Another piece has arrived. It's the Xperia J, and the first thing that caught my attention was the shape of its back. It curves more than an iPhone worn in a back pocket.
Other than that, it's a completely average phone. I bought it because it's from the same era as when I bought my first Android phone, the low-end Xperia Tipo, and it also comes with similar preinstalled software.
The strong point is the excellent display, which is protected by Gorilla Glass and is impressive given the age of the device. Inside, there is a Qualcomm MSM7227A Snapdragon processor, which is not bad, and next to that is 512 MB of RAM. Storage is 4 GB, of which 2 GB is user-available. However, 1.2 GB of this is wasted on preinstalled bloatware that cannot be removed. So, users get between 500 and 700 MB, which is not quite enough.
As usual, I have installed some games, but not many of them can fit into this tiny storage space. So I guess this won't be one of the best phones in my collection, but it still reminds me ...
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My friend and I took our kids to a model railway exhibition in Hradec Krรกlovรฉ. As well as a lot of very interesting layouts and models, there was also a shop selling leftovers and items made by modellers.
After a long time, I finally bought a new addition to my collection. It's not in the best condition as the paint is damaged, but I couldn't leave it there for 50 CZK.
So a project for long winter evenings is here. I am just deciding now, if i would try to repair the paints and make it "as new", or if i would chose the oposite way, that i would mask the problems with the paint by modelling a damaged, but still in use, car-
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I have mentioned almost everywhere, that i am running out of USB drives. The events and fairs no longers offers free promo drives so often, and sometimes, some drives becomes dead.
With the introduction of cloud storage, the need for USB drives decreased and fewer people use them nowadays. So I have kindly asked some communities for USB drives, offering them the 'ecological benefit' of using them instead of throwing them away.
The first two drives arrived recently, one of which was this one.
It came with a loose and broken USB connector, so I had to wire it to the PCB wire by wire and then fix it to the board using the ground 'legs'. It works, which is fine, but what's funny is the storage: it's actually a MicroSD card soldered to the PCB, with a control microprocessor that gives access to it and shows it as a USB drive.
And I still have no idea why they did that. Especially why it is soldered so askew! The reason for using a card instead of SMD storage is driving me mad.
Based on practical tests, I do not understand this solution. The same storage ...
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When I read this name, I was immediately reminded of the Futurama series and its Thunder Cougar Falcon Bird, or the mobile photo watermarks with superlatives.
However, once turned on, the phone is relatively nice. What surprises me is that the LCD screen seems really smooth, even though it has a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels (207 ppi). It comes with a quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A53 processor and an Adreno 306 GPU, which is also not bad for a phone from 2014. My model runs Android 5.0 and has 8 GB of storage and 1 GB of RAM. Unfortunately, the storage is filled to half capacity with preinstalled and unremovable bloatware. The remaining nearly four gigabytes are ready for my old games though.
This time, I tried installing all the old games I used to play. The first one that came to my mind was this crane game, which is really obscure.
Half of your screen is covered with controls, which makes it really hard to make fast moves. It's a really nice game, though. The menu GUI is a bit simplified, but the in-game physics and ...
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I'm back to phones from the box I received. This phone is interesting for exactly zero reasons. It was released with Android 2.3, which has never been updated as it is manufactured by a Chinese company.
It comes from 2011, and has a 4.3 inches 217ppi LCD screen. And it is the only outstanding parameter. It is equipped with 512MB RAM, really poor camera, and 1400 mAh battery.
The storage available to users is really poor. Only 100 MB is available for preinstalled bloatware and small user-installed apps. This is absolutely terrible.
Why were those phones ever released? Shouldn't smartphones be able to install something useful? I cannot really imagine how someone would cope with these awful phones, especially in the age of social networks with enormous caching.
The even funnier thing is that you can't really take a photo or save any files to your phone until you insert an SD card. The phone does not allow you to save any files to the internal memory. So, you get error messages when trying to use any app that would access storage.
The only way to install ...
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As i am concentrated to games on 5310XM
As I am focusing on games for the 5310XM, I thought there wouldn't be an article today. However, yesterday at 8 pm, I received a notification that I had a package in a box. Because of my OCD, I had to collect it as soon as possible, so I got up early and collected the package on my way to work. It is full of really interesting stuff that I will talk about later. The only things I took out were the Galaxy A3 and a "smart" wristband.
As the app for the wristband is obscure and wouldn't work with the latest Android, I'd keep it to pair with an older phone for testing purposes. However, I don't need to do that right now. So I decided to experiment with the Galaxy a little.
The battery seemed to be dead; when I turned it on, it showed 33%, which fell to 15% in a few seconds. I turned it off immediately and left it to charge for a long time. Now it seems much better. The battery life isn't great, but I guess it would last one or two hours of gaming.
At first, I tinkered ...
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This is a very nice, small Nokia from 2007. It has a 2.1-inch display with 240 x 320 pixels and 16 million colours, which I really like. It has around 30 MB of internal memory, of which about 22 MB is available for user content. This is more than enough for tens of games. And yes, if you're 20 or under, this must sound really funny to you!
The camera and software equipment is nothing to write home about, except for the built-in Opera Mini browser.
More interesting is the dedicated sound chip, which offers great sound quality through headphones and makes it a worthy MP3 player.
The operating system is the smooth-running Series 40 Symbian. I am really enjoying the phone's small dimensions and its excellent display. As I really enjoy playing games on old phones, I will stick with this model for a while longer to play all the games I used to play as a child, but now with a higher resolution.
One of these is the Tornado game, in which you destroy the environment, grow your tornado and gain strength to destroy increasingly large items. It's really relaxing and also contains a campaign.
The second ...
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Honestly, I wanted to write about another Sony Ericsson today, which is more interesting, but I couldn't install anything on it and I need to do some more research. I'll write about it later.
So I took the C510 out of the drawer. It had been waiting there for a long time and I was able to install whatever I wanted via Bluetooth.
I thought the problem with Sony Ericsson keyboards was just the joystick, which always got damaged after some time on any phone. However, the C510 has a keypad instead of a joystick and is damaged in a similar way to phones with joysticks. It still barely works, but it's a bit tricky. Fortunately, this wouldn't matter for playing games, as they are usually played using the numeric keys. I have installed and tried many interesting games and the resolution is much better than on most of the other keyboard phones I have, so maybe I will spend some time playing them.
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Today, I took the Nokia out of the box of incoming phones. It's a Nokia 500 with Symbian Belle. It's nothing special or particularly interesting, but it still has my favourite OS.
It is in really good condition with no missing parts. It also comes from an age when it could be charged using either the standard Nokia 'needle' charger or a micro USB, which simplifies things a lot.
So I immediately did the jailbreak to get rid of all those stupid 'Cannot install, certificate verification failed' errors when installing any SIS/SISX. It went relatively well, with no problems. I chose and downloaded many interesting games that I wanted to install. I copied them to the mass memory and installed them all. It was a long process, but most of them installed without any problems. More than nine out of ten installed, which was quite a success.
However, when I tried to run them, things got worse. Almost every installed game malfunctioned. Some of them didn't even start. Others were stuck on a black screen. Others completely distorted the screen with random colours, shapes and fragments. Some displayed a runtime error. A few of them caused the phone to freeze and ...
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The next phone I received in the box was the HTC One Mini. It had a completely destroyed top cover and was unable to boot up. After connecting the charger, the phone started displaying a battery animation, but it was still unable to boot up.
I found out that the problem was caused by a damaged power button. I disassembled it down to the flex cable and was able to turn it on by manually connecting the wires.
The next step was to replace the button. At first, I considered soldering wires to the flex and then soldering a micro-button. However, this would look ugly and be very difficult to do. Then I had the idea of using the flex as it is and just finding the right membrane to make it click again. I disassembled lots of microbuttons to find the ideal membrane size, and finally found one that fit really well. I fixed it with rubber tape to keep it in place and tried it out. It worked really well!
The next step was to recreate the ...
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