ZTE Majesty ProPlus: a budget phone to avoid

Pro Plus specs: 4.5" TN display with hardware buttons, 2GB RAM, 10GB free storage, snapdragon 210, android 7.1. Pro (not plus): 1GB Ram and only 2GB of free storage.

This phone is super budget and they cut the one corner I cannot accept: it uses a TN display instead of IPS. That means the viewing angles are crap, and just the slightest wiggle of your hand results in significant color shifts and contrast reduction. Yuk. The resolution is actually high enough given the size, but with such ugly colors you won't care. And since it uses hardware navigation buttons you get to use the whole 4.5" for content. So that's something.

If not for the LCD it would be a decent ultra budget phone for $30. Although it only has a quad core 1.1ghz cpu (snapdragon 210), it does have 2GB of RAM. Thus it's certainly slow, but it is usable. The geekbench score is 403 single, 1058 multi. That's almost a perfect match for the much older Snapdragon 400, a 1.4ghz 4-core chip. So at least it's more efficient at being slow!

Youtube performance was fine if you can get beyond the crappy screen. The loudspeaker was loud (almost painful), and perhaps a hint of base at max volume, but also noticeably harsh. There was no problem with dropped frames.

Website performance was fine - slashdot took forever to load but once loaded was actually reasonably smooth and loading a single smaller article view was in comparison snappy. In comparison to itself, that is. Any mid-level phone would do better and don't even think about comparing it to a flagship.

The camera is crap, as you would expect. Even in good lighting it's dark. I'm not going to bother with an example photo. 

The phone has a removable plastic back made of a pleasantly textured and grippy rubber. In this one way it's actually far superior to ALL flagship phones. It's a bit reminiscent of the Motorola G3 back cover. Under the cover you can access the sim card and the MicroSD card. The battery is not removable which is disappointing in theory but in practice you'll not want to keep this long enough that it will ever mater.

Model number ZTE Z899VL

Keep track of exercise while entertaining yourself

I hate to exercise. It's tolerable if I have some entertainment, but then I have a hard time keeping track of my reps. I could use a mechanical  tally keeper, but I prefer this app, which can keep track of reps while playing games or watching youtube. It floats on top in a little bubble off to the side and I can move it if it somehow gets in the way. 

Its the little orange thing in the upper corner of the screen shot. 

Download Floating Rep Counter from google play store..

Make your screen super dark for bedtime use

Evidence suggests that too much light before bed disrupts your circadian rythrms. Some people believe that blue light in particular is the cause but I think the case for that is shaky, and that it makes more sense by far to cut down on all wavelengths. 

Now hold on, you say, my phone comes with a brightness slider already. 

True. But I've found that in absolute darkness I can't get my phones dark enough with built in controls. 

Enter Screen Filter, a free app that can make your screen dark. I mean really, really dark. You'll very quickly realize why your built-in brightness slider isn't doing enough: they are protecting you from yourself. In a bright room you can easily set the screen so dark you can't see anything. Including how to make it brighter again. Luckily they take a page from a bygon era of PCs, and automatically restore the screen to normal unless you confirm your setting within 10 seconds. 

This app is free, has no ads, and works really well. I strongly recommend it for night time use. You might also be tempted to hope you could save battery life by turning down the brightness this way, but that's going to be hit or miss. If you have an OLED display that will probably work. If your display has a backlight, however, your battery probably won't benefit. This program works by inserting itself into the display pipeline, decreasing the pixel values just before rendering them to the LCD. Power consumption depends on the backlight, not pixel values.  A side effect is that extreme levels of light reduction reduces the dynamic range of your display. In practice I haven't noticed this much, and even if it were  worse it's a small price to pay for better sleep.

Multi Timer StopWatch: as many as you need at once

Most phones have a countdown timer and stopwatch app built into the clock app, but this one is really an improvement if you need to keep track of multiple things. In my case I used it when I broke my leg to keep track of how long it had been since I took "as needed' pills and also to remind me of those that had to be taken on a fixed schedule.

Here it shows just 4 stopwatches, but it supports an unlimited number (as well as countdown timers), and you can give each a descriptive name. It does have ads, but almost all of the time it's just a small banner across the top. There is an add-free version, but the dev wants $4 which seems a bit much.

Download on google play

Antiyoy: turn based strategy game free/no ads

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=yio.tro.antiyoy.android

This strategy game is very simple and easy to learn, but satisfyingly challenging. It's a bit like chess in that there is no randomness. Stronger units always defeat weaker, but cost more to build and maintain. It's elegant in its simplicity: combining economy, fighting units, and defensive buildings, all distilled to their most simple form.  The AI is decent but not great. The challenge comes from each new map increasing the odds against you.

My criticism is that the challenge doesn't really increase very regularly - once every 10 maps or so it's really, really hard, followed almost immediately by a map so easy it's boring. The other problem is that after a while it all gets a bit repetitive, since it's always the same rules and units, just different maps. That said I've played over half of the 100 maps and it still draws me back in. Did I mention it's free and has zero ads?

I was a huge fan of advance wars on the gba. There aren't many games like that on Android, but this one scratches the same itch despite being entirely different.