…and in with the new.
I bought myself a new phone. I had my old one (a Huawei P30 Pro) since July 2019, so at five years old it was becoming a little tardy. The battery was still OK, but it was getting a bit long in the tooth. So I decided (a while ago, actually) to get a new phone.
Long story (and it is a long story!) short, Huawei don’t appear to be making phones any longer. Well not the one I wanted (P60 Pro) anyway, so I looked around for something else. That something else was an Xiaomi 14 Ultra.
Shopping around
It is a bit unfortunate about Huawei. I’ve had Huawei phones for years and I’ve had no issues with them (Scarlett Johansson told me to buy one, after all!) so not being able to get one (through legitimate channels without paying a fortune) was a bit of a blow.
I spent a couple of months looking at other makes on and off. Pixel, Samsung, Nokia, Sony and Motorola. I looked at phablets, smartphones and flip phones. There are many phones on the current market and there are many, many manufacturers. Manufacturers that I’d never heard of.
Deciding to stick with the main smartphone manufacturers, I embarked on a voyage of discovery lasting several weeks, reading reviews and comparing specifications from various models of phone.
Not Apple?
Absolutely not Apple. I had the unfortunate experience of an iPhone several years ago and I will never, ever buy another. That is some overpriced proprietary crap that I’m not prepared to waste any money, or any time on. (In my opinion, obviously.)
What do you want, then?
I’ve come to the conclusion that the quality of photograph that camera phones take nowadays far exceed the quality that my old digital SLR yeilds. And of course phones are easier to use, as a) you don’t have to cart heavy SLR equipment around with you, or b) spend five minutes setting up your shot. Nope. Just point and shoot, literally. Obviously, I’m talking holiday snaps here, not the serious stuff (that I never do!)
So there’s that (a good camera) and of course the space to store the photos before offloading them.
I’ll also need some space for my music. I listen to music from my phone a great deal, so having the space to store my pretentious audiophilic FLAC files is a must.
Oh, and it has to make calls, run WhatsApp, have texting (because that’s still a thing) and all that peripheral malarkey as well. Probably a given, those.
Xiaomi
I looked at the Xiaomi products a few times. I kept going back to their UK website and looking at the various phones they have on offer.
Incidentally: Xiaomi make and sell a lot of electrical equipment! And I mean a lot. From air fryers to toothbrushes to phones and even luggage.
The more I read about the Xiaomi 14 Ultra, the more I liked it. It looked like a very high spec Leica camera (similar to the Huawei models) and had lots of storage and processing power. They do a black model with 512Gb of storage and 16Gb RAM for just shy of 1200 of your finest English Pounds.
They also make a photography add-on kit, with an extra battery built on and a very smart looking vegan leather case.
I thought “Yes. I’ll have that”.
And have it I did. Ordered directly from their UK website the phone was delivered to my doorstep within two days.
Has it met expectations?
The phone runs Android 15, with Xiaomi’s Hyper O/S layered on top. Everything looks pretty familiar, with most things where they were on my old P30. It’s very fast, too!
I spent a few hours loading apps, data and setting up all the little things that make the phone personal to me.
And I have to say that I’m very happy with it. It does all the stuff I want it to, and it does very quickly indeed. Some stuff has even been improved (such as location services: it now actually knows where I am!). Battery life is about on a par with the P30: I can get a couple of days out of it before recharging. Charging is a joy though, as the phone comes with a 100w fast charger, which bring it from dead to usable in just a few minutes.
The photography kit is excellent! It adds a nice little grip (containing a supplementary battery) with a button and rotary toggle that allows you to turn the camera on quickly and zoom in and out. It also adds a lanyard – very handy for grip security when walking, to avoid dropping the phone!
Of course, not everything is rosy.
Well of course not. But what follows are personal gripes. These couple of things are – in my opinion – irritating. Anyone else probably wouldn’t care.
Google and Google Services
The Huawei P30 that I had was the last Huawei phone to have any Google Services loaded on it by default. In short – a decision by the US Government in 2019 decreed that Huawei needed a special licence (for which they had to pay) in order to supply phones with Google Services on them. Huawei objected and removed Google from their phones (and replaced it with their own app store). Other countries followed suit (including the UK) and Huawei phones were supplied fromk then on sans Google.
Now I quite like that. I have to say that although I use Google Services, I don’t use very many. I have no interest in Chrome or Maps, or Drive, Photos, Music… the list goes on. I use Google Play (for apps) and might do the occasional Google search (I use DuckDuckGo primarily) but that’s about it. If those services aren’t available, there are plenty of alternatives you can use.
It’s not that I don’t like them, or consider them to be insecure. Google can be set up very securely (if necessary), they wouldn’t have survived this long in the business of internetting if they weren’t. It’s about choice and it’s about bloat.
All Google Services are pre-loaded on your phone by default. Unfortunately, they don’t give you the option to remove them. So you have application space and bloat on your phone, unused, in the background consuming space. Space that I could be using for something else. The ones I don’t use (all bar Play, mainly) I’ve disabled: but I had to physically waste time doing that in the first place.
I am of course fully aware that there are alternative operating systems that are Google-free out there, but my phone is new and under warranty. So I won’t be replacing that O/S just yet.
Incidentally: I thought about replacing the Google-orientated O/S on the P30, but (ironically) it's now too old and is unsupported for the major alternative O/S's like LineageOS and CalyxOS. Bugger.
The Always-on Display
I’ll do a separate post on the Always-on Display. Because this has irritated me no end!
It’s not always-on.
Conclusion
Aside from those two things that no-one would care about but me, I’m very pleased with my new phone. I can see at least two or three years use out of this one with no problem and it’s one I would recommend.
To end with, here are two “fun facts”:
- The US Government argued with Huawei and eventually had them remove Google from their phones. The President that initiated that process was Donald Trump in 2019.
- The phone came with a free gift. I was expecting to get a smart watch, or a pen. I got a full-size robot vacuum cleaner: an Xiaomi Robot Vacuum Cleaner X20+ to be exact. It vacuums and mops. It’s also provided me with hours of fun setting it up and using it. On top of that, it’s worth 300 of your finest English Pounds if you were to purchase it today. Although I wouldn’t recommend it as your primary method of cleaning your house, it doesn’t do a bad job of it. Thank you Xiaomi!