made it more difficult to connect a USB cable in the dark. I’ve got used to the socket and I can now reliably plug it in at night with ease.

I wrote about Rivers jeans being the only brand that can fit a Samsung Galaxy Note series phone in the pocket [14]. The pockets of my jeans have just started wearing out and I think that it’s partly due to the fact that I bought a Armourdillo Hybrid case [15] for my Note 3. I’ve had the jeans for over 3 years with no noticable wear apart from the pockets starting to wear out after 10 months of using the Armourdillo case.

I don’t think that the Armourdillo case is bad, but the fact that it has deep grooves and hard plastic causes it to rub more on material when I take the phone out of my pocket. As I check my phone very frequently this causes some serious wear. This isn’t necessarily a problem given that a phone costs 20* more than a pair of jeans, if the case was actually needed to save the phone then it would be worth having some jeans wear out. But I don’t think I need more protection than a gel case offers.

Another problem is that the Armourdillo case is very difficult to remove. This isn’t a problem if you don’t need access to your phone, IE if you use a phone like the Nexus 5 that doesn’t permit changing batteries or SD cards. But if you need to change batteries, SD cards, etc then it’s really annoying. My wife seems quite happy with her Armoudillo case but I don’t think it was a good choice for me. I’m considering abandoning it and getting one of the cheap gel cases.

The sound on the Note 3 is awful. I don’t know how much of that is due to a limitation in the speaker and how much is due to the case. It’s quite OK for phone calls but not much good for music.

Tablets

I’m currently on my third tablet. One was too cheap and nasty so I returned it. Another was still cheap and I hardly ever used it. The third is a Galaxy Note 10 which works really well. I guess the lesson is to buy something worthwhile so you can use it. A tablet that’s slower and has less storage than a phone probably isn’t going to get used much.

Phone Longevity

I owned the Xperia X10 for 22 months before getting the Galaxy S3. As that included 9 months of using a Galaxy S I only had 13 months of use out of that phone before lending it to other people.

The Galaxy S3 turned out to be a mistake as I replaced it in only 7 months.

I had the Note 2 for 15 months before getting the Note 3.

I have now had the Note 3 for 11 months and have no plans for a replacement any time soon – this is the longest I’ve owned an Android phone and been totally satisfied with it. Also I only need to use it for another 4 months to set a record for using an Android phone.

The Xperia was “free” as part of a telco contract. The other phones were somewhere between $500 and $600 each when counting the accessories (case, battery, etc) that I bought with them. So in 4 years and 7 months I’ve spent somewhere between $1500 and $1800 on phones plus the cost of the Xperia that was built in to the contract. The Xperia probably cost about the same so I’ll assume that I spent $2000 on phones and accessories. This seems like a lot. However that averages out to about $1.20 per day (and hopefully a lot less if my Note 3 lasts another couple of years). I could justify $1.20 per day for either the amount of paid work I do on Android phones or the amount of recreational activities that I perform (the Galaxy S3 was largely purchased for Ingress).

Conclusion

I think that phone companies will be struggling to maintain sales of high end phones in the future. When I chose the Xperia X10 I knew I was making a compromise, the screen resolution was an obvious limitation on the use of the device (even though it was one of the best devices available). The storage in the Xperia was also a limitation. Now FullHD is the minimum resolution for any sort of high-end device and 32G of storage is small. I think that most people would struggle to observe any improvement over a Nexus 5 or Note 3 at this time. I think that this explains the massive advertising campaign for the Galaxy S6 that is going on at the moment. Samsung can’t sell the S6 based on it being better than previous phones because there’s not much that they can do to make it obviously better. So they try and sell it for the image.

Samsung Galaxy Note 3

October 31, 2014 | etbe

In June last year I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 [1]. Generally I was very happy with that phone, one problem I had is that less than a year after purchasing it the Ingress menus burned into the screen [2].

2 weeks ago I bought a new Galaxy Note 3. One of the reasons for getting it is the higher resolution screen, I never realised the benefits of a 1920*1080 screen on a phone until my wife got a Nexus 5 [3]. I had been idly considering a Galaxy Note 4, but $1000 is a lot of money to pay for a phone and I’m not sure that a 2560*1440 screen will offer much benefit in that size. Also the Note 3 and Note 4 both have 3G of RAM, as some applications use more RAM when you have a higher resolution screen the Note 4 will effectively have less usable RAM than the Note 3.

My first laptop cost me $3,800 in 1998, that’s probably more than $6,000 in today’s money. The benefits that I receive now from an Android phone are in many ways greater than I received from that laptop and that laptop was definitely good value for money for me. If the cheapest Android phone cost $6,000 then I’d pay that, but given that the Note 3 is only $550 (including postage) there’s no reason for me to buy something more expensive.

Another reason for getting a new phone is the limited storage space in the Note 2. 16G of internal storage is a limit when you have some big games installed. Also the recent Android update which prevented apps from writing to the SD card meant that it was no longer convenient to put TV shows on my SD card. 32G of internal storage in the Note 3 allows me to fit everything I want (including the music video collection I downloaded with youtube-dl). The Note 2 has 16G of internal storage and an 8G SD card (that I couldn’t fully use due to Android limitations) while the Note 3 has 32G (the 64G version wasn’t on sale at any of the cheap online stores). Also the Note 3 supports an SD card which will be good for my music video collection at some future time, this is a significant benefit over the Nexus 5.

In the past I’ve written about Android service life and concluded that storage is the main issue [4]. So it is a bit unfortunate that I couldn’t get a phone with 64G of storage at a reasonable price. But the upside is that getting a cheaper phone allows me to buy another one sooner and give the old phone to a relative who has less demanding requirements.

In the past I wrote about the warranty support for my wife’s Nexus 5 [5]. I should have followed up on that before, 3 days after that post we received a replacement phone. One good thing that Google does is to reserve money on a credit card to buy the new phone and then send you the new phone before you send the old one back. So if the customer doesn’t end up sending the broken phone they just get billed for the new phone, that avoids excessive delays in getting a replacement phone. So overall the process of Google warranty support is really good, if 2 products are equal in other ways then it would be best to buy from Google to get that level of support.

I considered getting a Nexus 5 as the hardware is reasonably good (not the greatest but quite good enough) and the price is also reasonably good. But one thing I really hate is the way they do the buttons. Having the home button appear on the main part of the display is really annoying. I much prefer the Samsung approach of having a hardware button for home and touch-screen buttons outside the viewable area for settings and back. Also the stylus on the Note devices is convenient on occasion.

The Note 3 has a fake-leather back. The concept of making fake leather is tacky, I believe that it’s much better to make honest plastic that doesn’t pretend to be something that it isn’t. However the texture of the back improves the grip. Also the fake stitches around the edge help with the grip too. It’s tacky but utilitarian.

The Note 3 is slightly smaller and lighter than the Note 2. This is a good technical achievement, but I’d rather they just gave it a bigger battery.

Update USB 3

One thing I initially forgot to mention is that the Note 3 has USB 3. This means that it has a larger socket which is less convenient when you try and plug it in at night. USB 3 seems unlikely to provide any benefit for me as I’ve never had any of my other phones transfer data at rates more than about 5MB/s. If the Note 3 happens to have storage that can handle speeds greater than the 32MB/s a typical USB 2 storage device can handle then I’m still not going to gain much benefit. USB 2 speeds would allow me to transfer the entire contents of a Note 3 in less than 20 minutes (if I needed to copy the entire storage contents). I can’t imagine myself having a real-world benefit from that.

The larger socket means more fumbling when charging my phone at night and it also means that the Note 3 cable can’t be used in any other phone I own. In a year or two my wife will have a phone with USB 3 support and that cable can be used for charging 2 phones. But at the moment the USB 3 cable isn’t useful as I don’t need to have a phone charger that can only charge one phone.

Conclusion

The Note 3 basically does everything I expected of it. It’s just like the Note 2 but a bit faster and with more storage. I’m happy with it.

Cheap 3G Data in Australia

September 24, 2014 | etbe

The Request

I was asked for advice about cheap 3G data plans. One of the people who asked me has a friend with no home Internet access, the friend wants access but doesn’t want to pay too much. I don’t know whether the person in question can’t use ADSL/Cable (maybe they are about to move house) or whether they just don’t want to pay for it.

3G data in urban areas in Australia is fast enough for most Internet use. But it’s not good for online games or VOIP. It’s also not very useful for Youtube and other online video. There is a variety of 3G speed testing apps for Android phones and there are presumably similar apps for the iPhone. Before signing up for 3G at home it’s probably best to get a friend who’s on the network in question to test Internet speed at your house, it would be annoying to sign up for an annual contract and then discover that your home is in a 3G dead spot.

Cheapest Offers

The best offer at the moment for moderate data use seems to be Amaysim with 10G for $99.90 and an expiry time of 365 days [1]. 10G in a year isn’t a lot, but it’s pre-paid so the user can buy another 10G of data whenever they want. At the moment $10 for 1G of data in a month and $20 for 2G of data in a month seem to be common offerings for 3G data in Australia. If you use exactly 1G per month then Amaysim isn’t any better than a number of other telcos, but if your usage varies (as it does with most people) then spreading the data use over several months offers significant savings without the need to save big downloads for the last day of the month.

For more serious Internet use Virgin has pre-paid offerings of 6G for $30 and 12G for $40 which has to be used in a month [2]. Anyone who uses an average of more than 3G per month will get better value from the Virgin offers.

If anyone knows of cheaper options than Amaysim and Virgin then please let me know.

Better Coverage

Both Amaysim and Virgin use the Optus network which covers urban areas quite well. I used Virgin a few years ago (and presume that it has only improved since then) and my wife uses Amaysim now. I haven’t had any great problems with either telco. If you need better coverage than the Optus network provides then Telstra is the only option. Telstra have a number of prepaid offers, the most interesting is $100 for 10G of data that expires in 90 days [3].

That Telstra offer is the same price as the Amaysim offer and only slightly more expensive than Virgin if you average 3.3G per month. It’s a really good deal if you average 3.3G per month as you can expect it to be faster and have better coverage.

Which One to Choose?

I think that the best option for someone who is initially connecting their home via 3g is to start with Amaysim. Amaysim is the cheapest for small usage and they have an Amaysim Android app and web page for tracking usage. After using a few gig of data on Amaysim it should be possible to determine which plan is going to be most economical in the long term.

Connecting to the Internet

To get the best speed you need a 4G AKA LTE connection. But given that 3G speed is great enough to use expensive amounts of data it doesn’t seem necessary to me. I’ve done a lot of work over the Internet with 3G from Virgin, Kogan, Aldi, and Telechoice and haven’t felt a need to pay for anything faster.

I think that the best thing to do is to use an old phone running Android 2.3 or iOS 4.3 as a Wifi access point. The cost of a dedicated 3G Wifi AP is enough to significantly change the economics of such Internet access and most people have access to old smart phones.

Phone Car Accessories

June 19, 2014 | etbe

Tree Frog Dashboard Mat

I’ve been given some more MobileZap products to review. The first is the Tree Frog anti-slip dashboard mat [1]. This is designed to allow a phone to stick to an angled surface of the inside of the car without slipping. The pictures on the web site show a phone stuck to a curved angular surface of a car dash. To test this I stuck my phone to my fridge, the flat metal surface of the fridge and the almost flat plastic surface of the gel case of my phone are pretty much ideal surfaces for the sticky mat to adhere to. But even so keeping my phone stuck to a vertical surface is impressive. This mat is cheap enough that it could be used for many other tasks than securing a phone in a car, for example it could be used to stick a phone to the wall of your office. It’s apparently washable and can be expected to keep gripping things if washed regularly.

One thing that could be improved in the mat would be to have some holes in it. When I detached my phone from the fridge some large air bubbles developed between the mat and the fridge, this would be a problem if I wanted to regularly stick my phone to a flat surface such as an office wall.

When in my car it didn’t work nearly as well. The pattern on the surface of the car dash which is designed to avoid glare when driving is difficult to stick to, it’s a bit like trying to attach sticky-tape to unpainted wood for similar reasons. A phone will still remain in place on a 30 degree angle from the horizontal (which is significant) but the mat grips much more tightly to the phone than the dash, which is a little inconvenient as the mat stays attached to the phone when you remove it from the dash.

Sorry for the boring picture, it’s black and flat so there’s not much scope for making it interesting.

3.1A USB Car Charger

Above is a picture of a 3.1A USB car charger and a AA battery charger. The car charger isn’t particularly exciting, but providing 3.1A through two USB sockets is noteworthy – it can charge one device at 2.1A (the maximum any device draws) or two devices for a total of up to 3.1A [2] (with protection against over-current). Previously in my car I used the 2.1A charger that shipped with my Galaxy Note 2 and an inverter to provide 240VAC as the devices I had to charge a phone from a car socket didn’t provide enough current. This new device uses less space and also allows charging two phones at once. One problem with this device was finding USB cables that could handle the current, for benchmarking I used a phone that was running Ingress and acting as a Wifi access point. I discovered that the cables that Samsung ships with their recent devices (Galaxy Note 2 and Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet) seem to work best and support charging my Galaxy Note 2 or my wife’s Nexus 5 while playing Ingress and running as a Wifi AP. Most of the other cables that I have in my collection won’t even allow a phone to remain at the same charge level while playing Ingress.

AA Emergency Phone Charger

The AA phone charger is best suited for emergency use only, it takes one AA battery and has limited current capacity [3]. A NiMh rechargeable battery has a nominal Voltage of 1.2V, to provide 5V to charge a phone the Voltage has to be boosted by a factor of 4.16 which would reduce the current by a factor of 4.16 if the charger was 100% efficient. As 100% efficiency is impossible the current would be reduced even more. It seems unlikely that a AA battery would be able to sustain a current of 2A so the supply from that charger would be less than 500mA – IE less than the least capable PC USB port or mains powered phone charger. A test with a Nexus 5 showed the phone charge level decreasing while being very lightly used (mostly just checking whether the charge level was increasing) when a NiMH battery was connected. A test with an alkaline battery and the same Nexus 5 showed the phone charge level increasing when lightly used – but it probably wouldn’t do so while playing Ingress.

It seems that a single NiMH AA battery can only be used for charging a phone in a real emergency situation (IE an “act of god” type disaster not a need to level up in Ingress). If mains power was out then you could charge a phone while it’s turned off (AFAIK all Android phones support this) and then use it once it’s charged. This charger supports a wide range of phones (including LG phones from 5+ years ago and Nokia from ~10 years ago) so it could be good for charging an old phone in an emergency. Older phones need less power to charge and generally last longer between charges.

With an alkaline battery the charger works a lot better, but it’s still for emergency use as I generally only use rechargeable batteries. This is a device I might put in the bottom of my case when travelling, not a device that I’ll use regularly. I don’t think that this is a deficiency in the product, it’s just a limit of what can be done with the power requirements of modern phones and the capabilities of AA batteries. If you want a battery to use while playing Ingress you definitely need something a lot larger.

This charger is good for emergencies but not suitable for my main use (charging phones while playing Ingress) so I’ll give it to my parents, they do a lot of hiking and camping and my father often goes fishing. Taking a few AA batteries to charge a phone would be much more convenient for such use than taking one of the larger batteries I use for Ingress. Also as the charger is relatively cheap there’s less potential financial loss if you drop it in sea-water.

20800mAh Battery

Above is a picture of a 20800mAh battery pack that MobileZap sent me [4]. I haven’t yet discovered what it’s capacity is, during the recent Interitus anomaly it kept my Galaxy Note 2 and my wife’s Nexus 5 adequately charged for 5 hours of intensive Ingress playing (we alternated between phones). Without an external battery it would be unusual for either of those phones to last for 2 hours.

The battery has two ports labeled 1A and 2.1A which implies that it can supply a total of 3.1A. I am a little dubious of that implication. After the Interitus anomaly my wife and I had dinner with some friends and I let a friend charge her Samsung Galaxy S5 on the battery at the same time as my Note 2 (which claimed to be 2% charged). When I connected my friend’s phone my phone instantly shut itself down due to lack of charge, so I presume that the supply on the 2.1A port is reduced when a demanding device is connected to the 1A port.

The next day my wife and I went to the city again to play Ingress and attend a protest against some of the awful things that the Abbott government is doing. As an experiment I didn’t charge this battery to see how it would go for two days of use charging two phones. Again there was no problem and it still claimed to be half charged when we got home.

So far the only problem I’ve found with this battery is that it never reports being fully charged, not even if I leave it on charge for days. That doesn’t seem to be a great problem to me, if I disconnect it before it’s fully charged then that won’t hurt the battery life (unlike NiCd batteries that have to be fully charged every time) and even if it’s not fully charged it will still charge phones for a long time.

The battery is about 19cm long. I have jeans with unusually large pockets to fit large phones [5] so I can fit this battery in my pocket while a USB cable is connected to charge my phone. I also have a new winter jacket from Scottwear which has pockets that can fit the battery (and lots of other things). Anyone who doesn’t have such clothing should plan to use a backpack, handbag, or some other bag – this type of battery won’t fit in the pockets in most clothing.

MobileZap also has some other interesting Nexus 5 accessories [6].

Comparing Telcos Again

April 1, 2014 | etbe

Late last year I compared the prices of mobile providers after Aldi started getting greedy [1]. Now Aldi have dramatically changed their offerings [2] so at least some of the phones I manage have to be switched to another provider.

There are three types of use that are of interest to me. One is for significant use, that means hours of calls per month, lots of SMS, and at least 2G of data transfer. Another is for very light use, maybe a few minutes of calls per month where the aim is to have the lowest annual price for an almost unused phone. The third is somewhere in between – and being able to easily switch between plans for moderate and significant use is a major benefit.

Firstly please note that I have no plans to try and compare all telcos, I’ll only compare ones that seem to have good offers. Ones with excessive penalty clauses or other potential traps are excluded.

Sensible Plans

The following table has the minimum costs for plans where the amount paid counts as credit for calls and data, this makes it easy to compare those plans.

Plan	Cost per min or SMS	Data	Minimum cost
AmaySIM As You Go [3]	$0.12	$0.05/meg, $19.90 for 2.5G in 30 days, $99.90 for 10G in 365days	$10 per 90 days
AmaySIM Flexi [4]	$0.09	500M included, free calls to other AmaySIM users, $19.90 for 2.5G in 30 days, $99.90 for 10G in 365days	$19.90 per 30 days
Aldi pre-paid [5]	$0.12	$0.05/meg, $30 for 3G in 30 days	$15 per 365 days

Amaysim has a $39.90 “Unlimited” plan which doesn’t have any specific limits on the number of calls and SMS (unlike Aldi “Unlimited”) [6], that plan also offers 4G of data per month. The only down-side is that changing between plans is difficult enough to discourage people from doing so, but if you use your phone a lot every month then this would be OK. AmaySIM uses the Optus network.

Lebara has a $29.90 “National Unlimited” plan that offers unlimited calls and SMS and 2G of data [7]. The Lebara web site doesn’t seem to include details such as how long pre-paid credit lasts, the lack of such detail doesn’t give me confidence in their service. Lebara uses the Vodafone network which used to have significant problems, hopefully they fixed it. My lack of confidence in the Vodafone network and in Lebara’s operations makes me inclined to avoid them.

Obscure Plans

Telechoice has a $28 per month “i28” plan that offers unlimited SMS, $650 of calls (which can be international) at a rate of over $1 per minute, unlimited SMS, unlimited calls to other Telechoice customers, and 2G of data [8]. According to the Whirlpool forum they use the Telstra network although the TeleChoice web site doesn’t state this (one of many failings of a horrible site).

The TeleChoice Global Liberty Starter plan costs $20 per month and includes unlimited calls to other TeleChoice customers, unlimited SMS, $500 of calls at a rate of over $1 per minute, and 1G of data [9].

Which One to Choose

For my relatives who only rarely use their phones the best options are the AmaySIM “As You Go” [3] plan which costs $40 per 360 days and the Aldi prepaid which costs $15 per year. Those relatives are already on Aldi and it seems that the best option for them is to keep using it.

My wife typically uses slightly less than 1G of data per month and makes about 25 minutes of calls and SMS. For her use the best option is the AmaySIM “As You Go” [3] plan which will cost her about $4 in calls per month and $99.90 for 10G of data which will last 10 months. That will average out to about $13 per month. It could end up being a bit less because the 10G of data that can be used in a year gives an incentive to reduce data use while previously with Aldi she had no reason to use less than 2G of data per month. Her average cost will be $11.30 per month if she can make 10G of data last a year. The TeleChoice “Global Liberty Starter” [9] plan is also appealing, but it is a little more expensive at $20 per month, it would be good value for someone who averages more than 83 minutes per month and also uses almost 1G of data.

Some of my relatives use significantly less than 1G of data per month. For someone who uses less than 166MB of billable data per month then the Aldi pre-paid rate of $0.05 per meg [5] is the best, but with a modern phone that does so many things in the background and a plan that rounds up data use it seems almost impossible to be billed for less than 300MB/month. Even when you tell the phone not to use any mobile data some phones still do, on a Nexus 4 and a Nexus 5 I’ve found that the only way to prevent being billed for 3G data transfer is to delete the APN from the phone’s configuration. So it seems that the AmaySIM “As You Go” [3] plan with a 10G annual data pack is the best option.

One of my relatives needs less than 1G of data per month and not many calls, but needs to be on the Telstra network because their holiday home is out of range of Optus. For them the TeleChoice Global Liberty Starter [9] plan seems best.

I have been averaging a bit less than 2G of data transfer per month. If I use the AmaySIM “As You Go” [3] plan with the 10G data packs then I would probably average about $18 worth of data per month. If I could keep my average number of phone calls below $10 (83 minutes) then that would be the cheapest option. However I sometimes spend longer than that on the phone (one client with a difficult problem can involve an hour on the phone). So the TeleChoice i28 plan looks like the best option for me, it gives $650 of calls at a rate of $0.97 per minute + $0.40 connection (that’s $58.60 for a hour long call – I can do 11 of those calls in a month) and 2G of data. The Telstra coverage is an advantage for TeleChoice, I can run my phone as a Wifi access point so my wife can use the Internet when we are out of Optus range.

Please let me know if there are any good Australian telcos you think I’ve missed or if there are any problems with the above telcos that I’m not aware of.

Nexus5 Armourdillo Hybrid Case

March 25, 2014 | etbe

I’ve just been given an Armourdillo Hybrid case for the Nexus 5 [1] to review. The above pictures show the back of the case, the front of the case, the stand, and the front of the case with the screen blank. When I first photographed the case the camera focused on a reflection of the window, I include that picture for amusement and to demonstrate how reflective the phone screen is.

This case is very hard, the green plastic is the soft inner layer which is still harder than the plastic in a typical “gel case”. The black part is polycarbonate which is very hard and also a little slippery. The case is designed with lots of bumps for grip (a little like the sole of a running shoe) so it’s not likely to slip out of your hand. But the polycarbonate slides easily on plastic surfaces such as the dash of a car. It’s fortunate that modern cars have lots of “cup holders” that can be used for holding a phone.

I haven’t dropped the phone since getting the new case, but I expect that the combination of a hard outer shell and a slightly softer inner shell (to cushion the impact) will protect it well. All the edges of the case extend above the screen so dropping the phone face down on a hard flat surface shouldn’t cause any damage.

The black part has a stand for propping the phone on it’s side to watch a movie. The stand is very solid and is in the ideal position for use on soft surfaces such as a doona or pillow for watching TV in bed.

Appearance

This case is mostly designed to protect the phone and the bumps that are used for grip detract from the appearance IMHO. I think that the Ringke Fusion case for my Nexus 4 [2] looks much better, it’s a trade-off between appearance and functionality.

My main criteria for this case were good protection (better than a gel case) and small size (not one of the heavy waterproof cases). It was a bonus to get a green case for the Enlightened team in Ingress. NB Armourdillo also offers a blue case for the Resistance team in Ingress as well as other colors.

MobileZap also have a number of other cases for the Nexus 5 [3].