Rugged Register - Smartphone reviews after use

 I've been writing about a 'development trajectory' before, but never really explained what's meant by that.  Basically it's a way to describe tendencies which seems to be both how various brands (and sub-brands) compete among themselves, but also the 'ballpark' or 'playing field' on which new (or 'new') models are designed:  Imagine you should make a new, sellable phone today. You need to come up with something 'new', that's sellable, limit development costs, and yet still be able to do everything the consumer expects.  Smartphones are - for reasons unknown - thought to be 'cutting edge' technology. Constantly launching (and pipelining) new models feeds this narrative.  You'll probably end up with a version which is 'more of the same', cranking up numbers, not really toying too much with the general concept. That seems to be the case with most phone brands, anyhow, some of them aiming their phones as certain s...

Who'd thought Nokia would be back after being world leaders, then falling short, then having a really weird love affair with Microsoft?  Well. Here they are. At once bringing pedigree and soiling it at the same time.  After my love affair with the BV9900E  I came to the conclusion that buying a phone from someone well-estimated, well established, and well know was probably a good idea. Enter: Research among Sony, Cat, and eventually Nokia.  My choice fell on the Nokia, coming from a rather chunky design, realized that a 6,67'' screen couldn't be too bad. My! Was I wrong! I'll unfold that later, but here's what I got from a 2nd hand Nokia XR20: Wow. It's a cool, completed phone. The materials are really, really nice, it has a rugged feel to it, and the handling (software) is effortless. The two cameras puts in a good shift, and I couldn't ask for more.  But WHY ON THE EARTH, MARS, AND EVERY OTHER INHABITABLE PLANET have they made it so MASSIVE? The answer...

Off the usual beaten track we'll find the smaller, Chinese brands.  In an effort to try to 'beat the market' by not paying through the nose, I decided to try Blackview BV9900E on for size. Size was perhaps an issue, but the software became the reason why I eventually concluded that living with this phone was too much of a hazzle. Now. Blackview. They sure know what they're doing: Making phones at a low cost, but with really good specs. Probably taking a leaf out of Cat's or even Ulefone's book, they are very reasonably priced - and certainly can compare with the specs.  Now, BV9900E boasts four cameras, ruggedness, and otherwise very fine specs - bar being 'limited' by only running Android 10. The Android version is certainly watered down, but - kind of - works. Or indicates that it could work. If there was a proper support.  All fear of the Chinese filling the phone with all sorts of data mining software got replaced with a feeling that though very comp...

As a stand-up comedian once said: It's not like Samsung is a small company, formed by Sam and Sung. Back in the day with keypad phones, Samsung was minor. Now, they are high-end Android front runners and e.g. screens in other devices, including iPhone, are typically Samsung.  Samsung seems to have had a very clear business strategy, having high- mid- and entry level phones on the market.  Acknowledging various needs, Samsung also provided rugged phones which - when not all phones were (at least somewhat) waterproof, was certainly a thing.  The rugged phones could be divided into to types: Active - which were flagship phones from the high end S-series, in a rugged frame Xcover - in as such phones in their own right, though often based on a 'sister' phone i the mid-range. Target groups I have already mentioned the segmentation here: A-series were cheaper, S-series high end, and other models would somehow fit somewhere in all that. E.g. Xcover 4 is based on J5, as far as I...

Take your mind back to the start of the century. Nokia were the uncrowned kings of phones, only realistically to be usurbed by Ericsson. Scandinavia was the bomb in terms of mobile phones. But what about Motorola? Well, to be fair: They were first to the consumer market, but lost first and second (and probably even more) places to Scandinavs.  This, too, was prior to the term 'smart phone', but where the rugged phone approach was launched.  Smart phones was initially defined by 3G support, color screen, a camera and some measure of connectivity. The Nokia 5140 only worked on GSM networks, but was a rugged update of the 5100 which again was designed to be as small as possible: These were the times, where screen size was a no-issue (as they should roughly only contain a few lines of text as well as the Snake game), all phones would feature user-removable batteries, and chargers were brand or even model specific.  The first rugged thing (I owned), Nokia 5210 Picture from old...