Earlier this year, my trusty and much beloved Nexus 5 broke, and I suddenly found myself in the market for a new phone. I knew I did not want a Samsung, for reasons that are mostly related to the additional malware installed on them, and I could not get a new Nexus through the office’s vendor. A friend seemed happy with her Z1, and the Z3 was getting good reviews, so I decided to put my dislike of all things Sony aside, and got an Xperia.

I must say, I don’t regret this. The Z3 runs Lollipop, and has some Sony bundleware on it to push their media empire, but it is mostly unobtrusive and feels almost like a stock Google phone.

My worries about the quality of Sony hardware were also unfounded. It seems that the Ericsson engineering is showing in this device, with a great touch screen and far superior battery life than my Nexus had. I get almost 5 days of standby or two says of active use from a charge. That is after disabling mobile data, since I am on WiFi at least 80% of any given day anyhow, so YMMV on this, but I sure like not having battery anxiety towards the end of every day like I did with virtually all previous Android phones that I have owned.

I have recently discovered Pocket Reader, and I am getting a lot of value from it. I noticed that I tend to have a lot of open tabs, both on my phone and in Chrome, that are “I will read this later”, and now I just store that into Pocket for later reading. It makes those pages available offline on my phone, so I can catch up on my reading on the bus or plane when I don’t have a network, which is great. Also, when I read something good, it’s always there in the archived posts for me to find later. So this app has conveniences that RSS readers don’t, and in fact supplements feedly for me, especially for wordy posts. Whenever I think “this is interesting, but too long for my bathroom break”, I just shove it into Pocket for later.

What offline reading does not deal well with is video content. So all the lazy-ass web journalisms that talk into their webcam instea of writing, you suck! The same goes for websites that break every article into several “pages” as if there was a limit to how long an HTML document can be, just to get more ad impressions. Stop doing that, or at least add a “full article” view.