Rick's b.log - entry 2014/01/22

Specs getting silly

The reason this came about - I should add - is because when my contract time is up, my monthly payments remain the same even though the phone subsidy has reached the end of its time. Looking to get a replacement model... Let's just say the 'accepted advice' from several people (including an Orange rep!) was to break the current contract and take out a new one.
And the reason that everything is bundled is because it costs me €60/month. That's €15 less than doing it separately. And that's about 4-5× what the same sort of thing costs in the UK. Ho hum.

It is therefore with some measure of pleasure that I see that I will be elegible for a replacement phone at a 'good price' in 11 months. In this way, the contract can be renewed (not cancelled) and I get a better phone at a better price.

At the moment, a phone that looks good is the Sony Xperia SP. At a list price of €299,36 (.36? seriously?) on a 12 month contract (or €319,90 without contract), Orange claims that they can offer this to me for €149,90 at the end of the year. I'm not paying to much attention to the price, for a year is forever in the psychotic chaos that is the mobile phone market.
At any rate, it looks like quite a nice phone for the money.

But I wrote this blog entry to take exception to TechRadar's review summing up the Xperia SP as:

Heavy users will likely get frustrated with the moderate battery and mediocre processor. But if you want to save a bit of money and still own a smartphone that you can show off at parties or around the office, you could do a lot worse than picking up the Sony Xperia SP.

"Mediocre" in this case is a dual-core 1.7GHz processor hooked to an HD (as in 720P native (wheee!)) display. That's like way above the spec of my current Xperia U (1GHz dual core; just like the iPad Mini); that's much more than my previous Xperia Mini Pro (1GHz single core); and let's not even mention my first Android handset, the Motorola DEFY, which with its 800MHz OMAP36xx is outpaced by both the Beagle xM and the RaspberryPi!

Really... WTF? A dual-core ARM clocking 1.7GHz is "mediocre" these days?

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PhoneAddict, 15th February 2014, 22:11

Not sure what it's like over there, but here, on Orange (or EE as they're now known) I switched to a SIM-only plan once my contract was up. £17/month, unlimited calls to ALL UK landlines and mobiles, unlimited txt messages, 1GB of mobile data (including "tethering"). And if I want a new phone, I'll just buy one off eBay.

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