Just got a glimpse of the future, and it is phone shaped. I have been a bit late to the smartphone market. I have an old 2nd generation iPod Touch but it was a bit sluggish with apps so did not really go far down that route.
My cell phone contract came up for renewal and I needed to economise so ditched my 3 year old Nokia and expensive contract and bought the cheapest Android ICS phone I could find on a £10.50 "sim only" monthly tariff which has twice the "minutes" of my old contract, unlimited texts and 500MB data for 2/3 of the monthly cost of my old contract. The phone is a Sony Xperia Tipo which cost £80 + £10 for a 32GB microSD card bringing the total cost to around a 1/3 that of a new 32GB iPod Touch and only 2/3 of a 16GB Nano! In the face of the competition how Apple can justify those prices beats me. The screen of the Tipo is quite small but is very slick. Apps are noticeably quicker to respond than my old iPod and although a bit fiddly I am getting used to typing - landscape mode helps. But wow! how things have moved on... The phone side is so much more capable than the Nokia, with all my e-mail and texts in one place, all my contacts stored in the Google cloud (and backed up of course) and a shared calendar with my wife (life saver!). This gives me all the old PDA functions with knobs on - and automatically synced between phone and PC. On the apps side my requirement is for a mainly audio stuff so I have already installed Spotify, Squeeze Player, Squeeze Commander, official Squeezebox app, Last.fm, PodTrapper, BBC iPlayer and TrackID - not to mention converting about 70% of my music to 120kbps VBA MP3 and dropping it onto the SD card which only half fills it, leaving room for photos and video. I even have access to my full music collection on my NAS from anywhere with a mobile or wi-fi signal using a handy Synology app. Installed a few games to play while I listen to the music too. And of course there is the maps and GPS and I have added a compass app (which has come in handy already!). ..oh and there is a camera of course. The crunch bit for Logitech is that with the Squeezebox app and Squeeze Player I now have a free Squeezebox - and if I bought a bluetooth speaker it would not be much different from a SB Radio. I am beginning to understand now how Logitech might have felt it was not worth making any more SB hardware if you can effectively get it all for free on your phone. In fact I am surprised they even bothered with the UE Radio. The one thing this does not do, of course, is hi-fi quality reproduction and reliable multi-room synch. There is still a place for a SB Touch / Receiver type device - which is where, unfortunately, Sonos are now going to take over. Ho hum. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TheLastMan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16021 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=96877
_______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
