Point Element

It was a striking news. ZTE is indeed shutting down major operations due to US sanctions. We have a Nubia Z9 mini in house. So I'm thinking what effect could it have on this phone? Thankfully it's already served us about 2.5Yrs and with recent reset of stock firmware, it's going well as my sister conveyed. I have also given my sister a flip cover for decent protection. So it looks like the phone should last another year. I had doubts about the internal battery, but so far it's going decent. The health is around 80% which is not bad at all. But this is a good lesson in purchasing hardware. I guess I'm not buying any Huawei hardware anymore, since they are also named in a number of spying and data theft scandals. Thankfully with the vibrant phone ecosystem, that still leaves us a number of options like Samsung, LG, Sony etc. And then there are smaller players like OnePlus etc. I'm thinking what about Xiaomi? Has anybody found if they are spying on the customers? I...

I had Ubuntu 17.10 on my Office Laptop. And I managed to get couple of hours of free time on my hands. So decided to upgrade it. I had 2-3 DE's on it i.e Unity, Gnome, Mate etc. The upgrade went well. It downloaded ~2300 packages and took about 45 minutes to wrap up everything. Of course I had quite a few things installed. Then I rebooted and used it for 3-4 hours. I am pleased to tell that almost everything works fine. It has even retained Unity and it's working fine via Unity session. The Ubuntu session loads Unity themes Gnome. It's mouse movement is a bit wild, but it's smooth. Of course not as smooth as Unity but still good enough. Everything else is good. Congrats Canonical on another solid release!

1. ArsTechnica 2. The Verge 3. GSMArena 4. Fonearena 5. eSakal 6. Maharashtra Times 7. Distrowatch 8. Anandtech 9. LiveMint 10. Phoronix 11. Slashdot 12. Engadget 13. OMGUbuntu

There are so many great phones around at some great price-points right now. My current android phone Panasonic T44 is a totally budget affair. I got it for INR3200/- That's about $50. Thing is - it's quite enough for me right now. I can't game on it, nor it can do any heavy duty office work and because of it's limitations I just don't bother. The main issue is - because it's such a low end phone, I just can't think of using it for some things like taking photos when I'm out riding or use it for navigation(because it does not have inbuilt GPS). Anyway, the thing is with a better phone I could do all these things and more. I could game, could edit docs on the phone, basically do a lot more. And therein lies the problem. The mid-range phones don't do all these things well enough. And the phones that do all these things cost much more.  Plus there's the other issue of getting replacement batteries. With non-replaceable battery a phone is dead ...

Collected this from below links: in.pcmag.com/smartphones/64040/feature/11-tips-to-boost-your-android-phones-battery-life https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-tips-for-improving-android-battery-life/ https://www.androidpit.com/how-to-save-battery-life https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-get-better-battery-life-on-android/ https://phandroid.com/improve-battery-life/ Battery life of your phone is almost always a pressing issue. That's why these days phone batteries have reached 4-5000mAh from the measly 500-600mAh back in the days of Symbian phones. Android is a heavy, feature-rich OS, but it sure is not battery friendly. Android was quite crappy in battery department till v4. But from then Lollypop and Marshmallow brought great changes in reigning hungry apps and bringing down overall power consumption of the Software part of the equation. These changes, coupled with modern hardware with efficient modems, and big batteries means the battery problem is almost non-existent these day...