I present to your attention a guest article by my friend Kostya Gomma, with whom I worked in an advertising agency. I couldn't convince him to change a Nokia with a flashlight to a normal modern phone in a year of work. Finally, the migration took place and below the feeling of Bones from getting into the world of full-fledged smartphones and how he used the received capacities during his trip to the Venice Biennale :) It's funny that he wrote this review from his phone, which I insisted on myself – this was the condition for him to get into a Life Hacker.
A smartphone in the hands of a person who has never held anything heavier than a Nokia with a flashlight is a terrible force. Especially if this smartphone is not just an object of pleasure for a gadget lover, but an indispensable tool for an online journalist. But first, a brief background.
In the spring, we were unexpectedly invited to play several concerts in early June in one of the Ukrainian pavilions at the Venice Biennale, the world's largest art event. Taking the opportunity, I offered a friendly online publication Znaki.fm the diary of the Biennale in real time. And, having received the consent, I suddenly realized that I was in a difficult situation. How will I do it? The prospect of dragging a backpack with a laptop, a camera and endlessly looking for a ball wifi – I did not smile at all. So, a few hours before departure, in a terrible hurry, I picked up HTC Sensation on Android for the first time. After Slava's 10-minute briefing, half of which was spent on transferring contacts, we were left alone with him and did not part for the next two weeks.
As you remember, I have never used smartphones before, but this did not prevent me from fully understanding the Sense 3.0 shell and configuring the phone for myself during the Kiev-Venice flight. The three-dimensional desktop and the beautiful animation amused not only me, but also two zarobitchan aunts in the neighboring seats, who, after waving, asked if there was Skype (which surprised me already).
The pre-installed package for working with Polaris office documents is generally quite convenient, but for some reason it deprived my texts of paragraphs, and instead added incredible letter spacing. But that was later. And first there was orientation on the terrain. Almost sporty.
Pre–installed Location maps and GPS on board are what you need for a traveler in a distant country where everyone even speaks English very quickly. But it was not there. The Biennale takes place on the island of Venice, and these are several islands, 400 canals, 150 bridges and a maze of streets, alleys and dead ends, densely built up with old houses, the distance between which is often no more than an arm's length. All this splendor just drove the GPS module and me crazy, and every time I left the house, I absolutely could not guess when I would find my way back. So after several days of wandering and losses, I found a way out and guided myself by the signs on the houses, checking the map in my phone. It's nice that even the smallest dead ends were indicated there. Well, for a rainy day, I had a special life hack – POI (points of interest) tags, with which I designated my house, the pavilion where we performed and the objects of the Biennale that I wanted to shoot. After that, even a couple of cups of grappa ceased to be a hindrance on the late way home.
But I had to shoot an awful lot. My result is more than one and a half thousand photos and videos of objects and events of contemporary art. The camera is 8 megapixels, a lot of convenient settings, the picture is OK and sometimes even juicier than in real life. I was dissatisfied only with the "grain" when shooting with maximum zoom and the absence of an application like Instagram*.
A funny moment is the triumph of face recognition technology when shooting a moving installation of many faces in the pavilion of Georgia.
Another winning nuance of HTC Sensation is the dimensions that allowed me to bypass the guards at the Biennale awards ceremony, jump over the fence, push through a dense cordon of operators with heavy cameras and break right under the stage – at arm's length from the stars and functionaries of contemporary art to shoot exclusive materials for the Biennale diary.
Special thanks for the front-facing VGA camera, which gave me the opportunity to take photos without a background of Chinese tourists and Skype calls with videos. Ah! And for a very convenient opportunity to fumble content, thanks to which the broadcast on Facebook * and Twitter turned out to be much easier than I expected.
As soon as I found a mobile phone store, after waiting out the siesta – and it is in Venice has nothing to do with the time specified in the schedule, as I found myself in round-the-clock communication with the editorial office Znaki.fm which, in general, was what I needed. Sensation caught the neighbor's wifi faster than my mac, I didn't notice the promised problems with signal loss if I closed the back cover with my hand in horizontal mode.
For the opportunity to use Sensation as an access point for a laptop, I am ready to kiss the developers. This literally saved me when, having confused two cities (hello, clear Wizzair e-tickets!), 50 minutes before departure I found myself at Bologna airport instead of Forli. That is, 70 km from the plane that was supposed to take me to Poland, to my concert on Oleyna Street in Lublin. Four of my musicians and the organizers were already waiting for me there. In general, the concert was disrupted, it smelled of big trouble, and the phone sat down on the Venice-Bologna train, while I was the first in Ukraine to send exclusive materials from the awards to the editorial office. But I was saved by a kind signora, HTC Sensation, my old MacBook, an outlet in the business lounge of Bologna Airport and a Polish DJ stand-in. Having switched all of the above, I agreed with him via facebook* chat, shipped him 300 megabytes of tracks from my set via gmail – actually using the phone as an access point. And a few hours later I received a report from my musicians that the concert was excellent. Hallelujah!
I hope you have already realized that I used the phone to the fullest. I ignored many of its functions for lack of need and lack of time, but I let it out of my hands mainly to put it to charge. So, he withstood the hyperintensive use regime with dignity. The HTC Sensation's iron body survived two somersaults on the ancient Venetian pavement, getting off with a couple of micro-scratches. And the vaunted tempered glass Gorilla Glass, specially concave to protect from scratches, remained intact until my children got to the phone. It was inconvenient only to constantly erase fingerprints from the screen. As for brightness, the screen worked well at half power under the hot Italian sun even during siesta, which cannot be said about local mobile Internet sellers.
There is nothing to cover, I am spoiled with simple devices that can pull a week without recharging. In this sense, it was not easy for me, because with 3G Internet constantly on, continuous shooting and correspondence with the editors, the charge was enough for half a day at most. Then the search for the outlet began. On the other hand, the power saving settings and the disabled GPS did, if not miracles, then at least extended the pleasure for an hour or two. And if you turn off the phone for 1% of the charge, then this is quite enough for one last (and often decisive call).
I am satisfied. Not only the first experience of using a smartphone, but also how much it was useful to me during my incredible mission in a distant country. Minus some small things, HTC Sensation has fully replaced the laptop, camera, card, modem. The diary of the Biennale has been made and handed over, and I am already thinking about new trips and reports. And by the way, I've been pitching a tent on the Crimean coast for two weeks now – so guess how I'm writing this review.
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