Hi all, I'm Ilia (that's capital i and an l)! 
I've been reading AC and listening for the awesome podcasts ever since I bought my first-and-current Android device - SGS3 i9300 international back in September 2012.
Currently I'm 27 y/o, live in Israel and graduated from uni (economics and management) about a year ago. I'm still searching for a suitable job. My second passion (first being my girlfriend) is mobile phones and it started because of some poor decisions I made in the field.
The first time I actually cared about which phone I had was when I ditched my Nokia 3120 back in 2006 for a "3g slider" from Samsung - or so I was told by the Orange representative. The SGH-i250 as it turned out had no actual 3g (not that I knew what 3g even was back then), and it's 0.3 MP camera was horrible. The insanely high-capacity microSD card of 128MB was corrupting files copied unto it gradually, but the phone itself was comfortable to use. Then the touch-screen era began and after seeing someone playing a game on their LG Viewty I decided I wanted a "touchscreen phone". It was February 2008 and the iPhone was yet to come to Israel officially.
Lo and behold, however, Nokia, the still undisputed queen of phones at the time introduced the new Nokia 5800. A touch screen device with a 3.2MP camera - which was very good at the time. The camera even had flash! That, and the phone itself wasn't really expensive. I bought it. It was probably my worst experience with a mobile product ever. And it lasted for 18(!) months!
Little did I know at the time that there were 2 types of "touch" screens - capacitive and resistive. The Nokia 5800 came with the latter, but nobody - neither the the Nokia website nor the sales rep told me about the at the time. I was hoping to do multi-finger gestures just like on that "magical" fruit device, but I was obviously sorely disappointed. The phone was slow, it was laggy and Symbian S60v5 was buggy, and had very few apps for it. The camera wasn't very good either. Sure, music playback was a blast since it was one of the XpressMusic devices, but it meant little when browsing the web - even using the stylus - was a pain! Multi-tasking was also non-existent since apps lacked push notifications. In short - it was a nightmare.
I thus swore that my next phone will be one without compromises, and thus, when the iPhone 4 came in September 2010 - with the retina display, the supposedly 1Ghz processor, the 512MB of ram and the 5MP camera with flash - I bought it. Sure, Android was gaining ground at the time, and I was already fascinated by multiple home screen pages with widgets, not to mention the freedom Android came with, but I decided to stick with a proven choice and one which had many more apps available for it at the time.
The iPhone 4 was quite nice at the beginning, but soon afterward I began to get bored. By iOS 4.2 I already jailbroken the device and tried to customize it as much as possible - mainly install those awesome widgets android had. Only to find that there was almost no such thing on Cydia. I was dissapointed but I knew apple will introduce widgets in iOS 5 because of how Android grew in popularity. As we all know - they didn't - and don't until now. It is shortly after WWDC 2011 that I started to hate Apple with passion and mentally switched back from the dark side to the light one, after defending apple in many discussions on PhoneArena.com (where I am still active today - obviously bashing apple at every opportunity).
Thus, after 2 years of usage, when my iPhone 4 unexpectedly died, I saw the perfect opportunity to get rid of apple in my mobile life for once and for all. After repairing it in a repair-lab, I sold it to a couple who didn't even bother to check if the Sim card was working, and bought my SGS3!
I had a blast customizing my SGS3 but it was not until I discovered rooting and custom roms that my phone stopped being the laggy and battery-thirsty slow-as-hell-sometimes device that it was on stock 4.1.2 and became the flashy, all-powerful jaguar it is today, currently rocking SlimBean 4.3.1 build 2 and easily capable of surviving 4.5 - 5 hours of pure on screen usage or 2-3 hours of usage + 16-22 hours in standby (without any power management on my side).
Anyway - sorry if it was a bit long (I know there will be some tldr posts) but that's it! I love AC and look forward to being part of the best smartphone community on the planet.
I've been reading AC and listening for the awesome podcasts ever since I bought my first-and-current Android device - SGS3 i9300 international back in September 2012.
Currently I'm 27 y/o, live in Israel and graduated from uni (economics and management) about a year ago. I'm still searching for a suitable job.
My second passion (first being my girlfriend) is mobile phones and it started because of some poor decisions I made in the field.The first time I actually cared about which phone I had was when I ditched my Nokia 3120 back in 2006 for a "3g slider" from Samsung - or so I was told by the Orange representative. The SGH-i250 as it turned out had no actual 3g (not that I knew what 3g even was back then), and it's 0.3 MP camera was horrible. The insanely high-capacity microSD card of 128MB was corrupting files copied unto it gradually, but the phone itself was comfortable to use. Then the touch-screen era began and after seeing someone playing a game on their LG Viewty I decided I wanted a "touchscreen phone". It was February 2008 and the iPhone was yet to come to Israel officially.
Lo and behold, however, Nokia, the still undisputed queen of phones at the time introduced the new Nokia 5800. A touch screen device with a 3.2MP camera - which was very good at the time. The camera even had flash! That, and the phone itself wasn't really expensive. I bought it. It was probably my worst experience with a mobile product ever. And it lasted for 18(!) months!
Little did I know at the time that there were 2 types of "touch" screens - capacitive and resistive. The Nokia 5800 came with the latter, but nobody - neither the the Nokia website nor the sales rep told me about the at the time. I was hoping to do multi-finger gestures just like on that "magical" fruit device, but I was obviously sorely disappointed. The phone was slow, it was laggy and Symbian S60v5 was buggy, and had very few apps for it. The camera wasn't very good either. Sure, music playback was a blast since it was one of the XpressMusic devices, but it meant little when browsing the web - even using the stylus - was a pain! Multi-tasking was also non-existent since apps lacked push notifications. In short - it was a nightmare.
I thus swore that my next phone will be one without compromises, and thus, when the iPhone 4 came in September 2010 - with the retina display, the supposedly 1Ghz processor, the 512MB of ram and the 5MP camera with flash - I bought it. Sure, Android was gaining ground at the time, and I was already fascinated by multiple home screen pages with widgets, not to mention the freedom Android came with, but I decided to stick with a proven choice and one which had many more apps available for it at the time.
The iPhone 4 was quite nice at the beginning, but soon afterward I began to get bored. By iOS 4.2 I already jailbroken the device and tried to customize it as much as possible - mainly install those awesome widgets android had. Only to find that there was almost no such thing on Cydia. I was dissapointed but I knew apple will introduce widgets in iOS 5 because of how Android grew in popularity. As we all know - they didn't - and don't until now. It is shortly after WWDC 2011 that I started to hate Apple with passion and mentally switched back from the dark side to the light one, after defending apple in many discussions on PhoneArena.com (where I am still active today - obviously bashing apple at every opportunity).
Thus, after 2 years of usage, when my iPhone 4 unexpectedly died, I saw the perfect opportunity to get rid of apple in my mobile life for once and for all. After repairing it in a repair-lab, I sold it to a couple who didn't even bother to check if the Sim card was working, and bought my SGS3!
I had a blast customizing my SGS3 but it was not until I discovered rooting and custom roms that my phone stopped being the laggy and battery-thirsty slow-as-hell-sometimes device that it was on stock 4.1.2 and became the flashy, all-powerful jaguar it is today, currently rocking SlimBean 4.3.1 build 2 and easily capable of surviving 4.5 - 5 hours of pure on screen usage or 2-3 hours of usage + 16-22 hours in standby (without any power management on my side).
Anyway - sorry if it was a bit long (I know there will be some tldr posts
) but that's it! I love AC and look forward to being part of the best smartphone community on the planet. 
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