I finally had a little time to take another phone from the input queue and have some fun with it. It's a great 'dumbphone' and is perfect for playing old games. It's great that it comes with USB-C, even though it's from 2013.
The phone's specifications themselves are nothing special. The 240x320 display is very average for this type of phone and the sound quality is nothing special. But what I like is that I can play lots of games I remember from the old days, and I can fit many of them on the phone as it has 256 MB of internal storage. I guess I can fit all the games I can find on the internet for this resolution, which is awesome!
I will do my best to fit as many games as I can find and make it the ultimate gaming device. I'm really looking forward to playing Swen, Gravity Defied, Cars and Asphalt again – sweet memories!
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Well, i was quite optimistic while releasing the apps on AppStory. And now i am again disappointed. The apps i have released were released.. But noone mentioned that they have not been released in any country of European Union. And i am not able to publish them there until i would do some huge paperwork, scanning documents and contacting Apple to gain some status to be able to release the apps in EU.
I have already started the process last week, and still have no progress or at least information at all. So.. well done Apple.
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After more than half a year of intensive work, I have finally released a game for HryProDva on the App Store. The Xcode was very frustrating at times, and setting up App Store Connect was also nerve-wracking, as it was somewhat unintuitive. However, it was surprisingly intuitive and simple in other cases, so I can't say that either App Store or Google Play is easier to publish an app.
It is much simpler and more straightforward to fill in all the necessary forms and statements for releasing the app, as the process guides you through the initial setup and highlights any missing information.
However, the App Store's reviews are a billion times better. If they have a problem with your app, they tell you exactly what is wrong. They provide lots of details about the problem, so it's really easy to find a solution quickly.
I can still remember the crazy process of publishing one app on Google Play. By that time, I had already published quite a few apps there, but that one was hell. They rejected my app because of some issues with the privacy policy and user agreement declarations. This is a paragraph defined in terms with hundreds of ...
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A few days ago, a colleague gave me some mobile phones, one of which was a POCO M3. It's not an old phone and it's in perfect condition. When he gave it to me, it was like brand new. Even the factory sticker on the back of the phone was completely untouched. I decided to use it as a test device for app development.
I was even more surprised when I found out what would happen if I turned the phone off. But let's start from the beginning. First, I made my way through all the setup and welcome screens, which took quite a long time. I also downloaded and installed accumulated system updates, so the phone rebooted a few times. Everything seemed to be working fine. I turned the phone off to come back to it the next day. However, when I took it the next day and tried to turn it on, nothing happened. Even the consumption on charger was exactly 0mAh, I tried all the combinations to force a reset, but it had no effect.
So I did some research online and found out that this phone is quite famous for its tendency to ...
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Well, this will be a short one. This is one of the phones I've had in my "input queue" for a relatively long time. The problem is that even though this is a touch phone, it's just a dumb phone with some proprietary software.
Honestly, I still can't understand the purpose of these phones. They have closed firmware with very limited or non-existent possibilities for installing or customising anything except the wallpaper. I can understand classic phones with a phone keyboard that can only be used for calling, writing text messages and setting calendar events. But who is the target market for this kind of touch phone that can do the same thing? When you want a touch phone, you probably want a multipurpose phone. And when you want a basic phone, it's definitely more practical to have a standard phone keyboard. Does anyone know of any practical uses for these phones?
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This phone is from the era when Alcatel was trying to make a comeback. It's a phone from the era when Alcatel wanted to be reborn. Personally, I really liked the Onetouch Fire series, which attempted to bring Boot to Gecko to mobiles — a nice idea that I really liked. However, neither Firefox nor Android phones helped Alcatel gain a serious market share.
However, I also got today's phone as a present from my friend Tom. This phone was released in 2013 and came with Android 4.1. Based on my brief research, the reviews were quite good. It was a mid-range phone with a fairly good display and high-quality manufacturing, especially the back, which looks like brushed metal even though it is plastic.
The mismatch between my experience and the articles I read from 2013–14 is the system. The articles are about a very clean version of Android, where Alcatel made minimal changes compared to other manufacturers.
However, the first time I took this phone in my hands and turned it on, I could hardly believe that it ran on Android. The first thing I noticed was that it booted from power-off to a usable state in ...
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This phone was one of the many gifts I received from my friend Tom. I really like phones with QWERTY/Z keyboards as I can't write quickly enough on touchscreens. That's why I'm now using the Titan 2 as my primary phone.
The interesting thing is that, despite its premium appearance, this was actually a low-end phone. It came with the "dumb" S40 system, which had already been on the market for a couple of years. This means that the only apps you can install are J2ME, and there aren't many of those because of the very unusual display for 'dumb' phones.
Also, the lack of multitasking is a major drawback mentioned in many reviews. This would be a really useful feature for a phone designed for chatting. For example, being unable to minimise the IM just to read emails or check another IM is just frustrating.
There was also another rare problem. This phone had bent display corners, which became popular only a year or two ago, before everyone realised it was a even more stupid idea for touch phones.
The problem is that when the surface is bent, the corners display a lot of reflections, which don't look very ...
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Well, it was just supposed to be another test of free LLMs. I opened Claude AI and described how a simple, SimCity-like game should work. I gave him some exact instructions and let him code an Android app. After providing him with instructions, checks and feedback, I achieved a fully functioning proof of concept in a few days.
This is what it looks like now. It's really nice! This state was supposed to be the final one. However, I really enjoy the game and like how it looks, so I'm in a dilemma. Should I continue working on it alone, or just give up? It is actually on the limit of what the LLM can do, as it has become too complex and the code has grown too much. Now, even small adjustments kill the whole context, and it is almost impossible to make any progress.
So, what do you think? Should I finish it on my own and release it?
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I got this phone from Mr Logout. I didn't hesitate, as ZTE was similar to Xiaomi in its early days. It was a kind of Chinese "lovebrand" that offered cheap phones with fairly good hardware. But then it disappeared.
To be honest, it didn't disappear at all, but it doesn't make so many phones, and I haven't seen anyone with a ZTE phone in the last seven years.
So, here's the Blade C V807. It dates from 2013 and has a fairly average display for its time with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. It runs on Android 4.1 and has a dual-core Cortex A9 processor.
The advantage is that there is quite a lot of storage available to the user. A bit more than half of its built-in 4 GB. This was a very good amount, as many low-end phones had very little internal memory available, so it was very tricky to fit in the necessary apps. The 512 MB of RAM aren't really bad either.
The phone isn't amazing, but it's not bad either. The UI is quite smooth, even after all these years, and I could see myself using this phone as my daily ...
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Well, I really like Symbian phones. Even though most people hate them, I really enjoyed that era. I spent a lot of nights flashing custom systems and unbricking devices that I had bricked while flashing. It started with my Nokia 5230, the first phone I bought with my own money, and continued with many more devices.
But I suppose that this got out of hand. Thanks to a series of coincidences, I now have four almost identical Nokia 500 phones. I was writing an article when I had three of these, but as you can see, the collection is still growing.
The problem is that even though the phones are practically identical, I like the fact that they are completely different when you turn them on. They have different OS versions — some old, some new, and some modified by phone operators — and it's interesting to see the differences.
However... Is it worth keeping them all? No, it's not. But would I get rid of some? I don't think I'd be able to overcome my OCD and compulsive collecting to get rid of at least one.
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