Steve Litchfield

Yes, the title is slightly misleading, in that the new XL has higher spec internals and upgraded software and hardware features, of course. But the point I wanted to make here is that it isn't all one way - and it hasn't been for two years, with last year's Nexus 6P also disappointing. Here's the check list then. Follow along with me! Screen size. Look at the montage above, you'd think that the one on the left was the newest because the bezels were smaller and the screen larger. But no, the left phone is from two years ago! The Nexus 6 screen is stunning, at the same QHD AMOLED and at a full 6", unlike the 5.5" in the new Pixel XL (review coming soon). Durability. The Nexus 6 is built by Motorola and is as tough as old bricks. You can't bend it, you'd have to smash the screen to really damage it in some way. In contrast the 6P was horribly fragile . In fairness, I haven't handled the Pixel XL yet, hopefully it's as tough as the ...

It's a fair cop. As I parked in the Forbury Retail Park and strolled outside to take some photos in the nearby gardens, I had to walk past a sign that said, in very small writing (underneath larger writing promising 'Maximum Stay 3 Hours'), "Walking off-site will result in a charge of £100". I then returned to the park to McDonalds and bought my lunch. Strolling back to my car I saw the dreaded Penalty Charge Notice on the windscreen. I've now paid this after researching the whole topic for a week, it's simply more hassle than I can take to go through the various rounds of appeals and court cases etc. I suspect most other people do the same. I guess it's private land (the retailers lease the shop space) and the landowner can put whatever strict rules they want for the privilege of parking there. But it seems crazy and totally lacking in common sense. The idea of stopping people parking there all day while they work in Reading is fair enough -...

Bluetooth car kits are all very well, but a lot of them involve either some DIY to your car's dashboard or the right sockets (even just 3.5mm aux in) on your car stereo. Which is why I was interested in grabbing this Lumsing gadget which claims to effectively turn any car into a Bluetooth-capable media monster instantly and cheaply, thanks to the 'magic' of FM transmission. Now, FM transmitters are in themselves not new, they've been around for years, but you normally have to plug these into your smartphone with a 3.5mm jack - the secret sauce here (other than being sleek, small and stylish) is that the audio connection to your smartphone for music, podcasts and call handling, is all done wirelessly, via Bluetooth. The usual caveats apply in terms of finding a frequency that works well for you - in the UK, I usually swear by 88.4MHz, but a lot will depend on where you live. The power output from this Lumsing unit seems pretty good though and I rarely got hit by ...

Another in my occasional series of iPhone 6/6S case reviews - I'm all for leather when used tastefully and you can't fault the finish here, which is heavily textured leather laid on a plastic substrate - there are no rough edges (despite the relatively low price) and there's a definite premium feel: It's a typical in-situ design, of course, with the aim here to both look good and also aid protection and grip. It achieves the latter to some degree with the texture, though the 'genuine leather' was coated with something that made it slightly more slippery that it should have been. Moreover, the Hansmare case makes a song and dance in its promotional material about the edges being raised up enough to protect the iPhone in the event of a fall face down - but I'm sorry, this isn't what's found in real life - the sides barely made it flush with the glass surface and there's really very little protection: Sorry Hansmare, back to the drawi...

This is an interesting sideline from one of my favourite manufacturers of smartphone headsets. ROCKJAW have produced the stunning Arcana v2 and Alfa Genus headsets in the past, with a forth pole on the 3.5mm jack, for microphone and media control of course. Audio quality from each of these is exemplary and there's really no need to spend more than a few tens of pounds for other in-ear headsets - the Arcana v2 have been my go-to reference headset across all smartphones now for almost a couple of years . Now, the Arcana v2 have been discontinued, but the Hydra v2 are very similar and only a few pounds more. Now, what's this? Clarito is a cheaper budget version of the old Hydra/Arcana v2 design, but with standard 3-pole jack, i.e. there's no microphone and thus are aimed at wider headphone use. (Yes, you can use them with a smartphone, but you'll have no pause control or way of picking up a call.) There doesn't seem to be a compromise in audio quality tho...

I know, I know, it's in rose gold. But in this case, my daughter was doing the road testing - a fortnight of real world rough and tumble, in and out of pockets and bags. And the Ino design proved hard wearing and quite superb. Yes, there are a thousand similar clip-on cases from your local high street shop at a few pounds less, but this Motomo-branded case is premium from start to finish. The Ino case comes in deluxe packaging, with the case wrapped around a dummy iPhone cutout mounted on shaped foam. Now that's attention to detail! The Ino Slimline design is plastic, but its beautifully finished in mock 'brushed metal', here in rose-gold that would match the iPhone it's designed to protect (though our iPhone was the original gold - not that the two clash!) and with a grippy inner lining designed to help hold the iPhone in place: Not that the iPhone 6 or 6s would slide out, because it's held too well by the edges and corners, but in the event of a fa...

Well, there we go. With me writing for an increasing number of sites, including Android Beat , iPhoneHacks and All About Windows Phone , and then doing the Phones Show and PSC on top, I kind of forgot to blog. For about 9 months. Ahem. Or maybe there just hasn't been as much to 'rant' or 'rave' about in recent times? No.... that can't be it, the world's going quietly potty and quite bizarre. Donald Trump is running for president in the USA and the whole of the UK has to vote on an issue that only 1% of people really understand. Anyway, let's try and kick start this blog again. I have some accessory bits and pieces that can go up shortly, aimed at keeping my family happy, tech-wise....(!)

To all my Phones Show viewers, please note that I didn't take a break over the summer holidays as I normally do, i.e. the shows kept on coming and indeed, increased in frequency. However, my elderly (79) and recently widowed father has just had a major fall, breaking his arm and wrist and I'll be needed helping him at least part time for a few weeks, as you can imagine. Adding complications are that he's on the other side of the UK, so there will be many miles on the motorway backwards and forwards.... So.... I'm taking my annual short break from filming now. The Phones Show will return soon, probably around the time the new Nexus devices appear on the streets. The Phones Show Chat audio podcast will continue, of course, since there's a lot less time that's involved in that - a PSC takes two hours to put together, of which 75 minutes is spent recording. Whereas a ten minute video Phones Show takes around fifteen hours of planning, writing, fil...

The World Wide Web is broken. It's been breaking for the last few years, but I saw red a week ago when pages on almost all sites were taking 30 seconds plus to load, with widgets and content being dragged in from dozens of sites that I wasn't visiting when 90% of what I was seeing was adverts And, most of all, when stories starting emerging of malvertising - malware, spyware and ransomware all being spread through various advertising chains used on high profile web sites "Enough is enough", I thought and I asked around as to whether there was an easy way to just block ads once and for all, for my family's farm of laptops and PCs, to keep us all safe. The unanimous reply was "uBlock Origin" - look under 'Extensions' in your web browser and you'll find it. It's free and fast and has dramatic effects. Typically, an ad-heavy/laden web page in 2015 might take up to minute to load and will contain content from multiple ad servers, a...

Having been donated a slightly battered Nexus 5 as an Android M test device, I thought I'd got nothing to lose in terms of hacking it further. One of the biggest drawbacks of the otherwise still perfect '5' has been that the mono loudspeaker isn't very loud and is tinny. Now, obviously you can't turn a small speaker into a big one, but there are things you can do to let the component produce everything it's capable of. LG's design rather muffles the Nexus 5's speaker (positioned bottom left as you look at the phone normally, or bottom right from the back), by as much as 25% in terms of volume and tone. So, why not claw back that 25%, at the expense of a few err.... extra holes? This was originally postulated here , but I went slightly further. Again, this Nexus 5 already had scuffs and a few bits of plastic broken off, so I had nothing to lose! Here's a pictorial representation of what I did, with the red arrows showing the new holes: The ...

The world of iPhone cases is vast, of course. Every street corner, every vendor. Every pattern known to man - yet invariably made in a similar fashion, with the in-situ cases made from hard plastic or TPU. And above it all strides the phone case colossus that is OtterBox, one of the biggest brands and best known for designs that can take extreme punishment. This is their new offering for the iPhone 6 and it 'does exactly what it says on the tin', at the expense of increasing the cased thickness to 12mm. Job done, though. Yes, it seems sacrilegious to encase the iPhone's smooth aluminium lines in plastic and neoprene, not least because it almost doubles the thickness, but if you drop your phone once a month (which seems about average for iPhone owners across the globe who try to use the device 'naked') then a case is the only way to go, protecting against unsightly dings to the metal and a probable shattered screen. The Symmetry design looks similar to oth...

Got to get this off my chest. Here's the situation. Joe or Josephine Bloggs uses their Windows PC every few days. Sometimes. For a few hours at most. Sounds OK, doesn't it? Except that they keep saying to you "I still use my PC but it's so slow now, do you think I should get a new one?" Tempting though it is to say "yes'(!), what's actually happening is that Microsoft's update system doesn't take into account PCs which are only turned on for a few hours every few days. With patches being pushed out weekly (or so), they get no chance to download and install in the background (because the computer is - literally - not usually turned on), so when the user does fire up the PC, they have to live with 'updates downloading' in the background. All the flippin' time. Because they're rarely turned on, and online, long enough for the updates to complete. Add in that when they do boot up their PC it takes 'longer and longer' ...

I'm posting this here, since other short form social networks are proving inadequate 8-) Here's the problem. Friend's iPhone, latest iOS, patched up to date etc. She has a PC with Windows 7 and iCloud installed. Again all up to date. iCloud is on default settings, set to sync all photos to Pictures\iCloud Photos etc. The iPhone is set to upload all photos to iCloud and 'My Photo Stream' and, after taking a photo, something seems to happen in terms of uploads. However, we've waited a few DAYS now, and iCloud doesn't seem to have synced anything down. Any clues, from Apple experts, as to what to try next. It's driving us insane!! Comment below to add your tuppence worth? Ideas from me so far: re-install iCloud on the PC pray smash the iPhone with a large hammer and switch my friend to Android or Windows Phone Cheers! [I'll update this post with more info as requested by anyone kind enough to help!] Hmm... http://rianjs.net/2014/...

Well done to the Connects team for a well done April 1st prank - creating a mini-clone of MS-DOS (from the 1980s) that runs under today's Windows Phone. It's semi-convincing too: And there's a promo video to go with it: The packages sent to bloggers missed a trick though - there was a fully working USB floppy drive (I last used one of these in the early 2000s!), with a floppy disk on it. I was expecting the video again, or some PowerPoint or PDF presentations or a special multimedia message, but in fact the 1.44MB floppy just had a tiny TXT file pointing people towards an online URL to grab the app on their Lumias . Plus a neat notebook with floppy disks as covers, shown above! 8-) Not that I'm grumbling - hey, who knows when someone will next need me to read a floppy disk(!) - but I think the April Fooling could have gone this one step further in terms of production! Still, the prank application does work, and even kicks off the likes of Cortana i...