Honestly, I’ve been using the Google Pixel 3 XL for almost a month now, and I’m really happy with this phone. Except that not long after I bought it, Google started dropping the price all over the place… Anyway, this phone is actually pretty expensive, so of course you still want a screen protector and a case after buying it. Since it’s the flagship this time, the accessory ecosystem is pretty complete, and I found suitable products quickly. Way better than stupid Sony. So let me keep it brief, hopefully it helps anyone thinking of buying one.

As someone who’s been out of the audiophile game for ages, I find the current enthusiast market kind of funny and kind of sad at the same time. Ever since I redirected the money I used to spend on headphones into buying music albums, I feel like my horizons have widened. “A ten-thousand-yuan IEM isn’t worth hearing ten thousand albums,” or something like that. At least I’m not like some grade-schooler on Reddit, buying insanely expensive IEMs just to listen to a music library that hasn’t been updated in years, flipping back and forth through the same dumb test tracks. Or running high-end gear to listen to doujin music produced in some low-end studio. That’s just unscientific. High-end audio gear really does work, sure. But for most people it’s useless, and for most audiophiles it’s also not much use — unless you’re a die-hard classical fan and love other large-ensemble music so much you refuse to listen to anything that isn’t a SACD from a famous studio. Then yes, high-end gear does work. But for most people like me, who listen to pop, occasionally some small-ensemble stuff, and just want to feel the charm of a melody — as long as the headphones don’t have that “boom-tss boom-tss” low-brow tuning and aren’t distorting or off-balance, that’s about enough. Yes, about enough. How do you know that the ten-thousand-yuan suit-and-tie stack you bought wasn’t used to listen to songs made by someone using a garbage 5-yuan USB cable? With that money you’re better off just listening to more music. So I’ve been increasingly abandoning wired gear and trying Bluetooth. The biggest advantage of Bluetooth is convenience. The biggest disadvantage is, naturally, sound quality. But with APTX and LDAC gradually opening up, Bluetooth has more or less reached the “listenable” stage. So I bought the FiiO BTR3 Bluetooth DAC/amp, two and a half months ago… Why did it take me this long to write up my impressions? That’s a long story.

My daily driver already supports wireless charging, but my old backup phone, the OnePlus 5, still charges the old-fashioned way. In other words, it doesn’t support wireless charging, which just feels wrong. By chance I spotted this thing on eBay:

I decided to buy a Pinebook at least a year ago, back when all the Linux news sites started covering it. Most of them called it “the $99 Linux laptop,” and sure enough it really does cost $99. But there’s nothing especially novel about it, because the so-called Pinebook is just the Pine64 dev board that was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, shoved into a laptop shell. There are already plenty of similar products out there, mostly “Raspberry Pi laptops”—a Pi stuffed into a laptop case, or a 3D-printed shell with a battery and so on. Let’s look at the main specs of the Pinebook first. 11-inch or 14-inch 1366x768 screen (11-inch is IPS, 14-inch is TN) 2 GB RAM 16GB eMMC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MicroSD card reader USB port, headphone jack, HDMI output Nothing impressive there, and none of it is what got me interested in the Pinebook. The biggest selling point of the Pinebook—and its biggest appeal—isn’t performance. It’s that it looks good. Yes, compared to the whole flood of similar “Raspberry Pi laptops” on the market, the Pinebook is drop-dead gorgeous. Combined with the fact that it’s not expensive at all, I decided to buy one to play with. It’s cheap, and Pine64 claims to be a more advanced 64-bit ARM processor than the original Raspberry Pi (back when Pine64 was crowdfunding, the Pi was still on gen 1, if I remember right). At the very least it should make a decent toy. But I never expected that from deciding to buy it to actually holding it in my hands, it would take me a full year and more. Once the machine arrived I played with it for almost two weeks. There were pleasant surprises and disappointments. Picking up shells on the beach, sorting out my thoughts, let me sum up the sweet and the bitter for you.

A hot product a while back. It promised “small” “powerful” “multi-functional” all at once, and on top of that it actually looked good, so I bought one. Also, I’m a sucker for the ThinkPad red-and-black color scheme. Too tempting. Turns out I’d pre-ordered it ages ago, only to find out it was just a crowdfunding campaign. I don’t know why these idiots insist on crowdfunding everything. Call it a pre-order, slap a new name on it and call it crowdfunding — genuinely stupid. Anyway, I got the thing in early December, and the packaging was the familiar ThinkPad style.

They say the Huawei Mate 20 Pro can reverse-charge an iPhone, but honestly, if you’re reverse-charging from a phone, you might as well just use a battery. In fact, “wireless power banks” like this already exist. I bought a Nanfu one — old brand, trustworthy. Looks like an ordinary power bank from any angle, except it has this wireless charging section.

My previous phone was a Sony Xperia Z Premium. I used it for over a year, close to two years, and Sony recently said it would push out Google’s Android Pie OTA update to that phone too—every version except the Hong Kong one got it. But in the end I decided to replace it, with Google’s flagship phone released this year, the Google Pixel 3 XL. Plenty of people aren’t optimistic about Google’s new flagship—its specs are behind, it looks ugly, and it isn’t exactly cheap either. After using it for a while since it arrived, it really does have quite a few problems, but I’m still fairly satisfied, so I’ll briefly go over my first impressions.

Haven’t done an impulse buy in a while. This time it’s because I saw this thing was cheap enough: A 99-yuan Bluetooth earphone with aptX support and killer battery life. So I bought one to check it out — my laptop supports aptX now too, after all.

I have a Logitech T650 touchpad, but I bought it 4 years ago. Recently I dug it out on a whim. It still works fine, honestly — but that’s exactly when you get cocky and drop the thing…

I wanted a phone to play games on. Originally I wanted a tablet, but it turns out tablets aren’t really an option anymore — Google went and released the Pixel Slate, so a big-screen phone was the only choice left. What I wanted from a gaming phone: Enough performance Strong battery life A large screen Decent feel in the hand No touch dropouts or connection drops As cheap as possible Xiaomi phones all seem to have that tradition of the touchscreen failing when it gets hot, Meizu phones all have connection drop issues, the Smartisan Pro 2’s build quality is a joke and the screen even lets water in, and there are plenty of MediaTek phones, but their performance is absolute garbage. Then I saw 360 phones were on special on JD. Took a look — the 360 N7, originally discounted by one yuan to 999 yuan, and paying with Baitiao knocked another yuan off, two yuan off total, so I got it for 998 yuan.