Yesterday, after publishing the story, some personal stuff happened and got my mood lower than I thought it could possibly get. I was in a mall, and after that happened, I sat down, got my phone out of the pocket to check Twitter and there was a message from the LG community in Latvia. I had won LG G3.
That’s not the first time I’ve won something, but this is the most expensive thing. About a year ago in a similar contest I’ve won an Acer tablet. It was the most basic one for about 100$, but still, winning something is always a great experience. Before that I have won a printer, magazine subscription and some small things like tickets and CD’s. But winning the flagship phone is in another league.
The most fun thing was the reaction of friends, mostly asking, how do I manage to do that and comments like “enough is enough”. The contest was on Facebook, you had to write, what ould you like to get from the LG G Community. As I understand it’s a service for the LG G phone owners with some deals for products and services. My answer was premium subscription for Endomondo or Runkeeper. But in the end the answer didn’t matter, because it was random, which chose the winner out of 476 participants. Link to the video on Facebook.
The question now is do I keep it? I currently have HTC One (m7), I had it for a year. It’s a great phone. Design wise it’s still one of the best, even considering m8. Putting speakers in front is a genius idea. I started to listen to music and podcasts without the headphones plugged in at home more often. Two things I don’t like about it are camera and battery life. I’ve never had a camera in my life (my parents had, so I used theirs, but not too often), so all the photos I take are with my smartphone. Photos do look good on the smartphone screen, but on a bigger monitor they are quite a bit grainy. Battery life sucks. It lasts half a day at most with my use. Yes, I do use it a lot. Listening to the music or podcasts in the car, at work and at home. Twitter, Instagram – I use those services only on a smartphone. Messaging and so on, but still, half a day is unacceptable by any standard. Comparing LG G3 with my current phone I would most definitely use the LG phone, but there are other things to consider:
- It’s big, at 5.5 inches it is in a phablet category, so I have to look at it in the store. Most reviewers say it’s ok, the screen goes almost edge to edge, so it’s much more a phone than Samsung Note.
- This week a lot of phones will come out, including the new iPhone. Last year I had a similar experience. I’ve waited for an iPhone to come out and then decided to buy HTC One, mostly because of the screen size and resolution. This time with bigger screen iPhone and changes in iOS 8 (including most importantly custom keyboards and the ability of apps to talk to each other), buying iPhone makes much more sense. I love the feeling of iOS, but there are some great features of Android that the iPhone doesn’t offer.
I’ll get the new phone in a couple of weeks, so I have some time to think about it.