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Polar bear with carrot

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Lucid moment

I went phone shopping this week. I am not a big tech guy, hovering somewhere between luddite and grudging pragmatist forced into using the new technology.

Usually the last one to get anything. But I had dropped the old phone and it was a broken mess so I went down to the Verizon store and decided to see what was available these days.

The most important litmus test for me was, "Will it fit in my pocket?" Surprisingly, very few of the new phones would. My old phone was the original droid and it had a nice small footprint, although it is woefully out of date by today's standards.

Anyway, all of the new droids are these huge monsters that I would need to rock a manpurse to carry. I was looking at the iphone 4s's and they were very cool but it was immediately evident that the screen is really tiny. And they are not currently 4G. I put the Blue Heron Blast up on the iphone and could barely make out the letters. No way it could fly.

The nice sales lady pointed out this new phone from LG, the Lucid. It came to market the last week of March. Has the 1.2 GHz dual core 8860 Qualcomm snapdragon processor and another gig of ram. Runs on last year's gingerbread platform (horrors) instead of the newer 4.0 ice cream sandwich.

Phone has 1080p video and a nice sharp 5 meg camera. Supposedly upgradable to ice cream sandwich one of these days.

The long and short of it is that the phone is so far beyond what I am used to in terms of ease of use and utility. Wifi, bluetooth, mobile hot spot, etc. Things have come a long way in three years. Thing cost less than eighty bucks. A relatively no name phone that meets my present needs quite satisfactorily.

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What I find funny is that I decided to google the LGLucid and see what the experts had to say about it. It is an understatement to say that it has been generally panned. Should have waited another month for the real phones to come out.  A good choice if you don't need the absolute fastest speeds or latest features, but don't want to miss out on anything important either. This was a good display — two years ago! There’s still no excuse for any manufacturer to ship a phone with such an outdated and inferior operating system. Underneath the ugly layer of UI chrome is a surprisingly meager portion of preloaded bloatware. 


I waded through CNET and PC Mag and Tech Crunch and Laptop and Android Police and the Verge and a plethora of sites devoted to gear heads. Here is a typical review from Android Police. Now a guy that blathers as much as I do has no right to call anybody out but isn't it a bit unnatural to be so devoted to one's mobile phone? I spent less time buying a car than these people outlay for a portable communication device. Having come in from the prehistoric cold, I am more than happy and show absolutely no embarrassment in wielding a cell phone with shock, last year's technology. If I can keep it long enough perhaps I can sell it as an antique. And the kicker? I just found a site where you can buy it for a penny...

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