Random thoughts on life
Yesterday Mojang, makers of Microsoft, was bought for a cool $2.5 million. Nice. But what will this mean for the devoted legions of Minecraft fans?
For a start, the creator of Minecraft as well as the other founders are leaving and the developers are being made part of Microsoft Studios. But it’s interesting to contrast the announcements from both companies, as well as spotting what is both said and not said.
The day I got my nice, expensive case for my Nexus 5 I dropped it onto a radiator and took a chunk out of it (the case, that is). It wasn’t designed to be brilliantly protective but it’s thin so adds little to the sveltness of the phone. Never-the-less, it protected my phone from what could have been a rather nasty disaster.
Recently, though, I’ve been getting tired of the “black slab” look and thought a red case would look nice – a nice rich, medium red. Sadly the manufacturers of my case didn’t sell them in that colour and I ended up looking at eBay and, in particular, the cheap ones. Was I being ripped off by fancy packaging? Would a budget case be just as good?
So, after deriding OnePlus for their shoddy distribution practise I’ve gone and bought their phone anyway. How did that happen and how two faced can one man be?
Well, I did what I said I was going to do. I got sick of their method of sending “invites” to buy a phone via competitions. Smashing phones and all sorts were required – basically, hoop jumping. I stopped trying. However, I did get emails from them telling me when they were giving more invites anyway and many of them consisted of nothing more than following them on Facebook and Twitter to be able to enter. I was already following them so I simply had to click a button. That kind of hoop jumping I can do.
None-the-less no one was more surprised than me to get an invitation on Wednesday night but, I have to say, I wrestled with the decision for some time as to whether to buy one or not.
One of the improvements of the PS4 over the PS3 is the ability to use your Facebook avatar. Unfortunately, a rare issue seems to have, recently, started becoming more common – the image refusing to appear.
The OnePlus One looks a fantastic phone – high specifications and a low price, both beating the Google Nexus 5. But I’m not going to buy one now, even though I was very, very interested.
For those unaware, OnePlus is a new Chinese phone company (but another one, named Oppo, is behind it) but one that doesn’t want to compromise – hence the high specifications. The phone is quite a monster too with a 5.5″ screen (getting perilously close to being a “phablet”) with a 1920 x 1080 resolution. A fast quad processor is on board along with 3GB of memory. It runs the CyanogenMod version of Android and comes in various colours, and both 16GB and 64GB models. You can pick up the 16GB model for £239 or the 64GB version at £269.
