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I knew I wasn't the only one fond of small, cheap-but-great phones! :) Btw, this is my first post in English. I cover tech here in Brazil for +10 years and run
by rpgbr 4y ago
I knew I wasn't the only one fond of small, cheap-but-great phones! :)
Btw, this is my first post in English. I cover tech here in Brazil for +10 years and run a +9 years old independent, self-sustainable publication written in Portuguese. Now, I decided to give it a shot in another language, despite still feeling uncomfortable with my English. (I hope I haven't misspelled anything!)
If you enjoyed this brief iPhone SE review, may I ask you to subscribe to my blog's newsletter or its RSS feed? They are both on site's footer. No spam ever, unsubscribe whenever you want.
Thanks!
- justintoon 4y agoYou spelled "misspelled" correctly, which earns a point in my book because (in a profound display of irony) a lot of native speakers misspell that one!
- troad 4y ago“Misspelt” is the usual UK/Commonwealth spelling, if that’s the spelling you’re referring to. “Misspelled” is the usual North American variant. Both are correct!
- throwaheyy 4y agoLol at the first time an American tried to correct me on this.
- protonbob 4y agoYour English reads very well. I would not have known it wasn't your first language if you hadn't mentioned that you were from Brazil.
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- di3goleite 4y agoGreat post! I loved this reading. Btw, I'm Brazilian too. :D
- soneca 4y agoIt was cool to see your name when reading the post. I follow Manual do Usuário on Twitter and I liked it a lot. The podcast is great as well. Congrats on your work! I am also very happy with my iPhone SE 2nd gen. I only migrated from Android to iOS after they launched a cheap and small model.
- reidjs 4y agoAlso a huge fan of the iPhone SE and will keep buying them until they stop making them. Don’t take my thumb print away from me!!! I write a lot and it’s slightly faster to unlock via thumb (when it works) than face. Also it works in the dark, eg, when you think of something in the middle of the night or when your face is covered. The only way to beat thumbprint is authentication via nfc, for example using a biometric chip in your hand, but that’s not palatable for most ;). Posted on a SE gen 2
- spullara 4y agoFaceID also works in the dark and works with masks. Also works when you have gloves on :)
- rpgbr 4y agoWell, some iPhones work with masks — my girlfriend's iPhone 11 doesn't. Gloves aren't necessary here :) I live in the (allegedly) Brazil's coldest state capital, Curitiba, and you can get through winter here without them.
- jsjohnst 4y ago> Gloves aren't necessary here Gloves are used in more scenarios than just cold weather, motorcycle gloves for one example.
- Aeolun 4y agoWearing motorcycle gloves would make it impossible to touch anything on your screen anyway?
- sssilver 4y agoMost gloves accumulate enough dirt over time for touch to start awkwardly working. Some newer ones have a layer applied to the index finger to make it work. Gloves are not the big problem, my experience is that FaceID is useless when motorcycling because of the helmet.
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoYour english is great. I couldn't even tell it was written by a non-native speaker. Keep writing! You have interesting things to say.
- AzzieElbab 4y agoI would go for cheaper phone but I really value good screen. I read books on my phone. I don’t like owning multiple mobile devices just to read books
- rjzzleep 4y agoI'm not sure where you live and what locale you want, but depending on the LTE bands of your region, the Hisense A9 has a fantastic eink screen. It's a Chinese OS with at parts janky english translation.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoRead a review, that A9 seems fantastic. Made by Nokia or similar and I'd give it a go.
- NonNefarious 4y agoI had no idea. Your English is better than a lot of Web posts from Americans, who can't even spell "too." While I agree that the SE is Apple's best offering for the money, the new one fails hard in one main way: ergonomics. While the original SE (which I still use) has flat sides, the current SE went back to the dumb rounded slippery edges. This is a vestige of Jony Ive stupidity: make the phone ever-thinner, then round the edges so it wants to flip sideways out of your grip at all times. Oh, and make sure the screen isn't recessed at all, so when it does flip out of your grip it is sure to break. Notice that Apple returned to the flat sides on all of its current phones except the SE. It's almost as if they wanted make the SE less appealing. The lack of a Home button on the new iPhones is a massive pain in the ass and a stupid regression, mainly for the lack of Touch ID but also for app-switching.
- rpgbr 4y agoThanks! Yeah, I also prefer the flat sides (miss my old iPhone 5), but SE's rounded one isn't much a problem for me. Maybe I'm too zealous, but in seven years using this type of phone, I've never dropped one. (They dropped for another reasons, such as sliding from a uneven table thanks to the glass back. It survived without any scratch, anyway.)
- gvurrdon 4y agoI would agree - the round edges are a PITA. The glass back makes it very slippery as well. I'm using an 8 Plus still as it has TouchID (I find FaceID far too creepy) and a large screen, which helps with my failing eyesight. It would be excellent to have something like this but with flat edges.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoYour English is excellent, and I was surprised to learn that it’s not your first language!
- emeril 4y agostill rocking my iPhone se 1st gen (though I painstakingly had to change the battery on my own at the beginning of the pandemic...) it's even smaller than the newer ones!
- paul7986 4y agoOnly thing I like about my 2nd iphone SE bought this year (had the 2020 version) is that it has Touch ID. Other then it's trash with low battery life and at times becomes non-responsive like the SE 2020 did. What is wrong with Apple .. every other smartphone has touch id system. Its been five years and Touch ID for me is the best UX. It is grab my phone without even looking at it and it's open. Compared to grab it & swipe up while looking at it which is two steps vs. one. Those two steps while driving is dangerous (chide me all you want cause you use your phone when you drive too .. either sometimes, to a little or a lot)!
- tomcam 4y agoYour English is indistinguishable from that of the top 10% of writers or so. I had no reason to believe you are not a native speaker until you linked to your page with photo samples written in Portuguese.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> I had no reason to believe you are not a native speaker "Now, I decided to give it a shot in another language" and "may I ask you to subscribe to my blog's newsletter or its RSS feed? They are both on site's footer." both read non-native to me; I'd expect a native to say "Now, I've decided..." and "They are both in/on the site's footer". But I agree with everyone else that rpgbr's English is excellent, more than adequate to publish English-language journalism. It is extremely difficult to get all the details of a foreign language right every time, and in most cases it's not a standard worth reaching or worrying about. (And if you do worry about it... practice is the best way to get there.)
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoI want an iPhone SE sized phone with something similar to my Ulefone Power Armor 13's battery life. The Power Armor 13 weights nearly half a kilogram, and because of this I almost never drip it - you certainly know you've got hold of it, and the battery lasts so long I sometimes forget it needs charging till I get a 15% warning somewhere around day four to six.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y agoYour writing is excellent. The grammar is almost flawless (see below). Beyond that, I enjoyed your writing style as well -- strong opening, thoughtful variations in paragraph length and sentence structure, and generally concise and focused. If you are interested in some small feedback to improve a little more: the final three sentences in the article were the only ones where I saw something that could be improved. > I have already argued in the past that I prefer this iPhone model over any newer one, Face ID capable. I'm pretty sure this is grammatically correct as-is. (English is funny like that...) Having said that, the more natural-sounding way for a native-speaker would be to lose the appositive and avoid trying to turn "Face ID" into an adjective. So it would be something like: "I have already argued in the past that I prefer this iPhone model over any newer one with Face ID." > It is perhaps the closest to a perfect gadget I have ever used — no wonder, it is the third “same” device I buy in seven years (before, the iPhone 6S in 2015 and the iPhone 8 in 2017). I'm pretty sure the verb tenses are technically correct, but the last bit is not how a native speaker would write it, and there's an extraneous comma. Instead of saying 'no wonder, it is the the third "same" device I buy in seven years,' a more native-speaker way of writing it would be: 'no wonder it's the third "same" device I've bought in seven years.' (EDIT: I was thinking about this a little more because something about the sequence of words "third same device" still didn't sound quite natural. Iterating, I think it could sound even more natural like: 'no wonder I've bought the "same" device three times over the last seven years.') > If, despite all the rumors, in five years there is a “5th generation iPhone SE” with this same look, but updated internals, it will most likely be my next phone. This sentence is solid and native-sounding as-is. A professional editor, though, might object to the overwhelming number of commas (even though all the commas are grammatically correct!). They might suggest eliminating some of the repetitive clauses and moving things around a bit to make the sentence flow more smoothly. The end result might be something like this: 'If, despite all the rumors, there's a "5th generation iPhone SE" in five years with the same look and another round of updated internals, it will most likely be my next phone.' I hope that's all helpful and not too nitpicky. Like I said, your writing is fantastic as it is! I'm looking forward to reading more.
- stripline 4y agoGreat reply. I agree that the writing in the post is excellent. While we're giving constructive feedback I'd add this sentence: > I cover tech here in Brazil for +10 years and run a +9 years old independent, It should be past tense "I've covered", and in English we do everything backwards so 10+ and 9+ are more natural. So I'd change that to: I've covered tech here in Brazil for 10+ years and run a 9+ years old independent,
- skavi 4y agoI was considering commenting how much I enjoyed your writing style as I was reading the article. I had no idea you were a non-native speaker.
- idle_zealot 4y agoYour English is generally quite good. The one thing I'll note is that I've not seen native speakers use notation like "+10 years" in the context you do. Generally we'd write that as "10+ years" read as "ten-plus years" or ">10 years" read as "over ten years".
- rpgbr 4y agoThanks for the tip! I guess I use “+10 years” because of how we say in Portuguese (“mais de 10 anos”, as the “more than” comes first than the “10 years”).
- oxygenoxy 4y agoI suppose more people would read ">10 years" as "more than 10 years"?
- wbercx 4y agoHow would you interpret “+/- 10 years”?
- wingerlang 4y agoI don’t think they are comparable really. 10+ years means over ten years. +/- 10 years is an addition/subtraction and making a range.
- simonh 4y ago+10 years could be interpreted as 10 years in the future, and makes perfect sense in that context, but -10 years for the past seems weird. I'm not sure why.
- Macha 4y agoAs a margin of error. "this tree was planted 200 years ago, +/- 10 years" -> the tree was planted between 190 and 210 years ago. "this comet will next be seen in 100 years, +/- 10" -> The comet will visible between 90 and 110 years from now.
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- Casteil 4y agoI love my SE 2 - I've had it for ~2.5 yrs now and I'll most likely have it for another 2+. It's a very fast phone, and I like the relatively small form factor compared to most other phones these days that all seem to have colossal screens and are comically large when held up to the ear. I'll also take TouchID any day over FaceID. The one thing that would get me to upgrade before 2+ yrs from now (other than unexpected failure of my SE 2) is a 13 Mini-like iPhone with touchID.
- pantulis 4y agoGreat english, mate. Rock on!
- vizzah 4y agoTry iPhone 13 mini! SE would have been my choice if Apple never released this model. Mini is slightly smaller than SE and it's a crucial factor for me. And it also has more usable screen and where initially I was wary of FaceID - I don't miss the button! :] I hope Apple continues with SE+mini merged model for the future.
- rpgbr 4y agoI considered the 13 Mini, gave up due to two things: it's (really) expensive here in Brazil, and its cameras (or its main camera) isn't noticeable better than the one on SE. I couldn't justify spending the extra money for pretty much the same phone plus some niceties.
- augustk 4y agoThe iPhone 13 Mini has those sharp pocket destroying edges though.
- als0 4y agoAre you for real? The edges are not sharp at all.
- augustk 4y agoNot razor sharp but sharp enough to leave marks on your trousers after some usage. Here is an example: https://i.imgur.com/HZNUoVd.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HZNUoVd.jpg The iPhone SE has completely rounded edges which is more pocket friendly in this regard.