Joining the smartphone set

My Christmas present to myself was a smartphone. All year I've been configuring and connecting peoples Apple iPhones and Android smartphones. It was time that I got one myself. I didn't want to spend too much money on something that I might not like and use. That put iPhones out of my choice and budget.


There are now a number of budget Android-based with varying amount of facilities, screen size and resolution. I wanted one with a reasonable sized screen so that I could see it and with as many of the gizmos that would fit into my £150 budget. I reviewed and examined models from manufacturers such as HTC, LG and Samsung. My son has a Samsung Galaxy S2 and I was impressed with that, though not its price.

Together we settled on a Samsung Galaxy Ace for £140 from Phones4U. It has a 3.5" screen, 5MP camera with LED flash and GPS, Bluetooth, 3G and wireless connectivity. I seemed to get on with it straight away. I configured the wallpaper, ringtone, transferred my SIM card plus contacts, email and downloaded a couple of news reader apps. Plus Angry Birds game of course. I did have problems in connecting it to any PC even after I downloaded the Samsung Kies desktop application and USB drivers. Only by turning off the USB debug (Settings -> Applications -> Development) then restarting the phone did this connection work correctly. Not mentioned in the manual or FAQs.

I'm impressed by the size, quality and ease-of-use of this smartphone and it will definitely have a place in my pocket from now on.

Going solid state

I finally decide to invest in a Solid State Hard Drive or SSD and evaluate this technology and its prospects. As regular magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) prices have increased dramatically over the last couple of months, now seemed a good time to do so. I chose a relatively new Kingston 64GB V200 which closely approaches the £1 per Gigabyte limit. This has a modern controller that supports the future-proofing SATA III 6Gbps transfer speed and higher bandwidths for both read and write operations at an affordable and relatively low capacity level.

I considered testing it in three different environments; as a boot drive for a previous generation, fast quad core system; as a replacement drive for my DELL Vostro i5 Core laptop; and as a data drive for my gaming system. I installed Windows 7 on it in the first environment and though it improved boot times dramatically, though installing applications seemed a lot slower and general use about the same. This meant that I didn't replace the already fast 7,200rpm hard disk drive in my laptop because I didn't really see the point. It was fast enough and worked well already. Not worth the effort.

My gaming system already has 190GB used of the 500Gb system hard drive so the SSD wasn't going to replace that easily. I decided to add it as a game drive that I can fill at my leisure and will improve game start-up an level loading times. I'll report back on my findings.