I may not quite think of my mobile phone as part of my body, but it is roughly on the level of pants. I definitely don’t want to leave home without it.
I have continued my inquires into the latest crop of Android phones. As a Google person, this seems to be the natural segment for me. There are a couple applications that I would have liked that are available on the iPhone but not on Android phones, chief among these Questia, the online library. But for the near future at least, I will probably have plenty of reading without it. Â And unlike the pad / tablet segment, the price difference on mobile phones is distinctly in favor of Android.
The price issue came to my attention today again, as I read a glowing review of the new Sony-Ericson’s Xperia Neo. At close to 3/4 of the company’s new flagship phone, Xperia Arc, it was deemed just as good, although slightly less stylish to look at. In fact, for those using their phone to take photos or video, it may be better. I rarely take even still photos – not every month for sure – but shaving off the price a sum approximately 1/8 of my monthly rent is always welcome. Â There is no urgency, mind you, and I would probably not actually notice any difference in available money, but still, if the products are otherwise roughly equal…
And the Neo is indeed a thing that may cause geek arousal. Running Android 2.3, and with a 3.7″ display with… What? You don’t care? Well, that’s OK too, because I am probably not buying it.
While reading reviews on the Xperia Neo, I found mention of a Huawei Titan, alias Huawei U8800, alias Huawei IDEOS X5. It runs the previous version of Android, 2.2, and the camera is more like last year’s model (5 gazillion pixels instead of 8). But it is around 2/3 the price. Or in other words about half the price of Xperia Arc, Nexus S and I think one more that I have forgotten. Â That means I can buy this one now, and still have the money to buy whatever holds that niche next year, when Android is 3.x and pigs can fly. Or at least perhaps speech recognition actually works on cell phones.
I am cutting costs another place too. Well, too and too – it may be a stretch to say that buying a new mobile phone is cutting costs. But anyway, I have closed my account at the online game Age of Conan. Â It is a technically excellent game, and it is Norwegian, and it has taken some undeserved (in my opinion) flak for its lack of content during the first month or two. Â There is certainly a lot of content now. But it is simply too evil for me to enjoy. The way my life is pointing now, I have been finding the game less and less palatable. Â I have not played it in months, and before that there were some more months. So, bye bye Age of Conan!
Still keeping the 4 City of Heroes accounts though. ^_^ Even though only two of them are played with any regularity. We’ll see how things work out.
Huh. Apparently I should read things in chronological order instead of starting with the latest and moving backward. Then I would have known that the speech recognition doesn’t work on phones!
Well, it kind of works, if your dialect is suitable. Mine is not. It gets better over time though.
When we spoke to you, years ago by now, using skype we were all impressed by how little accent you had. Or, I suppose, by how intelligible your accent was to us Texans . . . which might not be a good thing! 🙂
Well, I was not impressed by the Texan accent! I really have a hard time with south state accent, but it is actually much worse in men than in women, for me.
Speech recognition, however, seems to prefer Americans over me. In particular, it has issues with my use of the word “a”. Unless I expand it to “ei” or some such, it is somewhat random whether it is interpreted as “a”, “the”, or simply ignored. At least it has stopped transcribing “native” as “naked”, so that’s something!
I quite like our accent. I’m readily understandable by non-Texans, but it has a richness and sub-vocabulary that I think is really colorful and suitable for expressing so many things so well!
I have to speak clearly, slowing my (generally quite fast) speech and separating words, it seems. And although it will send what it’s written to e-mail, twitter, facebook and other places, it does not send directly to text.
I am sure your accent works fine for Americans, but it is pretty far from the British English we learned in school. Australian English may be even worse though.