social.noyu.me

i got my new sony xperia 10 vi just now, and she's just as lovely as i dared hope. feels in the hand like it was handed down from heavens as the one true android phone… perhaps

(yes, the hull is plastic!, yes, it has a 3.5mm jack, microsd+sim slot, usb-c, & fingerprint sensor!)

she's tall but she's skinny. same width (actually a hair narrower) as the iphone se 2nd/3rd gen. she has 5g and the newest android version. she has a very reasonable price. she is not full of samsung bullshit. it is going to be Very hard for me to not love this thing… we'll see

‪i can't believe this thing exists and was released in 2024, it's like an endangered species, i hope they do keep making them‬

the subdued light blue colour and the plastic slab design, remind me a bit of the iphone 5c, if it matured a little and wished to be taken seriously. this colour really does spark joy, it is a creature of the sky

‪initial testing suggests the 3.5mm jack might actually be good friends with my shure in-ear monitor earphones (like the phones output on my two audio interfaces designed for music production, but unlike the 3.5mm jack on virtually every consumer device i own), i love you sony <3‬

after two years of carrying two differently-broken smartphones everywhere, one of which was quite bulky, and neither of which was any good for listening to music, this to me is happiness

and as the following song got into its emotional swell, i ended up on a previously entirely unknown to me high-up pedestrian overpass above the ring road, and i'm walking through a quiet path with trees i also didn't know of. god i actually am really happy right now

possibly the happiest and most at peace with the world i've ever felt on a day where i got so little sleep i had to take a nap after caffeinating

found myself wandering towards the centre of this quiet city and decided to just keep going. it felt like my legs wanted me to

wandering around with in-ear earphones in while not listening to anything, in the gentle cool of early spring, occasionally taking pictures of quiet light urban scenes around me, like i'm playing half-life 2 with no enemies, kept company by the wind. really blissful right now

i love the sky, and railways, and walking where my legs will take me

‪the blue feels a lot less subdued in daylight. it truly is a blue for the sky‬

i know that minakami yuki doesn't use a smartphone, but

i got this phone ultimately because it's, somehow, the smallest modern android phone. the tallness of it takes some getting used to, but because it's as narrow as an older phone and has flat edges, it's very comfortable to hold, and the android back button helps a lot

because it's a sony phone and sony pride themselves on their headphones and earphones, there's two preloaded songs from japanese musical artists to demo the latest sony gimmicks. i'll give you one guess which song is the 360° audio gimmick demo just going by the titles

the mili song, “sleep talk metropolis”, is kinda cool

can't believe this thing costs less than half as much as the iphone 16e even before expanding the storage lmao. and that iphone has only one camera and only allows me to run the Permitted Applications

my scorching hot take is that apple makes devices that have a pretension of being for artists but which are in their design fundamentally hostile to art and mostly just use artists to prop up apple's brand among normies. whereas actual utility to artists is sony's whole deal

(this is because sony sells cameras and professional headphones and apple sells… walled gardens with unexpandable storage)

while this phone alas doesn't have the fancy sony pro camera app on it (unlike the high-end xperias), it does have the camera2 api enabled and opencamera works with it, so i can take raw photos and bring out the underlying sensor grain. excited to see what i can do with that :)

mysterious thing: the phone shows up in opencamera as having four back cameras, even though it only has two. it's possible that the third and fourth ones are just differently processed versions of the first one but i haven't noticed a difference yet. weird

THEY HAVE MADE ME TOO POWERFUL THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY HAVE DONE

wow the update to android 15 (from android 14) was only half a gigabyte, didn't expect that. it installed in the background and then the phone just needed to reboot… this is actually a lot better than the ios update experience

actually i am almost wanting to take back some of what i said about the audio output on the sony xperia 10 vi, it has the problem that made me lose my mind on the macbook where you can hear quantisation noise at low volume on sensitive earphones but unlike on macOS i can't fix it

at least this phone runs android so even if i can't fix this at a system level i'll be able to find a custom music player app that doesn't have the problem perhaps, fingers crossed

okay, something bad(?) about the xperia:

sony official repair pricing if you break the screen is nearly apple-tier, it costs a bit more than half what i paid for the phone new. not proud of how i had to learn that. even so, i've still saved money versus if i'd bought an iphone!

(the price i paid for the xperia 10 vi was 4200 SEK brand new, and i was just quoted for 2366.23 SEK for a screen and frame replacement. the cheapest current iphone is 8495 SEK. this is of course an unfair comparison but it is the comparison that was relevant for me)