Category: battery

Focal Spark wireless bluetooth earphone unboxing and review

Introduction

In my quest for a good pair of earphones, you will have already noticed that I experienced with many of them here and here. During this journey I chanced across a suggestion from a friend on the Focal brand and the fact they were selling their earphones at a discount on Amazon.

Since the offer was too good to resist, I purchased these online.

Unboxing video

Here is a little unboxing I created for you to understand what the packaging of the earphone looks like.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/257Ei2DYDRf54sRn6

 

Strong points

The Focal Spark has these pros going for it

  • Very easy to wear for long hours

  • short cable means lesser tangling unlike the Samsung UFlex

  • Good sound quality – bit of muddy bass, but largely good distributions of highs mids and lows

  • Very good battery standby time – you charge it once and when you don’t use it the earphones does not lose battery power too soon – this is in stark contrast to the Uflex earphones from samsung which used to annoy me during the middle of that long walk

  • Charging is quick and gives full charge that does not let you down anywhere

  • You can pair two different phones to this earphone over bluetooth at same time (which could be a boon or a bane)

Weak points

The Focal Spark like any other earphones has few cons that I noticed during my usage which I will like to point out here

  • The wire is a tad bit too short, it needs to be about 20% longer to fit better

  • The earphone is best suited for music but not necessarily phone calls, I did have a feedback that the phone calls were not pretty clear. You can check that here.

  • The earbuds are a bit tight so wearing them for longer hours means it will feel like your ears are blocked. This is exactly where the Airpods do better. They are there and not there at the same time.

  • The bass was not exactly clear and was a bit muddy. Focal has still some way to go to beat Bullets V2 by OnePlus.

  • The asking price of 7000/- is not exactly less, but right now you can bag a pair for close to 3000/- which makes it either a steal or well, unpopular as the case maybe!

  • It comes with micro usb charging which is not so 2018, but this was not such a downer for me, would have still preferred usb-C which is quite the standard these days.

Conclusion

IMG_0433

In conclusion, these are an excellent pair of wireless earbuds for music purposes if not exactly phone calls. The buds have excellent battery life, and are good to hear and use. They are comfortable over long hours of wear and you just need to find an eartip of the size that suits you better. Having said that, for the current price on offer, this is a steal, and you should go for it !

Huawei Honor Pro 8 – Five reasons you must buy it

In my last post I mentioned my experiences with the Huawei Honor Pro 8 in the first 24 hours of me buying it. In this post I wish to cover the good bits of the phone which are impressive enough to make a case to purchase it. So let’s then get down to business, shall we?

Camera

The dual lens camera is 12MP + 12MP RGB + Monochrome. What this means is professional quality fo pictures taken. The icing on the cake is wide aperture mode which allows you to adjust the aperture after the photo is taken which gives your images like what is shown below. The depth of field can be adjusted post taking the shot.

And trust me the camera is good. I mean really good. Almost close to Samsung which is the industry benchmark till now. Take a look yourself.

Battery

The 4000 mAH battery is there for a reason. For many people charging in between the day is a bit of hassle. For me too. This in spite of me having a 20000 mah power bank, a wireless charger and a fast charger with me always. Still the thought of battery dying down is irritating. Tugging cables along, scrambling for that cable to get that extra bit of juice – well all this is history with the Honor 8 Pro.

For the records, if i have 100% at 9am I still have 5% at 12am – a full 15 hours later. This is under heavy use – WhatsApp, videos on FB, hangout calls, phone calls, Virtual Reality video, Email sync, browsing, Wifi, LTE, Navigation – literally everything. Of course I am not a gamer but I think the phone would do well even if gaming were to be considered in the mix. Overall for the battery – a very big thumbs up !!

Virtual Reality viewer

The Honor 8 Pro doubles as a VR viewer and Google cardboard videos look great on this viewer. My only grouse is that the casing for the phone could have been more sturdier in some manner but you cannot expect more for free. This aside the Jaunt VR application is awesome and it tracks your eye movements to operate buttons within which is super cool. The lens kept falling off but hey like I said before – if its free I cannot complain much you see 🙂

Storage and RAM

128GB storage and 6GB memory – at a full 7000 INR undercutting 1+5. Period – Enough said. If you have to know more details, the OS itself seems to take about 20GB leaving a little over 100GB for other stuff – but hey again – nothing to complain here.

Huawei’s RAM management is very strict and background process sync is controlled and throttled. For me this is a big plus. I am not a big fan of too much of sync happening over the background so this works well for me. Kudos again.

Sound output

I compared the sound output of Honor 8 pro vs the iPhone SE – a rather unlikely bunch to compare against. But still I connected these over bluetooth to my Beats Pill + bluetooth speaker. And no prizes for guessing who wins in terms of overall fidelity here. The honor goes to the Honor 8 pro. The separation of treble and bass and all the frequencies is very even across the band and its accoustically appealing.

The iPhone on the other hand was not so clearly separate with the tones and the difference is telling. You can listen to yourself.

Honor 8 pro & Beats Pill+

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_BkTHoP121yUDl1LTgyMU14WXM/view?usp=sharing

Apple iPhone SE & Beats Pill+

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_BkTHoP121yckpTWk1Td21xMVE/view?usp=sharing

Other stuff

Fast charging – Awesome again – not much heating of the phone, in about an hour we are ready to go with full charge. Good job here.

24 hours with the Huawei Honor 8 Pro

I am hating to write lengthy reviews these days, and wanted to write this post a bit more differently. I just bought a Honor 8 pro from Huawei and wanted to bring up some of the things about this phone in this article. What better way is there rather than letting pictures speak for themselves …. So shall we jump in then ?

Phone Body

The front is made of Gorilla Glass, and I was expecting the rear of the phone to be glass as well but it seems to be made of ceramic or plastic which is not matte. Bottom line is that the front surface is extremely reflective, and the rear – very very slippery. The rear is also a fingerprint magnet which is no good again.

If you are not careful with this phone, you are bound to drop it very very easily. So a case and a strong tempered glass is absolutely essential. I happened to have the bad luck of letting it slip from my hand, but with not much damage except for a bit of scratches on the screen guard which was supplied.

Fingerprint scanner

This is one of the fastest implementation of the fingerprint scanner. I can confidently say its faster than Apple too. Place your finger on the “Backside” of the phone and you see the home screen or the app you were at when locked in a fraction of a second. Nothing more. But there is a flipside of this implementation.

You need to reach out to the backside of the phone always and in some situations you will not be able to do so and you will feel stuck. This is the reason rear finger print scanners are not always good.

The lack of a dedicated home button on the front means you need to always lift the phone and fumble to find that fingerprint sensor or type that long passcode to open the phone. Pretty irritating. Sorry Huawei – no marks for this.

The lack of double tap to open the screen to on state is also a sorely missed feature. A double tap does not do anything but a reverse knock on the screen takes a screenshot.

Display

Frankly even though the 5.7” QHD display is of 515 ppi pixel density, what is more interesting is the brightness of the display is very questionable in sunlight. So much so when the setting was to be at auto, and display at max brightness, I still couldn’t see a thing on the screen. You can see for yourself.

Indoor with auto setting

Display is clear and no issues reading stuff in this situation

Outdoor with auto setting – shade

Very very refective, but could see the screen though not very clearly. You need to have a viewing angle which is suitable for your eyes.

Outdoor with auto setting – in direct sunlight

You feel like throwing this phone away. Period. Nothing visible. My Samsung Note 5 was much better in this department. See for yourself.

Other Nifty Features

There are some other nifty features on this phone which I found good and useful and would be reasons for you to consider this phone. Let’s look at them one by one

Easy mark as read for messages

Even though this is not so much of a deal breaker, nevertheless it makes life so easy to swipe left and say mark as read by tapping once or twice max.

Info folder for SMS

These days we get lots of informative messages from Banks, notifications from Amazon, and so on… Huawei has decided to put these into an info folder for easy reference. Something I liked a lot.

Swipe down search

Pretty nifty as it is in the iPhone. Swipe down on home screen and you can search for your favorite apps. Was not the case with Note 5 from Samsung as it had two levels to reach to get there which was extremely annoying.

In another post I will talk about the selling point of this phone – its Camera & Battery, and we will compare Sound outputs between Honor and Apple on bluetooth.

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