The Story of the "Mid-line" Cellphone

For roughly the last 3 years, I've been using the Motorola (aka Moto) G4, and has been perfectly satisfied. This is really a rather unremarkable phone and therefore it's service shouldn't be of interest in any way. And there-in lies the story......

  

I have a long history of buying Motorola's premium offerings going all the way back to the i1000 on the Nextel network. Sure, there were other devices that ranged from the very interesting Nokia 8100 of Matrix fame and my one and only Apple device; the iPhone 5s. They all served me well, but as phones got increasingly complex, I began to feel that I got nowhere near taking advantage of their capabilities. When their life expectencies were closer to 5 years and contracts were close to 2, that was OK. When those things dropped to half, it became not worth the cost. At roughly the same time, the feature set became such that one didn't need to buy "halo" device (Z4 below) to get all the features one needed. 

There were 2 paths for the makers to put these devices to market. They could go the traditional route and sell them in bulk to the big carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint etc), or sell them directly to the consumer as "unlocked" phones ready to connect with virtually any system. My Moto G4 bought from Costco was one of these. It cost me about $150 on a Black Friday sale. That makes the phone itself cost less than $5 per month (of course, there is the cost of the plan itself). That's cheap! More importantly was that over the course of the 34 months that I used it, I never wanted for anything in terms of features.

So, last week, after my G4 committed suicide by jumping into the pool at practice one day......, I went out and chased down another mid-line phone. The Moto G6 Play. 

To reinforce the concept:

• It has all the features I need and some I don't.
• It has the old Micro-USB charging port. I'm really not ready to buy a bunch of replacement cords, and it charges plenty fast enough for me!
• It has the regular 3.5mm headphone jack! 
• It was cheap. I paid $63 on eBay from a DFW seller who got it to me in 2 days.
• Despite being 2 generations newer, it's interface was comfortably familiar. 

The fact is, even if I'd have gone out and paid full price for it, the price wouldn't have been any higher than what I paid for it's predesessor, the G4. As thing would turn out, I actually ended up paying nothing for it. I won't get into that story today. But I'd have been quite happy to pay $5 a month for it's use over the next 2-3 years.

Workstation Interrupted..... and Then Detoured!!!

This has been what my personal computing world has been like for the last 2 years! In September of 2017, I wrote a blog post on my workstation rebuild project. At that point, I had acquired the motherboard, processor and memory. Everything was pretty much in place to move on to the build itself! Then a number of things happened:

• For my birthday (October) of that year, I got a gun. Subsequently, I've been very involved in all things firearms!
• I started coaching the swim team at my school. We'll just say that it's time consuming, and exhausting and leave it at that....
• Since that time, my children have turned 12&15, then 13&16, which is in and of itself exhausting, but has included things such as teaching my son how to drive, as well as dealing with a teenage daughter...... enough said......
• I found out that the X99 motherboard steadfastly remained dead, despite my best efforts, so it went to Gigabyte warranty depot. Which is why you buy from a quality manufacturer.
• Gigabyte had a glitch and forgot about my board for about 6 months.....
• Gigabyte now has no more of the X99 boards to replace it and we are now going back and forth as to what to do about this situation.....
• MS Windows 7 support is ending, and I've been dealing with ours' as well as clients' machines.

You can see, what that above picture is about now.

After I sent the X99 to Gigabyte, I decided to pull out one of my old computers as a stop-gap measure, expecting that it would do email and some light web surfing for a month or two at worse. 8 months later .....I finally took it off of my desk and put the old warhorse out to pasture. For those who don't recognize it off-hand; it's my old "Tomcat" build. It's an IBM (which should be your first clue), Z61m running a Core2Duo processor with a chipset so old that it has a 3Gb limitation! Which goes to show that for what most people do (email and web-surfing), they don't need the latest and greatest. In any case, although it was slow and occasionally a little annoying to use, I was grateful to have it. On to the next thing.....

....And this is the next thing. An ASUS Rampage III Extreme with an Intel i7-950 processor and 6 sticks of 2Gb Dominator memory that I picked up for $50 about 3 years ago off of Craigslist. It has the X58 chipset and was from the 1st generation of Core CPUs! I'm using it because I'm tired of not being able to use my monitor rig, including the 28" 4K panel. I spent a few hours this last Saturday getting it up and running. I've got to say that for a 2011 motherboard, it runs (Windows10) pretty well, especially compared to the old ThinkPad! 

As of yesterday, Gigabyte and I are in the process of negotiating a mutually agreeable replacement for the X99 board. They asked me for a chipset and I prudently asked for a Z370 board vs. the X299 which would be a direct replacement in the product line. However, after some research, it turned out to have some hardware limitations that would have boxed me into some very specific (read expensive) hardware that I didn't want to get involved with. Much like my new philosophy about my cameras, I've decided to give up on some dreams for a more practical a outcome. Despite the "Z" chipsets being more "consumer" oriented, it will do everything I need it to do. There was just no sense in spending more money on spec that would have been meaningless. I'll explain more when I detail the build in a future post. 

Burn The Ships!

 

Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue in 1492, and forever changed the world...... But it could be argued the things didn't really get going until 1519, when Cortes landed in Mexico and gave the fateful order to "burn the ships"! What does this have to do with me? Well...., awhile ago, I made the decision to give up my full-sized DSLR Nikon gear (APS-C) based around the D300 and bought a Panasonic Lumix GX-7. This last weekend, I burned the ships! About 3 weeks ago, I sold the D300 rig, but a few days ago, I cut my emotional ties.

For some time now, I had been collecting an ad hoc selection of old film 35mm cameras from the heyday of Japanese manufacturers. They ranged from the old and quaint such as Topcon Uni, and Miranda RE to true classics such as my Minolta XE-7 all the way to the hi-tech from last years before digital as represented by a Contax 139 Quartz. The group was so varied that I collected a number of Tamron Adaptall II lenses so I could use the many adapters made for the numerous cameras. Unfortunately, this little hobby, while fun was getting stale the last few years and it was a vast clutter of jumbled and dusty hulks. So, between meeting a guys who bought several lenses on Saturday, and another guy on Sunday who bought everything else; I'm out of the "big/old camera" business. 

It's not as simple as cleaning out, or even just switching gear. There's a lot of emotion associated with those old cameras. In a many of ways, it represents my youth, my most abiding hobby interest, and even some professional aspirations. On the other hand, it's a lot of stuff that sits there and did nothing, but collect dust. And, although, I probably didn't sell it for as much as I could (or should) have, it did bring in some money and to a large extent, was a relief as well! Those ships got burned!

What did I do with the money? I used some of it to replace the cameras and lenses I used. I had previously picked up a Lumix GX7 with a 12-32mm (24-64mm eq) lens. After selling the Nikon D300 gear, I decided to use some of the money to replace the Nikon 18-200 lens with a Lumix 14-140mm. Uh..... I did that by purchasing a GH1 with that lens! And along with it came a FL-360 flash (which I needed), and an Olympus 14-42mm lens, along with misc accessories. Why? The whole thing was about $50 more than what I was going to have to pay for that lens anyway at about $300 total! Those lenses alone routinely run anywhere from $200 to $250. 

After I sold all the old camera gear, I decided to give myself a little reward. That is in the form of one of the "littlest" Lumix lenses around.

The 20mm/f1.7 (40mm eq), considered one of the sharpest for the format. They typically sell for $125 to 175. I paid $145.....

 ....for a 20mm/f1.7 and a Lumix GF-1 attached. Yup, I found it on eBay for $150 after shipping (down from the original listing of $200) with an "OBO". So I offered $130 for it. So, now I have a Lumix micro-4/3rds system. More to come.