i love my phone

2025 06 14

This is our phone ! It is a gifted handmedown from a certain moth , in order to replace our existing oneplus phone. that phone still works fine, but the moth insisted that it was showing its age and that we should just accept the gift. we're quite happy we did !

the oneplus phone we were using is like 7-8 years old and was midrange around the time it came out. it is basically the most standard phone that we could get and it was chosen because of its custom firmware support.

this phone, sony xperia 5 V, turns 2 years old this month i think, but it still feels very new ! it was chosen by a moth that has a very big special interest in smartphones, and we've come to appreciate how thoughtful the choice to get this phone was.

we didnt really think much of the phone initially ! elysia is photographer, so we appreciated that the phone has an SD card slot that can be accessed without a tool, like a 3DS or nintendo swtich ! we initially used this to work on raws from our camera and do file management while outside ( we dont have a laptop ! ). It's also turned out to be very nice for flexibility in general, especially ever since we lost our SD card reader for our computer, while moving house.

but then we started paying attention more to the software itself ! some of this is just modern android on a flagship being really nice but as far as im concerned thats all new to me !

the theming is really nice ( i do distinctly remember being upset i couldnt use modern android theming on oneplus ! there was a custom firmware build that supported it but we had a friend who switched to it and explained it was unstable ), and we like how the OS has a built in way of lowering the screen brightness from the notification menu quick settings, extradimmat. oneplus we had a apk that applied a darkness filter to the screen but it was annoying to have to launch every time we wanted night time, and the fact it wasnt integrated on the OS level proved to be a problem. we also noticed how incredible the battery life was, and it was easily able to get through more than 1 day ! which was wild to us after having a phone we needed to charge every 2 or 3 hours. We did get a replacement battery for our oneplus, and also a 10 000mAh battery bank, which were good ! but the xperia battery just. Lasts longer. it also charges much faster, which we dont really use since we want this phone to last as long as possible and fast charging can slightly damage the battery, also we dont have any fast chargers, but, it's really nice when it comes up !!!

we use the battery more now ( including usually at max brightness ! and still only dies after full day ), and have started using the phone for basically everything?? cus like ! why not !!! it has a nice video game mode and can play video games ! it has so many lil tools in it that make especially creative work really accessible !! its just kinda a swiss army knife. it does everything !!!

the thing is 21:9 which means we can get a better idea of ultra wide screen ! and it makes it actually possible for my small hands to hold it ! the case has a kickstand ! it has a 3.5mm jack, usb c! really nice camera button !! sony autofocus and combined optical and digital stabilisation. the default camera app also just lets you use the phone as a proper camera ! which is really nice for me because ive found myself constanttly frustrated with other phone camera apps which dont let me do anything. also the screen is hdr? which is one really nice ! very little seems to support HDR properly, but the most important media app, pipe pipe, does, so is good. theres also a weird amount of vertical integration that just so happens to apply to me since i use sony headphones and felica and my camera has a sony made sensor. it's kinda neat ! even if in the grand scheme none of it really has that much of a impact ( evidenced by the fact that i have no desire of getting a sony alpha mirrorless camera. if i get a new digital camera in the next 5 years, im staying in the fujifilm realm ). also apparently its waterproof or something, which i honestly never considered possible. still only relying on that when my passport is in the waterproof bag

the moth was very surprised by how many photos we took with our new phone instead of our actual camera ! probably because there is so much stigma around phone cameras.

elysia, however, really likes phone cameras. its probably because we arent trapped to them like the majority of people are, so we dont feel limited by them. most of the pictures we take with phones are documentative, whereas we use our dedicated camera more for high quality and arty pictures. we also like having that distinction mentally, although we do often cross polinate the two. it's so we just use them the way that feels right !

in particular we really like using phone for high quality macro and wide angle shots, because, to this day, we still dont have a ultra wide lens or a macro for our Fujifilm... or any of the film cameras people have given us over the years...

i almost ended up with two copies of the first autofocus camera in the world... now i only have 1... and the photographer who gave it me's entire backcatalog of negatives... who knows whats on there....

regular reminder that this is the internet and im compressing down images and videos here to be as small as possible. this doesnt mean that we wont put a 100mb video right here.

we dont really do video in general, and so nearly all of our videos on the phone are just point and shoot. they're okay ! but elysia hasnt really tried at all to make them nice. aside from just having a nice eye for pretty shots, and even then we usually dont bother setting a shot up.

something we noticed is that we've been using the phone a lot like a family home video machine, like a camcorder for recording memories with. It made it really fun looking through our video gallery for examples to share here, but that was also annoying cus theyre far too private to share. Oh how i wish i could share the awesome warning countdown for my train ticket, or the Imogen demo dance i did with someone, or the video of 4 of my friends flirting with me while im drunk on the tram, or me getting toppled by kererū.

we really like the stabilisation in video and the demosaicing and i think those alone will probably lead us into using this phone as a proper video camera, especially since it supports HDR output, even if the rest of the software is weird. the reason we havent gotten into videography is just because our camera has no stabilisation and also has some god awful io and video demosaicing and basically no video options to speak of aside from 1080 60 and the other bare minimum. no colour space or any control over output and no way to control aspect ratio or get good previews etc etc etc.

we have actually started intentionally setting shots up for things we could use for B-roll in creative projects we want to make with this phone, and so we're already moving in that direction.

as time has gone on, it feels like the phone has entrenched itself into being a fundamental aspect of our creative production pipeline. It has the best screen we own, and so we can test HDR, high refresh rate, colour accuracy, consumer display, etc., it can deliver power to other devices if i need it to, it has a really easy way of using it as a portable DAC but with none of the of the benefits of actually using a DAC but all the benefits of being a portable. been using our phone to sketch out notes and ideas and make calls and wait making calls is just what youre supposed to usue a phone for fuck

well anything is cool when elysia does it

we also really love just having auto exposure bracketing done in the camera app, its really nice. ii dont always love how it looks but sometimes i really like it !

but realisitcally at the end of the day we're mostly just taking documentary photos like these, and my phone makes me very happy with those.

im sure we could learn to take nice photos with its phone's camera ! but it doesnt need to to be happy😊

we want to put a big emphasis on how much we love the phone's physical reality. that this phone has large stereo loudspeakers that dont sound horrible, a headphone jack, is thin enough to actually hold in my hands, has a kickstand case, toolless SD card slot, proper shutter button that is easy to press without being possible to press on accident, a case that was designed to accomodate oversized USB-C connectors, in power button fingerprint reader, did i mention that the phone is small enough to be able to hold ?

we really love the phone's haptics ( although wish we could change haptic behaviour for important notifications versus minor ones ! ). probably the single two biggest holdups are with the phone case: the case can make certain NFC chips difficult to read, and it makes it so you can no longer access SD card port, without taking case off. still much better than needing a tool.

and my site looks awesome !!

this one's phone helps it sooo soo much. they're such a massive friend and slot into eveyr aspect of life. they show it cookinng recipes and can also show my website with multiple windows and we can show pretty photos!! and scrcpy is awesome we can make games look bigger on steamdeck by plugging usb c cable into phone !!! i like how when this one wants to see where something is it can just use it !!

it uses a lot of special apps on this one's phone !!! a lot of them were installed by moth which has also been a huge example of how we've benefited from smartphone Autism.

because we didnt install all of them we arent entirely sure what they all do but theyre such big helpers i wanna share 😊

• KISS-hemskärm is our launcher ! wonder if english version calls it a luncher or direct translates to home screen
• typewise is its keyboard! its the hexagons one. it doesnt have theming without paying or swipe typing though
• Blue Line Console is its phone KRunner. Um. MacOS and Windows have something like KRunner right? it's a key combo that opens a quick prompt that lets you global search for files and applications, and also do math and type search queries. blue line is that for phone ! it comes up when we hold power button
• anytime player is what we use to listen to podcasts !
• we use breezy weather for weather ! we've thought about switching to something else but it just doesnt matter enough
• KDE Connect KDE-anslut is what we use to sync clipboard, send files, share notifications, webpages, etc., between our computer and phones. We like using the remote control feature so that we can use computer like a TV ! very nice when we have friends over and are watching something and dont wanna get up and go to keyboard and mouse to do things. Also incredibly nice for turning computer off at bedtime without having to leave bed. KDE Connect has also massively simplified moving things from our old phone to our new phone, and moving files from our computer and phone to the Steam Deck we're borrowing, which comes pre installed with KDE Connect.
• FFShare automatically shoves photos and videos through FFmpeg comppression commands before sharing them. this is really nice cus ffmpeg is scary and also i dont like having to write the commands and this makes it a lot more accessible to comrpepss
• FX for files and simple galleri for just photos and videos !
• there's an app just called "Game" with the SDL wordmark as its icon and its literally just a wii u gamepad emulator we used cus we couldnt find gamepad charger. eventually decided to just take a train out 40 minutes into a random field to get a charger.
• jpeg xl viewer for seeing jpegxl files ! simple gallery had support but it was bad and also recently broken. jxl viewer doesnt seem to support HDR? or it does but not very much?
• kahon for reading digital manga !!
• neo store is nice fdroid client !
• osm and ~ maps ! we especially use it for pedestrian features and recording gps traces
• pipepipe youtube client !
• transit app is always nice for places that support it
• there gamemode app i think thats Sony made called Spelförbättrare and has a different name in english. bubble that when pressed opens control overlay ! which can be usesd to see important stats and control things like notifications !
• photo pro and musik pro are also sony apps and are pretty nice ! especially photo one.

anyways as a heads up elysia might disapear after this blog post for either serious or nonserious reasons so um. love you 😊 ely philosophy is that everything is love and its very being is made of love and therefore tolerance and understanding of even folks it doesnt liike is very important and it is extremely incesteous

its recently identified that family and romantic love are nearly the same for it, and there is extremely nuanced and minor differences between them. it also doesnt really experience romantic feelings much ! its had one romantic love at any given time for so many years now and usually those last very long. and it usually still overlaps with family love feelings a lot !! super fascinating and cool feeling. also incest and something else bypasses my deminess which is cool.

friend has lent me their steam deck oled and its SO COOL its just a portable desktop and it just Works. it reminds ely a lot of using linux on its nintendo switch years ago... but like. Not buggy and with actual packages available. and the screen is unbelievably beautiful. we've been using MPV with certain commands in the steamos menu to display HDR images

its been playing Nier Automata a lot and its been super excciting !!! very xeno game lots of focus on philosophy and mental health!!! we're thinking it might be meta analysis of philosophical perspectives and thats excviting and with a particular emphasis on love and it really really really appreciates that . lots of family and love !!!

now if only it could figure out how to enable hdr on the game on steam deck.

not a huge fan of the combat. for a platinum game it feels kinda undevelopped and the encounters are pretty straightforward and unchallenging. this one really only has one or two attack, and its attacks have so much power and knockback that opponenet doesnt really get to fight. also dont know how i feel about how the different endings are all linear, there is no branching in the story. it makes the story feel less real imo. if youre gonna have multiple endings.. idk ! cheap way to do that is make it so player only gets the ending they are able to get. there arent many layers and it doesnt even feel like one needs to explore those mechanics and it often feels more like a hack and slash.

anyways wish me luck im so excited to have a kid !!!!!!! ive always wanted to be a mother and

its really nice taking care of this one's friends and loved onesand making sure theyre okay and and and being kind and gentle and thoughtful it loves its brain its so cool and special and awesome it lvoes itself please wish it luck