Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

It's always nice to go back to some of my old phones. The Arty A3 was my first Android phone from the 'big screen era'. I thought it wasn't that old, but it actually is. I bought the phone in 2014. However, having researched it, I realised that it was the best phone for the money at the time, so I made a really good choice.

I really liked the phone because it was smooth enough and capable of doing everything I needed. It had enough RAM for its time. And it was really cheap.



It also comes with the highly commercial name 'Android KitKat'. Gigabite used to make phones under the brand name Gsmart, but I'm not sure if they still do. I'd say there was a really short period of one or two years when GSmart was a popular low-budget brand, but then it disappeared.





I also really like discovering the games I've forgotten about on my old phones. This time, I found Europoly (a Monopoly clone), which I remember really liking and playing a lot. I can also remember some strategies for winning, and my desire to win as many games in a row as possible. It's a really nice game!



The second one was really simple but extraordinary: the 'before or after' game, where you are given historical events and have to decide if each one came before or after the previous one.

It's a really simple concept, but it's really addictive! However, it can make you really angry when you miss your target by one on the twentieth try.



However, I also immediately remembered the problems I had with the phone towards the end of its life, and why I replaced it.

One of these is that the top silver stripe above the screen is just a thin piece of aluminium that is glued on and has started to come off.

The bigger problem was that the display would sometimes stop detecting touch for twenty minutes or more, which was really problematic when I needed to make a phone call. Sometimes the touchscreen would stop working completely and sometimes it would only recognise the first few seconds of each swipe, so I was still unable to unlock the screen.

However, I have been using the phone for two days and have not experienced any touchscreen problems yet. Maybe the almost ten years of rest has made the phone work better.