James and Stefan usually get together every Thursday morning to talk about the week’s news. This morning, however, they spent most of their time discussing their new devices. James recently acquired, with his own money, a Sony Xperia Z2, while Stefan was sent a Samsung Galaxy S5 to review. Spoiler: James is happy and Stefan likes to swear.
The two also shared their thoughts the One Plus One Times Three Divided By Five, Xiaomi buying Mi.com, where’s the best place to backup your photos (James loves Flickr), and whether or not it’s worth paying a premium to have 4G LTE.
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The Voicemail 
For starters, I’d like to start a petition to have Stefan imitate The Count a minimum of once per episode, for every episode moving forward.
Second, I’m REALLY miffed to hear that James loves the Z2 so much because I wanted to wait for one but couldn’t and now I have a Nexus 5 (which I love) and am jealous.
Third, I was disappointed to hear you guys dismiss the Oneplus One and smaller manufacturers in general so quickly. Sure, they’re unlikely to overthrow Samsung or Apple in the near future, but I think they’re poised to be a powerful force, especially for the ‘upper class’ of tech nerds who don’t hesitate to buy a new phone outright every ~9-12 months. We’ve also seen most of these new entrants actively embrace the developer community, specifically within Android, moreso than the major manufacturers.
There are some REALLY cool things that you can do with your Android phone once you’ve rooted and began exploring the developer-driven world. For instance, the various slide-to-wake/tap-to-wake/etc features are available on most phones via custom kernel these days. I’ve also recently been exploring the Xposed framework, which enables some awesome stuff. For instance, on my Nexus 5, my status and navigation bars change colors to match whatever app I’m using at the moment. It’s quite a nice experience and with the exception of a couple of apps, did not require any configuration on my end – the community has already pre-built the color palettes for most apps. With Hugo heading up Xiaomi, I’d expect to see some really cool Android innovations/improvements on their phones in the near future, as well.
Meanwhile, Samsung, Motorola, LG, HTC are all comfortable loading us up with branded “replacements” (I use the term loosely) for stock Android apps/experiences and fighting each other in the megapixel war.
Hey Ricky, thanks for commenting [as ever!],
That’s valid critique in regards to both One Plus One and Jolla, I’ll pull Stefan up on it on the next episode and see if we can’t explore it further; either way it deserves more interrogation.
Rooted device stuff is interesting (and I’d love to see some screens of that colour palette/nav bar stuff you mention) but again, like the new hardware manufacturers mentioned above, only for the those that live in the realms of the uber geek.
We’ll see about that Count stuff 😉
PS. My Z2 is AMAZING.
James – RE: color status bar/navigation bar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IX-lnLdKmo (poor video, the latest version is MUCH smoother, but you get the idea).
Cute.
Not worth rooting for though.
Agreed. There are about a hundred things better worth rooting for. This is just a small nicety.
[…] you’re looking for my thoughts on the phone, by the way, check out Episode 095 of my mobile technology podcast, The Voicemail. That’s where my initial thoughts can be […]