Since I started using Android some couple of years ago I’ve grown attached to the Android OS. When Android was in its infancy it was a little buggy, even slow sometimes but I think the Android of today has matured. I find it stable and very intuitive.

The problem with Androids though are picking the right phones. Some phones with bad hardware can give you a really bad experience but some good ones give you a good experience.

About a month ago my friend Danny who works in Huawei contacted me and asked if I would like to be sponsored by them. They had a new phone coming out soon.

Without him telling me exactly what phone it was, judging from the month of release (September) I knew it was going to be the successor to the Huawei Mate 7 (Huawei’s largest flagship phone from last year). I thought it was going to be called the Mate 8 but instead it was called Mate S.

Before accepting an engagement with a brand and a product I normally do a lot of research. The last thing I wanted was to be caught promoting a product that I didn’t believe in. So Danny lent me the older Mate 7.

There were things I liked about it like the fingerprint sensor and the long battery life but there were things I didn’t too. Like the camera. And the camera is really really important to me. These things however were significantly improved in the new Huawei Mate S.

So I took the engagement with Huawei and in came the Mate S. I’ve been using it for almost a month now.

Here’s what I think.

1. How it looks

I often don’t really think much about the looks of smartphones these days because they generally look the same to me However for the past few weeks that I’ve been carrying this phone I’ve had at least two people who have come up to me to ask me what phone it was that I was carrying.

Because they thought it looked nice. I’m not sure if it’s because you don’t see that many Huawei Mate S around in KL yet or if it’s because of its design. What I do like a lot is this is the revolving wallpaper.

Let me explain that. Basically the phone comes with some very nice professionally taken photos. Whenever you turn it on, these photos rotate so every time you look at your phone it has a different wallpaper. This is how it looks like.

And then I turn off the phone to standby and on again and it changes to this.

And this.

Nice right!!

2. How it runs

I’m not going into the details of the specs because if you want that you can find them all here. What I will focus on however is how it runs. Does it lag? Is it choppy? The answer is no. It feels pretty smooth and I know some phones feel smooth for a while but I’ve used it for some weeks now and I have no issues on it. How it feels This is my favorite favorite part of the phone.

3. How it feels

You see a lot of smartphones these days are experimenting with fingerprint sensors in all different parts of the phone. Some of the front, some on the side. Huawei’s approach is to put one on the back here. Why on the back? Because when you pick up the phone you naturally slip your finger on to the back.

It feels really natural and it’s very very fast too. Even faster than the Mate 7’s finger print sensor. The phone unlocks itself the very second your finger touches the sensor at the back. Now at first I thought this really was a gimmick and well no big deal but the more I used it and got used to it the bigger difference it made to my lifestyle.

I eventually got an iPhone 6S Plus to test Dayre on but suddenly using the fingerprint sensor on the front felt somewhat unnatural.

How it takes photos

I take a lot of photos of Penny and Fighter so photos is a really important thing for me. Here I will let the pictures speak for themselves. Here is a photo I took of Fighter while he was sleeping in a dark room. Taken with my iPhone 6S Plus.

Here is a photo I took with the same lighting but with my Huawei Mate S.

What I do really like about the Huawei Mate S though is the selfie camera. It really smoothens out the skin and almost makes it look like you photoshopped yourself. Here are some of the photos I took with it.

I also really like the selfie camera flash. If I’m not mistaken the flash has a little diffuser on it so the flash becomes less harsh on your face. That’s something a lot of other selfie cameras don’t seem to have and it makes a huge difference.

How long it lasts

Battery life is really important to me and here’s where I gotta be honest, I wish I had more.  The Mate S has a battery 2,700 mAh battery which is much smaller than the huge battery the Mate 7 had at (4,100 mAh). To be fair the Mate 7 had one of the largest batteries I’ve seen on smartphones but 2,700 is still smaller than many phablet size phones.

That’s understandable though because of the smaller size of the Mate S and to be fair, the battery is still bigger than other phones its size. Like the iPhone 6S.

All in all I really love the Huawei Mate S. If you’re looking for a good android phone with a good Android experience, I think the Mate S is one that won’t disappoint you. There are many good Android phones on the market, but the Mate S is one of the best I’ve tried at the moment.

Did I also mention that you can get it for  just RM2,698?

Sponsored

I recently attended the On Demand (OD) entertainment launch by Astro and was looking at the collection of TV shows and movies they have available to stream or to download. One of them was Inception.

Inception is one of my favourite movies of all time. Great movies are ones that impact you in the way that you can’t forget even after you walk out of the cinema. I remember walking out and digesting everything that I had just watched in the past few hours. Then I remember pinching myself and wondering if I was still in a dream.

So out of interest I started reading up on some Inception trivia and came across this article when I learned a few really interesting things that I thought applied to us in life and in business. Generally.

Here’s what what I never knew about the film and my lessons from it.

What we never knew 1:

NOLAN DIDN’T RESEARCH DREAMS WHILE WRITING THE SCREENPLAY.

He took a similar approach to writing a movie about dreams as he did to writing Memento, a movie about memory. He primarily used his own experiences and feelings rather than outside information. “I think a lot of what I find you want to do with research is just confirming things you want to do,” he told Collider. “If the research contradicts what you want to do, you tend to go ahead and do it anyway. So at a certain point I realized that if you’re trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it’s mostly from my own process, my own experience.”

Lesson learned:

When I first came up with the business plan for Nuffnang, I came up with the whole 9 yards. We had a plan, cost structures and a financial model with all sorts of assumptions that could predict our growth. I spent months doing research on this business plan to make sure that I had covered everything until Ming finally told me that we had done enough research. It was time to take the plunge.

We took the plunge and guess what… what turned out for Nuffnang was nothing like the business plan I created. We can plan all we want but business is about adapting to the challenges reality throws at us.

We are brought up to believe that we should research everything we do before we do it. We research extensively which university to apply to, what course to study, even what job to take. People tell us to do our homework… but not often do people tell us that we’ve done enough homework and it’s time to take the plunge. After all, as Christopher Nolan pointed out the main motivation of our research is really to confirm what we want to do.

Even if the research tells us it’s wrong, we often go for it anyway because we often follow our heart (or gut).  We are often faced with a decision on whether to follow our heart or our minds. So far I haven’t been wrong yet for following my heart.

What we never knew 2:

THE CASTING DECISIONS REVOLVED AROUND DICAPRIO.

Nolan knew that he wanted Leonardo DiCaprio for the role of Cobb, so according to him, “We were just trying to cast the best people I could find for those parts, who felt right around Leo.” This also involved casting a young ensemble because Nolan “wanted to get a young, energetic cast around him who wouldn’t make [DiCaprio] look younger.”

Lesson learned:

As a company grows, its business is managed not just by one team but a number of teams, creating a natural hierarchy. The job of an entrepreneur or a CEO is to pick the right people to lead each team. That’s it. The lead will then tell you what kind of people he needs under his team and it’s the CEO’s job to find him the right people that he needs so he can do his thing.

In the past I’ve often made this mistake. I overreached and picked the people in the team of my own managers based on who I think is the right person for the job not based on who my manager thinks he or she can work well with. Having learned that, I now find out what kind of people my managers need, I give my input but I let them have the final say.

What we never knew 3:

NOLAN FINISHED BOTH EARLY AND UNDER BUDGET.

He actually prefers the constraints that time and money give him, so he makes a serious effort to be efficient when it comes to filmmaking.

Lesson learned:

I’ve met a lot of successful people in my life and they all share one thing in common. They have never once complained about their circumstance. About not having enough money or not having enough resources. They make do with what they have and just like Nolan, having limited resources forces them to be more efficient and creative.

Successful people tend to focus on how to make things happen with what they have. Unsuccessful people tend to complain about the cards they’re dealt and how they just never had enough to achieve what they needed to achieve.

If you’re looking to stream OR download Inception to watch legally you can get them from OD Plus for RM15.90 a month. Along with a lot of other movies like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and TV shows like The Flash or The Big Bang Theory.

If you want to watch really new movies (like released in the cinema this year kind of new), you can select and pay for individual titles at the OD Store from as low as RM5.30. Movies you can get here are like Inside Out, The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Fast & Furious 7.

Or if your pocket has recently been hit by the rise in toll rates you can choose from a library of virtually unlimited FREE on demand content, including Same Day as The U.S. titles, the latest seasons of Akademi Fantasia, Super Spontan and many more for free with OD Free. There you can watch TV shows like Game of Thrones, Empire, Quantico, Heroes Reborn, The Walking Dead, Marvel’s Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D and lots of local content like Akademi Fantasia.

If you have Astro on the Go you can also use the new Download feature to download content on to your device (from your Wi-Fi) and watch it offline. So you can carry your movies on to a plane or whenever you don’t have an internet connection. This is a first in Malaysia.

Connect your PVRs to your home Wi-Fi before 31^st Jan 2016 and you’ll get 3 months free access to OD Plus’s content (worth RM47.70). To learn more about ODjust go to www.watchOD.com and follow the instructions.