P for... fone
I guess it's been 15 months now since the purchase of Android phone fever had hit me. Since then made a lot many purchases, so much that first my neighbour toko-fied me and then mom as well. But then... if you get "de-cent" phones around 5K, it really becomes damn tough to beat the temptations. Thankfully one friend reminded me to do something which I used to do regularly but left track of it in last 4/5 years. Will talk about Finance management thingy later on. Right now, it's about me and the phone thingy. A bit of feedback to start the topic.
1) The first android phone bought was Karbonn A1+: It was an okay phone to get started with. The phone's still functioning perfectly. You will only have trouble operating text replies on it if your fat thumb/fingers get used to large touch screen phones. In last 1 week of me using this phone, I used to erase 2 alphabets before successfully typing 1 alphabet. And this is me cribbing who used ASUS PDA 565 with 2.8" screen with onscreen keyboard without much fuss :P. In all, a good phone to start with 15 months back but definitely not worth purchasing in today's time. You will get much better deal in price that it still operates in market
2) The second android phone was Karbonn A25: This was the first phablet in house. 5" screen and everything looked okay till the time you start to install applications. Then the hell break lose. Then all other limitations also start coming in front. No 3G, no GPS despite it flaunting the fine Mediatek 6577 goodie. More about this phone and latest adventures with it. All I need to say is, this was the last Karbonn phone that ever entered my home. I am never ever buying karbonn again :)
3) The third android phone was Ambrane A55: This was the best purchase as it was barely .3" smaller than Karbonn A25; 2K cheaper than karbonna A25; 4GB internal storage compared to 114MB storage of Karbonn A25. So by all means, a better phone than Karbonn A25. I just feel sorry for the phone as Ambrane folks didn't do as much advertisement as their competitors. I would still recommend this phone to anyone who is satisfied with dual core goodie. But for those who want quadcore...
4) Go for spice Coolpad MI496 if it ever becomes available at 5.5K again! Leaving out front camera, it has almost everything. Definitely the best purchase till date.
5) Another option would be to buy ZTE Blade G2 at 4.6K. It too is quadcore goodie and is lovely piece except for just 512 MB RAM. Will talk about it later. Very very later :P
Coming back to main topic. Didi's Karbonn A25 touch sensor started misbehaving. So I switched her A25 with Coolpad goodie. For long time I am having this feeling that phone chipset are monolithic and not modular like PC stuff. That means the mass manufacturing of chipsets by Mediatek are supposed to be uniform to large extent. I don't see any reasons why Mediatek would take efforts of customization unless they see karbon, micromax or lava/xolo to be market leaders in India. For them, they might still be small players in Indian market. Indian crowd still seems to be tilting towards Samsung, Nokia etc. So if you are indian packaging company like Karbonn, Micromax, Spice, Xolo etc what would you do? You would still like to appear as differentiated player, sell different features at different rate. One simple way of appearing differentiated across same piece of bare hardware is to control features at software level. While going through articles and datasheets, it is claimed that mediatek chipset for MT6577 has GPS inbuilt but phones likes A25 and A55 don't flaunt it as probably the drivers are disabled within kernel loaded on the phone.
There were two ways of verifying it. One to dis-assemble the entire phone and see the bare hardware and figure out the variation/configuration. I did open up all the screws but could not pull out the plastic cover to see the PCB :(. Got nervous. Ended up plugging up everything back. There's another way, another attempt...
Am trying to put up images of other phones onto A25. Have had partial success using MTK Droid tool to install CWM and failure in install ZTE 970 image onto the A25. The experiment shall continue for this entire week before I finally gather courage to bare up the phone completely without fear of breaking any part...
1) The first android phone bought was Karbonn A1+: It was an okay phone to get started with. The phone's still functioning perfectly. You will only have trouble operating text replies on it if your fat thumb/fingers get used to large touch screen phones. In last 1 week of me using this phone, I used to erase 2 alphabets before successfully typing 1 alphabet. And this is me cribbing who used ASUS PDA 565 with 2.8" screen with onscreen keyboard without much fuss :P. In all, a good phone to start with 15 months back but definitely not worth purchasing in today's time. You will get much better deal in price that it still operates in market
2) The second android phone was Karbonn A25: This was the first phablet in house. 5" screen and everything looked okay till the time you start to install applications. Then the hell break lose. Then all other limitations also start coming in front. No 3G, no GPS despite it flaunting the fine Mediatek 6577 goodie. More about this phone and latest adventures with it. All I need to say is, this was the last Karbonn phone that ever entered my home. I am never ever buying karbonn again :)
3) The third android phone was Ambrane A55: This was the best purchase as it was barely .3" smaller than Karbonn A25; 2K cheaper than karbonna A25; 4GB internal storage compared to 114MB storage of Karbonn A25. So by all means, a better phone than Karbonn A25. I just feel sorry for the phone as Ambrane folks didn't do as much advertisement as their competitors. I would still recommend this phone to anyone who is satisfied with dual core goodie. But for those who want quadcore...
4) Go for spice Coolpad MI496 if it ever becomes available at 5.5K again! Leaving out front camera, it has almost everything. Definitely the best purchase till date.
5) Another option would be to buy ZTE Blade G2 at 4.6K. It too is quadcore goodie and is lovely piece except for just 512 MB RAM. Will talk about it later. Very very later :P
Coming back to main topic. Didi's Karbonn A25 touch sensor started misbehaving. So I switched her A25 with Coolpad goodie. For long time I am having this feeling that phone chipset are monolithic and not modular like PC stuff. That means the mass manufacturing of chipsets by Mediatek are supposed to be uniform to large extent. I don't see any reasons why Mediatek would take efforts of customization unless they see karbon, micromax or lava/xolo to be market leaders in India. For them, they might still be small players in Indian market. Indian crowd still seems to be tilting towards Samsung, Nokia etc. So if you are indian packaging company like Karbonn, Micromax, Spice, Xolo etc what would you do? You would still like to appear as differentiated player, sell different features at different rate. One simple way of appearing differentiated across same piece of bare hardware is to control features at software level. While going through articles and datasheets, it is claimed that mediatek chipset for MT6577 has GPS inbuilt but phones likes A25 and A55 don't flaunt it as probably the drivers are disabled within kernel loaded on the phone.
There were two ways of verifying it. One to dis-assemble the entire phone and see the bare hardware and figure out the variation/configuration. I did open up all the screws but could not pull out the plastic cover to see the PCB :(. Got nervous. Ended up plugging up everything back. There's another way, another attempt...
Am trying to put up images of other phones onto A25. Have had partial success using MTK Droid tool to install CWM and failure in install ZTE 970 image onto the A25. The experiment shall continue for this entire week before I finally gather courage to bare up the phone completely without fear of breaking any part...