A-JAYS One + Review

I'm no audiophile or music guru. These earphone were bought as a replacement to some generic Samsung earphone I got with my phone. I had never really valued music quality very highly as long as the music coming from my phone/ iPod and into my ears sounded fine. I was lucky to be able to find the A-JAYS One + online for around £20.

Packaging


The A-JAYS One + come with interesting packaging that is certainly sturdy and is aesthetically pleasing.

Sound Quality


Wow. This was the first thing that popped into my head when I first listened to the earphones, they were above and beyond what I had expected from a pair of £20 earphones. They are in a different class to the generic Samsung earphones which are themselves, in my opinion some of the best budled with phones.
The bass is rich and full as far as earphones go, with clear and punchy highs and mids.

Design

These earphones have a flat cable to prevent entanglement. I have found that it does not truly prevent it but certainly reduces the frequency of it enabling me to shove them into pockets without worrying about prising nots apart when I fish them out again. The earphones come with 5 sets of buds to fit any size of ear and to ensure a good seal. The 90º jack is a very helpful addition reducing the likelihood of the cable breaking over time when pulled out of the socket.

Extras


 The A-JAYS One + include an inline microphone for calls and a one button control. On android handsets an app can be easily downloaded allowing the user to control all music player functions with one button.

Wrap-Up


These are easily one of the best and most worthwhile purchases I have made in a while. For £20 they can't be beat!

Galaxy S2 Review Part 1

This is my first android phone and first real 'Smartphone' Before this phone I had a variety of 'dumbphones' and 2 iPod Touch's. It is around 5 months after I got this phone and this is my review of the software, performance and battery life. My family owns many apple products including two iPhones 4s and 4, 1 iPad 2nd gen, 3 iPod touches so comparisons will inevitably be drawn

Ice Cream Sandwich

This is the latest and greatest of Google's android software (4.0). I flashed it about a week ago thanks to the great help over at XDA Developers. So far it is a marked improvement from Gingerbread (2.3), the uniform menus and minimalistic feel really improves over the slightly random assortment of menus and colours in Gingerbread. Performance is also much smoother with everything now being GPU accelerated, this leads to a truly enjoyable experience. Don't get me wrong, Gingerbread was great but this really is a step up and in the right direction. The experience is butter smooth on the S2 and the increased screen size compared to 'i' products is very welcome.


My Set Up

Personally I run a decently customised Go Launcher EX screeshots are below. I find that it feels more intuitive than touchwiz and gives me much more customizability.

Performance


I used to run an overclocked and undervolted version of Gingerbread with a custom kernel but stock rom. This gave me some pretty incredible results in benchmarks.


Browsermark (ICS) 140698
Browsermark Gingerbread 80000
Antutu 7502
Smartbench 3586, 2069
M3D benchmark L.R.V 36.50 average, 42.35 current
CF-Bench 15343, 4569, 8878
Vellamo 1234
Quadrant (Non dual core) 7071
Linpack Multi thread 127.104
Basemark 2.0 Taiji Free 58.10

I haven't had a chance to run any stock ICS benchmarks (Apart from browsermark) so far and I can't overclock until Samsung releases the sources.

Battery Life


In Gingerbread I managed to get great battery life from the phone averaging around 20 hours of use with the phone. That consisted of around 4 hours web browsing, 2 hours video, 1 hour youtube, 12 pictures and some music listening. This was great as I have two batteries so one is always charging as the others are in use. This is better than the battery life that my family members achieve with their various iDevices that are constantly seeking a socket to be plugged into (Excluding the iPad).

Wrap Up


So this is a great phone and I would highly recommend purchasing it, however I would advise you to wait as a whole slew of new android devices are soon to hit the market including the rumored successor to this model. However if they turn out to be far too expensive this phone will be a great cheaper alternative. Look out for the next part of this review on the camera and hardware!

Dell Dimension 8250 upgrade

As I said in my previous post I have acquired an 8 year old Dell 8250. I now plan to use it as a movie playing machine and a minecraft server. Hopefully the 1gb of RDRAM will be enough for a local server for private use. But the one concern I have is video playback. As I said before the MX420 is only just able to run full screen 480p video. So to fix this problem I am going to have to buy a graphics card that supports video acceleration. After a look on amazon and ebay I have come down to 2or 3 cards that are at the price I need. They are as follows

Nvidia 6600gt AGP

Nvidia 7600gt AGP

ATI 3450HD AGP

ATI 4650HD AGP

The the 3450hd is there because it supports full HD acceleration for video and draws much less power.

Edit 1 16/03/12: So i've added the ATI 4650HD to the list only because it is far better than the other three and hopefully I can get a good price somewhere on the internet. However my main concern is if my measly 250w power supply can handle it...

Edit 2 16/03/12: Now there are pictures


Developing...

Dell Dimension 8250

So recently an old dell has become available to me as my brother recently got a new laptop. This computer is from around 2004 and has specs as follows:

Pentium 4 2.4ghz
1gb PC800 RDRAM
Nvidia Geforce MX420 AGP Graphics Card
Some old HDD thrown in

At the moment it is running windows 7 which I installed on it about a year and a half ago. It actually runs it well with a very fast boot (around 30 seconds). It was used as a primary computer for an 8 year old, mostly youtube, rome total war and rugby 08. It was able to do these tasks perfectly and the only compromise was that to run full screen youtube windows aero had to be disabled. I think that the fact that an 8 year old middle of the line computer (When it came out) is still able to run the latest operating system and do so without any major flaws.