Tag Archives: Huawei

General

Google Not Play

A friend has a problem with Google. Let’s face it, we all might have problems with Google, but this is a specific whinge about Google: they like to remove services people have been using- Hangouts, Paramio, Reader.

Now there’s the good point that generally we’re not paying for these things, but we do generally contribute data, which is pretty much Google’s raison d’etre. There’s also the point that I think pretty much all the big tech firms will chop something if they don’t feel it makes value of some kind for them, or if it costs more to provide than it is worth, and of course they like to buy up other companies and integrate their product, sometimes ending up with duplicates, one of which gets deleted (a look at Office Microsoft 365’s admin panel will show you this in action.

I finally got caught by Google doing this: they used to have Google Play Music; their competitor to iTunes or Amazon Music. Not something I’m interested in; I do now use my phone as a player, but I’m not (yet) lowering myself to streaming.

But..Play Music made an acceptable local music player. Better than the shite Huawei bundled, for a start, but Google have rebranded and spun their music into Youtube, so the Play Music app is now useless. As if my crappy Huawei didn’t have enough useless apps as it was.

So, it’s time to find a new player. Hopefully free, hopefully lightweight, and not too painful to use. Then, what to do about the useless crap?

First things first: a new player. First attempt was AOSP Music Player + which seems to be an build of one of the players that used to be bundled with the Android sources. It’s lightweight, there’s little bloat, so away I went, but I genuinely couldn’t find a way to clear its queue or stop, rather than pause playback. I know Android is supposed to manage these things and background the app, but it just feels wrong. Next try, and second time lucky, was Music player Go, and that fits the bill. Open source, simple, lightweight, not too fiddly, and you can stop it.

Next: time to tidy up the phone. Now, as there’s no third-party firmware for my crappy phone, and the crappy Huawei player and Google Play Music are both bundled in the OS image, you can’t install them, and you can’t even delete the icons.

Happily, Android Debug Bridge comes to the rescue: you can uninstall (or at least, totally hide) apps from the UI with it. A little care is needed here; it is possible to remove essential services :-).

Job done: I have a new player with a nice dark UI:

Music Player Go, suitably dark and simple.

and I’ve removed some more clutter from the vile Huawei.

audio, Technology

Portable Music

For some time, my portable music needs had been satisfied with a Sansa Zip Clip player and Soundmagic E10 headphones, but the breaking of the Sansa meant I needed to revisit that.

My current phone is a Huawei P-Smart, the previous Motorola having broken, got fixed and then given to my better half, because there was a delay fixing the Motorola (in the end, easy and cheap) and I needed a phone: The Huawei, however is not ideal for a number of reasons:

1) It comes preloaded with too much tat. I’m quite zero-tolerance on un-neccesary apps and add-ons, something I’ve always done with PCs and continued with phones.

2) It can’t take a second SIM and a micro-SD, like the Swift 2 I dunked in the cut.

Still, it was cheap, and the battery lasts well, but:

3) The headphone output is just shockingly bad. Indescribeably bad, it sounds flat and lifeless unless you enable some Huawei proprietary shitty processing software, and when you do that, it seems to have a active dynamic range compression that actively compresses loud(er) sounds down in particularly clumsy way. It’s painful to listen to.

So the obvious choice of giving up on a seperate player and using the phone seemed to be out. I did fancy the award-winning Cowon Plenue D player, but £200 seemed a bit much given a few expenses of late.

The answer presented itself: Soundmagic’s new offering, the E11, comes in a Bluetooth version. That way, the crappy phone just presents a bitsream, someone that is competent can handle the D-A conversion, and I don’t risk tearing the headphone jack off the phone in my pocket, and if I end up with a phone with no 3.5mm jack (unlikely for a while, I’m too tight), no problem.

I’m a convert. I had my doubts, but the headpones are light and comfortable, the battery life seems OK, and the sound is as good as the wired E10s, all for considerably less than half the price of the Plenue D. Hell even the slight background hiss I’d noticed during my recent hospital stay turned out to be from the oxygen pipe I was wearing….