Taken on my new phone Samsung Galaxy S2 using the ‘Camera 360′ camera software.

New phone time!  I was certain that i was going to wait for the new Blackberry Torch or maybe iPhone 5,  i’ve had android phones before (Hero (great) and Milestone (hated it)) but didn’t think i’d go back to one.  Then i read up on the new S2 and i was sold.  It arrived a couple of days ago and i’m just blown away by the speed of the thing!

Initial impressions – unbelievably light. In one way that’s a good thing because it helps cancel out the physical size of it. Huge and heavy might have felt a bit cumbersome.  On the other hand, it’s hard to believe this is a premium device. It’s plastic and the back cover is wafer thin.  Looking at it you wouldn’t think it was a £500 + phone.  That is until you switch it on!

Stock Camera

The screen is wonderful. A 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display. Videos look amazing on it and if you’re a camera freak like me then it’s brilliant for shooting photographs and video. Photo’s by the way are 8 megapixel and video is 1080 full HD.  I’m going to start using it in place of my point and shoot camera to see how i get on.  I’ll miss the zoom but i’m interested to see how well it does.

Touchwiz is pretty funky (Samsung’s equivalent of HTC’s Sense). I think HTC has some nicer widgets but Samsung’s aren’t to be sniffed at either.  Besides which you can customise the hell out of your homes creens via the marketplace anyway.  The phone is very responsive and no matter how many apps i open it never seems to lag!  I can’t get my head around that because i’m so used to using task managers to end tasks to free up memory and speed up the phone a bit.

I’ve done one test video and i’m pleasantly surprised with the results.  It’s no HD camcorder replacement but for a phone it’s pretty darn impressive!  I really like the camera too, it’s quite advanced and there’s plenty of tweakery to be done in there.  There’s an action mode which i assumed was for sports shots but it’s not.  Instead it takes several pictures of a moving subject and blends them into one picture.  Very clever.  Here’s a sample video i did this afternoon:

I updated the firmware last night which i think has fixed the screens auto brightness behaving erratically but the wifi signal seems weak and GPS takes a while to lock on.  I’ll update after a bit more tinkering.

As a buyer i’ve never really had a problem using eBay but now that i am a seller it’s a whole different story! eBay is all for the customer and the sellers get whipped left, right and center. The first thing i found out is that a buyer can leave a seller a negative feedback but a seller isn’t allowed to do so for a buyer.  How is that fair?  I am currently dealing with a nightmare customer.  She made an order over a week ago, left off vital bits of information from her order (and mis-spelled a lot of it) and so i’ve sent her 4 messages over the length of a week asking her to confirm. Last night i get an email “where is my order”.

Stupid woman! A quick check of her feedback shows that as a seller she has received negative feedback for communication. Now the worrying thing is, even though the delay of this order is her fault, she can leave me a negative feeback and rate me low scores for delivery. Enough of those and eBay will restrict my selling or even ban me completely. Again – how is that fair!?

The fact is there are a lot of people using eBay who are either computer illiterate or just plain illiterate (or both) – this woman clearly never checks her messages, maybe she doesn’t know how to. She’s not alone either, i get lots of communication from people who write like a three year old.  My source of income depends on these people not being daft. Yes. I’m screwed.

I don’t trust eBay one bit. I tried to contact their customer support the other day about what i believe was an unfair rating.  Someone rated me ’1′ for item as described even though my feedback is 100% positive – that didn’t add up to me so i asked them about it.  I may as well have asked for instructions on how to perform brain surgery.  One good thing though, i was then sent a survey where i had to rate both the service and the individual who ‘helped’ me.  Yes, i went to town.

So i’m creating a backup – i’m setting up my shop on its own website.  I will also set up a presence on eBid (smaller operation but cheaper too). Once that is done i will also set up a shop on Facebook. I do hope that one day Facebook creates its own shop, they have the potential to slap eBay down and maybe make them rethink their unfair policies and outrageous fees.  Now the fees i didn’t mind at first because i thought i was getting a great service.  Ha!  It’s disgusting the way that eBay operate. I expect much better service from them when i’m giving them at least £110 a month in fees.

Well it finally arrived. Sony said they would send me an email so that i could track its delivery once it got to Europe but that never happened. I had an email over a week ago telling me it had been built and had been sent to Europe and that was the last i heard until it turned up on my doorstep today. Anyway, never mind, it’s here now and it’s fabulous! I’ll have a good old play on it and then jot down a few thoughts afterwards but initially i’m pleased at how solid it feels. It seems much better built that my Dell laptop.

UPDATE: Well i am loving this mean green vaio machine! The backlit keyboard is brilliant, i can honestly say that i’d never want to go back to a non-backlit keyboard now. It also feels very sturdy as does the whole laptop.  The sound from the little speakers is quite low but it doesn’t sound tinny. The screen is lovely, i use photoshop daily for my work and the colour, brightness and size is spot on (for a portable laptop). I tried a BlueRay (Avatar) and it looked amazing!

The glow is weird, i can’t explain it. You know how glow-in-the-dark materials look in the dark? Well this looks like that during the day! It’s ever so strange but a really nice effect. The mouse pad always looks like it’s lit up even though it isn’t. The fan is very quiet – i have the power mode set to balanced and i hardly ever hear it.  I’ve been using it for 1 hour 30 minutes on the battery and the indictor is telling me i have another 2 hours and 2 minutes left. This has been browsing and about 15 minutes in photoshop.

The 1GB graphic card i *think* is supposed to switch itself automatically depending on what you’re doing. I’m not really a computer gamer apart from World of Warcraft but that looks much MUCH better than on my Dell laptop (which has a 512mb graphic card). So anyway, i’m very pleased with this laptop, it’s definately the best one i’ve ever had and would probably go for Sony again.

The weather not me. Been a really nice day today. You can tell Summer is on it’s way!