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Huawei P10 – Beyond the nuts and bolts

Posted by: hvincent@gmail.com Posted on: October 12, 2017 , ,

With all the latest techs and trends in mobile phones in recent years I found it extremely complicated to get real unbiased opinion on phones and manufacturers. We carry these little tech beasts day in day out with no real need of featuring the bits and bytes of every single feature.  As of the past couple of years I was mainly an Iphone user and that worked all fine.  But the one irritant I was reaching was the obligatory requirement to be attached to Apple devices.  In comes the Huawei P10.  Being almost identical in size as me previous fruit phone, this would be a game changer.

 First off the battery life, with normal use I was able to get over 2 days of use before the battery would die down. Never ever got that with my other phone.  Secondly once it did run out, the Included Supercharger took care of giving me back a full 100% within 2 hours.

 

The Android 7.0 installed paired with the EMUI 5.1 makes for a soft simple feel to the user interface.  One extremely appreciated feature on on this phone has got to be the camera system Huawei partnered with Leica to include a top of the line camera in this unit without breaking the bank.  The back camera uses a dual lens system to deliver tack sharp images and high quality video.  As for the the front camera aka selfie cam, it’s a nice 8mp camera with a F1.9 aperture so low light isn’t an issue.

 

There are so many more great features on this phone i’m yet to discover and to be real honest I haven’t missed the Iphone as of yet.  They do offer the Plus version of the same phone which among others bell and whistles resembles the size of Plus versions of other manufacturers.

At the end of the day, Huawei the 30+ years old chinese manufacturer has delivered quite a nice quality build and speedy phone.  As I write this i’m aware that they are soon to launch the Huawei Mate10  Hopefully will be able to test it out, if anything comparable to the quality of the P10 it’s a Shoe in.

 

Cutting the cord 2 years into it.

Posted by: hvincent@gmail.com Posted on: September 22, 2017

Well it’s been now 2 solid years into our cord cutting process and I can’t thank myself enough for taking this action plan to reality.

Being a little scared at first with the fact of losing out on the local sports broadcasts, being a big Habs “Montreal Canadiens” fan, cutting the cord did represent going in the dark for some games.  Luckily Sportsnet aka Rogers  ehanced the Over the air experience by adding games on the Local Citytv broadcast.  Happy to say that I havent missed many games thus far and the playoffs are just around the corner.

 

Having developed a real passion for OTA “Over the air” television mainly for the savings and not being dependent on anyone telling me what I need as a viewer.  I reached out to Antennas direct to put one of their antennas to a Real world test in Quebec.  Running a quick test you can see that all local stations have emitters for OTA that are roughly 16km’s away from the test location and US stations as: NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox are much further 138km’s away.

The review environment of the ClearStream 1 Convertible with a VHF Retrofit Kit.

The Clearstream 1 is directly connect with a 4ft Coax to a HD-homerun 3 made by Silicon Dust.  I did do Outdoors and Indoor tests with the unit as this is a Outdoor/Indoor antenna.

Below you will see exactly the results from the unit showing 3 important figures.  Signal level, Signal Quality, Symbol quality.  The result are pretty interesting for a one time 69$ purchase. No additional monthly fees.  Yes Free once you buy the antenna.

Indoor Results Outdoor Results
Real RF channel Miles From emitter Signal Strength Signal Quality Symbol quality Signal Strength Signal Quality Symbol quality
29 9.3 40 0 0 54 72 100
47 10.1 49 46 85 64 89 100
10 10.3 81 0 0 97 100 100
12 10.3 89 65 100 96 100 100
35 10.3 63 0 0 82 100 100
15 10.3 73 77 100 87 100 100
49 10.3 43 0 0 70 95 100
26 11.4 74 63 100 86 100 100
38 59.9 35 0 0 42 – –
22 85.9 41 0 0 44 43 –
14 85.9 41 0 0 57 55 100
32 85.9 33 0 0 36 – –
43 85.9 25 0 0 27 – –
13 85.9 60 0 0 49 – –

To the untrained Eye this wont mean much but here is the easy version.

Although the Clearstream 1 can be used inside the results thrive when hooked up outdoors.  In total, outdoors the Clearstream 1 was able to pull in 19 Channels for free.  Radio-Canada, CBS, CBC, TVA, CTV, global tv, ABC, NBC, Tele-quebec, PBS, fox and City.  I do need to mention the US stations come in and out possibly better positioning and using an amplifier would solve this.

The image quality on the strong local channels is unsurpassed by any of the Cable co’s or Satellite / Fiber offerings.  This is TRUE HD, non compressed.

This being said the Antennas Direct Clearstream 1(In Canada the item # is C1C-CA) is more than a viable solution for anyone looking to fetch local channels from 30-40 km’s away, this is by using it straight out of the box.

Hook up, Scan and enjoy Free HD TV.