Apple, the iPhone, its flaws and how they have made phones better.

It is a number of weeks since the 'chaos' of the iPhone 6 and 6's release and the bending issue. And the hair pulling issue. And the update issue to name a few..........

This got me thinking, have any of the iPhones arrived without some kind of issue?

The simple answer is no, not really Apple have not had a clean launch.

The first gen iPhone was released without the ability to connect to 3G, or send MMS, or the ability to copy and paste, However these were mere omissions which were quickly fixed with an update.

The 3G was blighted with the itunes servers going down meaning that people who had waited days in some cases outside of stores left that store with a phone they couldn't use because it couldn't be activated until the servers were back up 12 hours later.

The 3GS overheated and discoloured the plastic body when 'heavily used' (apples words) in hot environments. 3 of my mates had this issue, we live in Britain.

The 4 and 4s were plagued with signal dropping issues and siri not understanding many accents.

Number 5? (which was actually the 6th iphone model.....) Two words, Apple Maps........

 The iphone 5s was not produced in large enough numbers to satisfy initial demand. Oh and the fingerprint scanner needed a software update to work straight out of the box......

These are just a few of the issues that have been reported by iPhone users over the years and to add to that tally of faults and issues now it is being reported that the iPhone6 rear plastic strips are being dyed by peoples clothing making the phone look old and tatty.

Top all of this off with the fact that the devices are blinking expensive to begin with, that they are frighteningly fragile, have no external storage, a non removable battery and then when you upgrade to the new model your existing accessories are not always supported by the new devices and that when you look at the specification of the product you buy it is behind the times in regard to RAM and processor technology, connection speeds etc etc and I just can't understand how they still have such a big market share.

The celebrity factor plays a huge part in this as it has become aspirational to own an iPhone as a status symbol and naturally those who have invested a lot in itunes and apps are tied in to the brand but those newcomers need to wake up and realise that the new state of the art iPhone6 is not only out of date already but is also massively outgunned not only in spec but also in price by the likes of Googles Nexus range not to mention The Oppo One plus one which is half the price and twice the spec!

Dont get me wrong, when I owned an ipod touch 2nd gen it was the best mp3 player I have ever owned, The iphone 3gs was the best phone I had owned up to that point but when I went to get an upgrade to the 4s I saw the spec and the price, compared that with the spec and price of an unknown to me at that point Huawei Ascend G300 and made the leap to Android.

Was I disappointed???? No not even slightly.

Since then I have had a couple of HTC's, an Asus or two (including the 7inch fonepad phablet) and am on my second Huawei, An Ascend G510 which I have customised with Cyanogenmod. Would I go back to owning an iPhone now? Nope. Never.

I dont like the fact you have to use itunes to sync music, I don't like the fact that my £100 portable speaker dock became unsupported after iOS 6 and is now completely incompatible because apple changed the connector. I'm sure there are a few other people just as miffed about that one........

In summary Apple created a truly magnificent device that captured the public's eye with its fancy advertising and aspirational appeal but in truth it is a flawed, fragile, restricted trinket that makes a lot of people feel important and popular. For which I thank them. Without all the flaws and issues and aspirational appeal we wouldn't have the Android devices we have today. So thank you Apple for making overpriced flawed phones. We android fans appreciate it.

Have you experienced any issues with an Android device like these? Let us know in the comments.

Watching. Windows

A couple of years ago I swapped all my IOS and Windows tech for Android. I went full bore into the android world and loved it. Apart from one or two little things.

1. Keyboards: I mean a physical tap tap keyboard, I experimented with various docs and cases and even has an Asus Transformer for a while but the actual physical keyboard from a Windows machine was just something I couldn't cope without.

2. Mobile Browsing: I have a 10 inch tablet,I am at home so why must I only view a mobile version of this site? I am on a 10.1inch netbook now and this handles full sites and its only a GB of ram and a 1.66GHz atom processor.

3. Non expandable memory: Just stupid. Yes I know all about Cloud storage. And yes I know Apple don't do expandable either.

I could go on but I wont bore you with the full list. Android has come on leaps and bounds but I still feel that there is still something missing. One of the things I don't like for sure is product life, I am on a rather old netbook bought for £40.00 secondhand. This thing is 6 year old and runs like a charm, I have had android phones last less than 6 months.....

Truth be told I missed having a windows machine, Yes android can do everything that windows can do but I couldn't get it to work for me. Yes I can root and ROM my android devices and I have played around with android tv boxes as well as phablets but I just missed having Windows.

The revelation that I needed Windows back in my life is spreading and I'm thinking about Lumia 720 as next phone...I stream everything through my 360 as it is.....  However I think +New to neXus  might can me completely then.....

Ive been looking out for windows......

Over 3 years ago I sold my Windows powered netbook and took up Android full time. My Asus Transformer eventually gave up the ghost and there was a succession of devices which followed which just got smaller and smaller down to my present 5" Huawei phone. None of the android devices however had a full physical keyboard and despite many aftermarket attempts I was not comfortable typing for long periods of time so I just stopped writing......

But I was in town yesterday and a little Acer caught my eye in a secondhand shop. 'Untested' aspire one netbook. Power adapter but wont boot apparently. Needless to say I bought it, near mint condition and amazing for its age, after a little faffing (new copy of windows) it not only boots but works like a champ and now I'm using the correct wireless driver the WiFi even works!

I know a lot of people have a downer on places like cash converters and CEX as they tend to give crap all for goods and there is a risk that it could be nicked or they extort the price you pay in order to make more money but meh. Its bargain city if you know what to look for. You just need to be brave.

I picked up this little untested gem for £30.00 and with a little knowledge picked up over the years Ive made a working computer. Ok so its only a 120gb HDD and a 1GB of ram but for £30.00 I couldn't say no!

Needless to say now I've got a physical keyboard back in front of me look out for some new posts both here and at +New to neXus on the android side of things. If anyone wants I can do a "how to on re installing windows" if you like? Or drop us a comment with a suggestion and please like and share!

Nilox Foolish 1080p Action Camera

Nilox may not be a name you are familiar with, I certainly had not heard about them until a rep popped one into my hand and said have a go. With GoPro being the dominant force in action cameras for so long I thought it only prudent to try the opposition!

The Nilox Foolish Cam

First impressions were nothing but all good! The box is slightly larger than that of a Go Pro but most likely that is due to the amount of items in the box.

In the box were,

1080p camera
Removable LCD display
2 x Waterproof enclosures {one for LCD one for without}
USB lead
AV lead,
Battery
Class 4 4GB micro SD card and adapter
2 stick on helmet mounts
A variety of other mounts and adapters
As well as instruction manuals.

The controls are much simpler than the GoPro, there are 2 capture buttons next to each other one for 8MP stills the other for 1080p recording. The on/off switch is just that and the LCD display is easy to read even while riding. The really good stuff came when I started to play, The LCD screen made it easy to line up shots as long as the camera was not on my head however with a couple of buttons the lazer sync was activated and I could see exactly where the cam was pointing.

Battery life depends on how much footage you watch back at the time but I got 2.5 hours of footage last Sunday and we watched over half an hour of that back straight away. {I crashed a few times.......}

Still shot from the Nilox Foolish camera

Here is a link to my Youtube Channel for a sample of footage from the cam in question. The only editing done on these clips are turning 90 degrees for a couple.

Downsides to the Nilox is that the helmet mounts rattle depending which way I put my camera on, i.e. if the clip comes from the back, no rattle, clip at front, rattle, and there is no side of helmet mount option in the box that allows you to mount the camera horizontal rather than vertically but seeing as it has a universal tripod mount on the cam and both waterproof cases have this as well this is irrelevant and just means a quick trip to ebay for any mount you want!

Overall the little cam has impressed me more than the GoPro ever did, Having now owned both I can honestly say I am converted. The Nilox is more usable and with the addition of the Lazersync and LCD you should never miss a shot.

So there it is, ease of use, simplicity, more bits in a box than GoPro can shake a stick at and a RRP here in Britain of £199.99. Need any other reasons???

July 3rd EDIT: I am currently uploading some low light footage from a ride last night with a couple of mates, the image quality is rather poorer than I expected but then again this camera does not have a built in light, Maybe an addition for future models?

Ubuntu 12.10 and me.....

Having a slightly old and cheap PC sitting in my front room running XP Pro I can turn it on and do what needs to be done very easily, but after a chat with a customer in my bike shop I decided to tale the plunge and drop Ubuntu onto my machine.

Dropping the OS on to  a USB was easy using the instructions on the Ubuntu site as was getting it to boot, and its a quick boot! the OS runs off a 4gb san disc cruzer blade usb stick,

First impressions are that it is a very alien environment, the 12.10 was chosen for no reason other than it was the one I had been talking about. I found the software confusing to navigate but once I had had a few days of playing I had my XBMC set up and had worked out where most things were. However, my external HDD won't mount and I can't seem to get the internal one to mount either, the issues continue with the screen turning off after 10 mins or so.

I have searched the net for the solutions and chatted with the Ubuntu community on Google+ but I do not understand the language used! I am not a techno noob but this is so far beyond me!

It has only been a couple of days so far and overall I am rather impressed I just need some kind of idiots guide to sort out the 2 issues I have. I will persist however its so nice to be windows free for the first time ever!

Things I can live without.

2 weeks ago my hoover broke. At first I was fuming as it was only 2 weeks old but through borrowing the neighbours hoover and the Vac Shop in Taunton, I made it through the 2 weeks and this evening Henry came home and sucked like a pro.

This made me think about the tech and gadgets I have in my house and how I would cope without them. First of all if my PC broke then I would fall back on the Raspberry Pi, in my previous post I talked about the best pi in town but due to my external HDD and the pi not talking to each other it sits in reserve. OK so the pi goes down and the PC is down, er, well then its onto the Xbox 360 for iPlayer and 4od but the Xbox and the HDD are not talking either so if that goes down as well then I'm watching everything on my TF101. So 4 solutions to that.......

But what are the chances of that happening? Well I thought I would give you an insight into my tech, from my previous post you should be familiar with the pi, the PC however was purchased from eBay for £49.99. What does that get you you might ask? Well it got me a pentium 4, XP PRO, 40gb of hard drive and 2 GB of ram. Why you might ask did I buy an ancient used PC with German bios? Am I a hipster? No I'm cheap! It works for me! XBMC plus chrome browser and that's all it needs, why XP? That is the only os my HDD will talk to!

The Xbox 360 was purchased in 2009, my amp is a £89.99 Cambridge audio bog standard with no remote teamed with Hyundai multi cav speakers again from eBay.

So its all old or cheap. I am now bracing for the critics views..... But it all works, perfectly. Even the £250 Toshiba led backlit LCD TV has never missed a beat.
I used to have an all singing all dancing LG TV and an iomega screenplay director HD and a Denon amp and HP PC and  this and that and the next thing! But the one thing I learnt very quickly is that just because its expensive and someone else thinks its the bomb well it might not be.

Next week I'll give you some more details on the Iomega screenplay director. That was expensive and awful.

How would I cope if some of my tech broke? Fine. Ish, adapt or die. Could I live without any of it? No.

Tor to the Rescue

A few weeks ago it was announced that certain ISP’s here in the good old UK were going to block certain file sharing sites, like they did with probably one of the most famous, pirate bay. I was shocked to see that one of my favorite torrent sites Kickass was going to be closed to me by my ISP. Today it happened, I tried to enter the site and bang, locked out.

This forced me to think of a way round or alternative, straight away I remembered a clever little program i’ve used in the past called Tor. Some of you may have heard of it before but for those who haven’t it is a secure browser that lets you browse the internet anonymously, basically  hiding you from your ISP. Its far too complicated to go into, but you can click HERE to find out more about Tor.

This program is great for occasions such as these so i tried it and it worked, allowing me to access the site again.

So for those who are interested it is very simple to install.

1. Head over to the Tor Website HERE
2. Download the program and install
3. Find the folder where the program installed and run the Tor browser
4. Thats it your done, go to the site and see if it works

Head over to thekugelblitz.com to read more from +Chris Monks