Personal: What’s on my phone

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About a year ago, I wanted a new phone. My first smartphone was a Samsung, which was my 2nd and 3rd smartphone as well. I always wanted to try a different brand and since I bought an Asus Zenpad 8S in 2016 for my birthday, I wanted to give the Asus Zenfone a try. I’m quite content with my Asus Zenfone 3 MAX. I have the 5.5-inch version, so it’s quite a big phone in my opinion. So, a while ago, there was a tag challenge in the tech community to tell your audience what you have on your phone. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I still want to do it. So, here we go. Also, I invite other bloggers to do the same thing. What is on your phone? If you write an article about it, feel free to tag me on Twitter or link to this article. Or feel free to leave a comment here as well. 

Mini review

So, before we go to the main event, I first want to give a mini-review on the Asus Zenfone 3 MAX. What are the things that I love and dislike about the phone? I have been using this phone for a year now. If you want to read up on the specs of my phone, you can read it here on gsmarena.com.

There are a few things I dislike about this phone. If you use the screen at max brightness and either WiFi or 4G, the phone’s battery drains quite fast. Lowering the brightness helps quite a lot to save battery. Another thing has to do with the call quality. Sometimes the microphone doesn’t pick up my voice too well and the other end doesn’t hear me, but if I reposition the phone a bit, that fixes the issue. Another thing I dislike is that buttons like home or back aren’t backlit. But, that’s all I really dislike about this phone. While other reviewers would find other things wrong with it, I really like this phone and it fits my needs perfectly.

So, what are the things I really like about this phone? It’s my first phone with a fingerprint reader. This makes life so much easier. More on that later. Another thing I really like is how this phone seems to get frequent updates to the latest version of Android and all the latest security patches. I prefer the ZenUI over TouchWiz any day of the week. The camera on the phone is really good for family pictures in my opinion. But, the biggest factor for this phone is that it’s priced at 250-280€ and you get an amazing phone for that price.

What’s on my phone?

Now, what’s on my phone? Quite a lot actually. I nearly always carry my phone with me since it’s a handy tool when I need to look up something quickly or snap a quick picture of something I need to remind myself of.

Since I’m rarely at my desk at work, I always have my phone with me. So, they can call me whenever there is a problem. Also, I love listing to music while walking and I use my phone as an old school music player. So, my music app is one of my most frequently used apps.

First of all, I won’t talk about every single app that’s on my phone. There are quite a few games I have installed on my phone for when I’m in a waiting room or have some time on the train and the batteries of my 3DS or Switch are out. I’ll only talk about the apps I placed on my home screen since those are the apps I use the most.

Whenever there is an app I use often, I place it on my home screen. If I stop using it frequently, I remove it from my home screen and replace it with something else I use frequently.

This is my first home screen. This screen greets me when I unlock my phone. For obvious reasons, I won’t show how I unlock my phone. On the left of my main home screen is the Google Assistant/Google Now. This way I can catch up with the latest news of the subjects I’m interested in. On the right, there is a 2nd home screen with additional apps. More on that later.

At the bottom, I use the classic vanilla apps. From left to right, you have the dialer, my text messages, a button to see all apps, Chrome, and my camera. On top of my home screen is a big clock with the date displayed. Besides that clock, I have the messenger app. I talk quite often to friends over messenger and if I want to share a link, Messenger is the easiest way. Underneath that, you have the Play Store. Each morning, I update all my apps and check the store if there isn’t anything interesting that I could review on my blog.

Then, you have three rows of 4 apps each. The first row is my calendar, my finder app, Discord, and Dropbox. The calendar app is Google Calendar. I use this app often to remind myself of things I need to do. I put more than just my appointments or birthdays in my calendar. Things like: “Article day”, “Write the time for the final project”, “Write a piece for collab” or “Release of thing X” are things that appear in my calendar as well. Appointments have a red color and things I need to do have either blue or yellow. Blue if it’s something I could delay and yellow if it’s urgent or if it can’t be delayed.

The file explorer is the one that comes with Asus’ ZenUI and I love it. It gives me Windows-vibes and it’s really great to use. Whenever I download a file, I can quickly find it with this app. When you open it, you can select to view all images, videos, music, documents… on your phone or just explore the phone. An amazing feature here is that I can set up a wireless method of accessing the files on my phone. When my phone and the device I want to access from being connected to the same network, I can wirelessly access the files on my phone. It creates a link I can visit and I see the same thing as the file explorer app. This app saved me various times.

I use Discord to talk to other bloggers and friends from over the whole world. I’m also part of some servers where game developers look for bloggers to promote their games. If you want to add me on Discord, just shoot me a message over Twitter. But, an app I use really frequently as well. I actually have Dropbox Pro, since I use this as a backup method. I have close to 500GB stored in my Dropbox. Everything from files I need for work to my final project is in there. So, I never worry too much about dying hard drives or losing my files. I also use the Photo Sync feature of Dropbox. This feature saves all the pictures I make with my phone in my Dropbox so I can use them directly on my computer or all the other devices I connected to Dropbox.

In the second row, we find Instagram, WordPress, YouTube, and WhatsApp. I do have an Instagram profile, but don’t frequently use it. I enjoy browsing Instagram to see what my friends are up to. If you can’t guess why I use the WordPress app, well, I use it for checking and fixing things on my blog on the go. So, I’m quite a big fan of YouTube. I love watching tech channels, retro gaming channels, game development channels and various other channels relating to creating things. The final app on that row is Whatsapp. I mostly use that app to keep in contact with my family or my theater group. That’s all I use Whatsapp for.

The final row on my main home screen is the row with the most used apps on my phone. Twitter, since I’m quite active on Twitter. Outlook to check my mails and “Nationaal” is the app I use to check the train schedule to get from and to work. I know that I skipped an app. That’s “Pulsar+“. In one of the firmware updates of my phone, Asus removed the quite excellent ZenUI music app. So, I searched high and low for a great music app on the Play Store. First I used Pi MP3 Player, but I started to run into issues. For some reason, no apps wanted to update on my phone after I installed that app.

Not too long after, I found Pulsar. I liked the app so much, I actually bought the premium version. It includes additional themes and some neat additional features. I can’t recommend this app enough if you enjoy listing to music on your phone. It’s one of the best apps I have used in a while.

So, on my 2nd home screen are the apps I use less frequently but I want quick access too. Let’s start with the first row. This has the Facebook app, the UEFA soccer app, a weather app, and the Nintendo Switch Online app. The weather app, AccuWeather, is an amazing weather app. It’s quite accurate in my area and I use it to check if I need to take an umbrella on my walks or not. I use the UEFA soccer app since the soccer app of my local sports channel doesn’t have the UEFA Nations League tables built-in. I use the Facebook app since I dislike the website on mobile and I find that it was quicker and easier access to certain features. And finally the Switch online app, I use that app for if I want to voice chat during online Switch play.

The next row has the Steam app, for when I want to check the Steam Store and to have an additional layer of security for my Steam account. Besides that, the Easy Banking app is the app I use to check my finances. Then, you have the Sporza Soccer app. I use this app to follow my local soccer league and to see what the Red Devils, our national soccer team is up to. And Bancontact is used for quick payments, once you set up this app, paying for the doctor goes so quickly.

Oh, before I continue, quick side note. If you are American, I mean football when I say soccer. That said, let’s continue.

The next row has my gallery. When I need to show a picture of somebody. I find the way that the gallery app sorts pictures better than how my finder app sorts them. Besides that, you have the calculator app. Strangely, this is one of the only apps that doesn’t have its name translated in the ZenUI to Dutch. It such say “rekenmachine”. Oh well. It doesn’t bother me that much. Then, you have the Maps app, I use it as a GPS. And finally on that row, you have Imgur, for quickly uploading pictures and since I love this website.

The final row has the Telenet Mobile app. This app is from my ISP and I use this app to check on how much mobile data I have left. Besides that, you got Reddit. I have periods when I get very addicted to Reddit and go on the site a lot and there are moments I rarely visit the site. The final two icons on that row are the Patreon app and the Grumpy Cat game.

I use the Patreon app to check on posts the creators made that I support on Patreon and the Grumpy Cat game is just one of my favorite games on my phone at the moment.

You might notice that I leave one row empty. This row is my temp row. On this row I place apps I just installed and I want to test or if a developer asks me to review them. So yes, that screenshot might be a teaser for an upcoming article. Whenever I tested them or wrote the article, I usually remove them from my home screen.

A few apps that I want to mention that aren’t on my home screen are:

Ringtone Maker – MP3 Cutter – One feature I miss from Samsung is that when you select a song as a ringtone, it searches the best part of the track to start the ringtone. This app solves that and I can even choose from where start my ringtone.

Datasize Explorer Pro – Whenever I’m running low on space on my phone, I use this app to check which apps take up a lot of space and I should remove or clean the cache of.

WiFi Analyzer – If you are a techie or a networking person, this app is a must on Android devices. It helps you to visualize WiFi to help you troubleshoot issues with WiFi.

And all the other apps, outside of games, are apps from local stores here in Belgium or the Netherlands I use to shop or to buy my retro games from. Or your typical apps that almost everybody has like Shazam. And a few apps I don’t think are worth mentioning.

So, that was quite a lot. I’m quite curious to see which phones you guys have and for what you use it and what apps are on your phones. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. It was something different from what I usually do, but next time I’ll get back into gaming stuff. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

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Android Games #8: No Subtitle Needed?

So, since July, I have a new phone. I’m using the Asus Zenfone 3 MAX 5.5. It’s quite a mouth-full, but I really like my phone. It was a great help on my trip to London this week. Anyways, with a bigger screen, I had played some games I wanted to talk about. So, I decided to write a new installment in my Android Games series. So, if you are new to this series; in this series, I talk about casual games I played on my phone I’m unable to write a full article review about. So, I take a quick look at them to give them a spotlight. That said, keep in mind the publishing date of this article since some games are in active development and can change when you compare them to the review I wrote in this article. In any case, feel free to leave a comment with your opinion on the games and/or the content of the article. Also, if you know of any good casual games on Android, feel free to let me know. So, on with the article! PS: the score stars are based on how much stars I would give it in the Android Store.

InstLife

Oh yes, this is one of the games that inspired this article. InstLife. This game came on my “recommend” list one day and I installed it and gave it go.

This game is truly very interesting. This app is in its very early stages of development but I really like what I have experienced so far.

This game is a sort of life simulator you sort have control over. Each update introduces more and better ways to control your life.

At the start of the game, you get a random country, gender, and name. And then you are at the mercy of an RNG. Yes, each playthrough is different. A playthrough can take anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 minutes or more.

Take a look at the store page I link above since you get a good idea from the screenshots it has up on the game store. Also, this app is free and doesn’t require any permissions to run. Seriously, what are you waiting for? Give this game a try! I’m highly enjoying myself with it. Each time I have a few minutes to spare, I do a quick round of this game and I’m glad I can.

The thing is, I press “Age” quickly. While there is in the recent update a lot more added to give a lot of depth to the game. The big warning I need to give for this game is a basic understanding of how adult life works and a good understanding of English. Otherwise, you might have some trouble.

Score (v0.2.8): 4 stars

Pokémon Go

Oh, deary me, I have never talked about nor have I mentioned Pokémon Go since it got released in June of last year.

I think I don’t have to introduce this game since it’s still somewhat present. I saw it several times on my trip to London.

To be honest, I think Pokémon Go is a mediocre game. Perhaps the fact that I life in an area where not too much Pokémon Stops are has something to do with it.

After a few months of playing it here and there, I just stopped playing it. It actually bored me seeing all the same Pokémon over and over again and only seeing new Pokémon when you level up or walk on different parts of the day.

I’m sorry, but Pokémon Go didn’t click with me. There isn’t enough to draw me back in and launch the app to try and catch random Pokémon. I might open it here and there when I’m thinking about the game, but I have been doing it less and less. So yeah. I can see the appeal of this game, but it’s a game that isn’t for me.

I also think that the game has some major flaws where it doesn’t explain things like raids amongst other things to new players. Such a shame.

Score: 2.5 stars

Stellar Fox

Stellar Fox is an interesting game. In this game, you draw lines so the white fox can roll towards the exit.

But, there is a catch. Once the fox starts rolling, you can’t stop it. Also, there are some very interesting mechanics where you, for example, have to let a clone go faster to pick up a key to open the exit before the original fox reaches it.

This game is a very neat puzzle game and if you have the time and interest, I urge you to check it out. The visuals, presentation, and music are very well done and I can’t give anything majorly wrong with this game. While here and there, the levels might be a bit too difficult, I really like this game.

Score: 5 stars.

Finishing this article

So, that are my opinion on three Android games I have been playing on my new Android phone. I do realize that this article is shorter than my other Android Games articles, but I took some time off past week to enjoy myself, so I didn’t have time to prepare a bigger article for you guys.

I do have some other Android Games on my list I’m saving up for a longer and bigger article in this series but that will be for another time.

In any case, thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to see you in another article on my blog but until then, take care and have a great rest of your day.

PS: if you want to see pictures of my trip to London, you can visit this Imgur album I uploaded. I had a great time there! While I was there, I was talking with some of my blogger friends and we might have plans for next year… So yeah. Keep an eye on that.

Game Quicky: Space Max (Android) ~ Go To Space

Google Play link – Developer’s press release – Official website

So, today I want to take a look at an Android game called Space Max. The developer asked me to give my honest opinion on this game, so here we go. This game is developed by CrySoft Development and published by TinyGames. This game is available on Android and iOS devices. Because I don’t own an iPhone, I have played this game on my phone and my tablet. In this article, you will find my thoughts about this game. For those who don’t know how a game quicky works, I list what I like and dislike about the game and give my final opinion in the end. Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion on the game and/or the content of this article. 

The good

The tutorial for this game explains how this game works perfectly. It teaches the mechanics in a heartbeat.

While there are microtransactions, the first upgrades aren’t too crazy to buy. I have played various Android games where you get directly into a paywall, and this game doesn’t have that.

While this game has ads, they aren’t placed in annoying places. Also, they are used in a way how I think ads should be used. When you die, you sometimes get the chance of watching an ad to continue for free. This is a great idea!

The art for this game looks pretty cute. This game is adorable in my opinion. In that extend, the interface is designed in a great way. I have nothing to comment on that, besides that, it’s good of course.

This game doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it shows. The fact that you have to fart your way up and the crazy costumes you can unlock. It makes this game humorous to a certain extent.

Something I really like in this endless jumper is the fact that when you can go down for a little while. This is great to pick up bananas or bolts you just missed. In most other endless jumpers, this means instant death.

The bad

While I realize that it’s this game’s gimmick, but I got pretty annoyed by the farting sound effect rather quickly. After a few minutes of playing, I stopped playing for a while since I found the farting sound effect immature. It would be a great idea to have some option to mute the fart sound effect for people who get annoyed by this but want to play the game.

The controls can be annoying sometimes. While I understand how they work, you have to tap in the middle to go up, left to go right and right to go left. But, I think these two things would improve the game:

1. Give players an option to invert the controls. That when you tap left, the ape goes left. And when you tap right, the ape goes to the right. That would be great since my brain is hardwired to do that.
2. Place transparent buttons on the screen that make it clear where the straight up, go to the left and go to the right sections begin and end. That would make the controls of this game less frustrating and fairer.

The game seems to hang sometimes in the menus and during gameplay. Often when I press a button to go back to the game after I bought an upgrade, the game hangs for 4-5 seconds before it goes back to the game. A little waiting animation would be great.

I think that the blocks directly at the start of the game are overkill. It feels like this is an obstacle meant for in later parts of the game. I would honestly remove them or place them higher up.

I also found 2 bugs:

1. In some cases, when I died, I saw powerups and bananas underneath the starting area.
2. When you press left or right at the start instead of in the middle, you die in mid-air.

Something I wish the game had was a pause button. I played this game at breaks and when my break was over or when I had to pick up a call, I had to either quit the game or let myself die so that I don’t loose any progress.

Conclusion

The idea of this game is pretty interesting. At the surface, this game looks like an interesting game. But, as soon as you start playing it for while, the flaws start to show. The fart sound effect, the lack of proper controls, the game that sometimes hangs and the lack of a pause button can be a deal breaker for some people.

I honestly think that with a bit of polish, this game would be so much better. But how the game stands now, at the time of writing this article, this game is mediocre and lacks any punch to make a difference in the sea of endless jumpers that exist on the Android Play market.

Like I said, the game has a lot of potentials, but the flaws drag the game down. I’m sure that a few patches to this game can fix the issues I mentioned. Since this game does some interesting things to change up the usual endless jumper gameplay.

Thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing this article. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

Score: 3/5