I bought this for my parents. Before this, my mother was using a Sony Xperia Z1 I’d handed down to her, and my father was on a first-gen Meizu M1 Note. I bought the Redmi Note 3 mainly for three reasons: New 全网通 processor, supposedly very solid. Massive 4000 mAh battery, supposedly very solid. For people my parents’ age, MIUI is an explosively user-friendly system.

Things have been tight lately for reasons, so I’ll keep this short and to the point about the Nexus 5X.

Before this I was using a plain car mount. Nothing wrong with it, except it blocks the air vent. In summer that’s tolerable — the cold air blows on the device and cools it down. In winter it’s a problem: the phone is already warm, and blowing more hot air on it makes it completely useless. So I started looking for a replacement, and one day on eBay I found this…

After getting the Nexus 6 last year, some things satisfied me and some didn’t, so when the Nexus 6P launched this year I kept hesitating about whether to upgrade. The things I wasn’t happy with: The screen was too yellow. It’s an AMOLED panel, and supposedly not even a good Samsung one, which is why it took me forever to adjust after switching from a Sony Xperia Z1. Battery life was a bit of a mess. With the Moto 360 sipping power over Bluetooth, I barely got through a day, and sometimes had to top up around noon. No LED notification light. The Nexus 6 actually has one, but Android disables it by default, and even if you turn it on you apparently need a paid app to make it work. Ridiculous. The biggest thing making me hesitate was this: the Nexus 6P does fix those complaints, but not in a way that leaves you feeling reassured.

A long time ago I had no idea who Luo Yonghao was, yet plenty of my classmates were obsessed with him. They all thought he was amazing, so I watched his talks about idealism and startup history too, and figured yeah, the guy really is something. At least he isn’t the type who only cares about profit, and that alone is worth a lot. Then he decided to make phones and started boasting online every day. It annoyed me, but I could sort of see what he was up to. He just wanted marketing and eyeballs. He just picked a fairly low-brow way to get them. I wrote about this a long time ago. I was kind of itching to try the Smartisan T1, but I really hate physical buttons, so I never pulled the trigger. This time, with the Nut, I thought it over… figured worst case I could just replace my old Meizu M1 Note, so I went for it.

I bought the Nexus 6 the same way I bought the Nexus 9 last time — same channel, arrived at almost the same time too. There’s already plenty of info about this phone online, but I’ll still keep it brief.