Bluetooth Speaker Westrom BT074 Review

In this review we'll take a look at a simple, small, low-cost bluetooth speaker Westrom BT074. Such a device can come in handy, for example, if you want to listen music or other sounds from your laptop while being in different room. At least, this was my motivation for buying a bluetooth speaker and this model attracted me mainly with its quite low price, about 7 Eur.

Package content and connection

Nothing really suprising is waiting for you in the package. The speaker itself, micro-USB cable for charging and instruction manual.

After unpacking you can switch the speaker on and immediately pair it with your laptop or mobile phone. Just make your portable device visible and the speaker will soon appear among available device. Pairing should be done by one click and, of course, once paired, the next time speaker will connect automatically, whenever your paired device in range.

Good quality, with one “but”

Although the speaker is pretty compact, it can produce music of acceptable quality. If you don't have any high expectations (or extremely good ears) and want the speaker to play some “background” music, I think the quality will be satisfying for you.

The speaker has Bluetooth version 3, with the standard range up to 10 meters. This value stands in open-air, rapidly decreasing with each wall or door.

The dark side of this speaker is for me the accumulator. First, it needs to be charged every few days (while the speaker being in use about 1 hour per day), which is a bit annoying but probably understandable at device in this price level. What is worse is the signalization of low battery level, when the speaker stops playing the music, beeps once and starts playing again, every approximately 10 seconds. Maybe it's good protection against running out of the battery completely, however, I would prefer a signalization in form of red light or something similar, to be able to continue listening even if the battery is low.

Conclusion

I would recommend buying this speaker to everyone who is not searching for extra quality but wants a simple, cheap and quick solution how to listen to music from laptop or mobile phone in any room of the house.

Advantages:

+ low price

+ bluetooth

+ compact size

Disadvantages:

- small accumulator

- low-battery signalization

Healthy Food: Choice or Fear?

You don't need to be a food expert and still you definitely can tell, more or less precisely, which food you can call healthy and which you can call unhealthy, or junk. There are many people who are choosing their food, to certain extend, according to this information, who are trying to avoid fast-food, alcohol or even wheat completely and are exceptionally proud of themself when they eat two tomatoes next to their lunch, thinking how much they've just done for their body and their health. However, have you ever tried thinking more about why we're behaving like this? Why are we listening to the people, sometimes informally referred to as nutriterrorist, who are basically commanding us, telling us what we should eat, what we shouldn't eat, how much we should eat, when to eat etc.? Isn't it solely because we're scared, afraid of our health, worried that we can develop some disease? Have you ever thought about what damage can actually do the burger from McDonald's you'd love to eat but you're avoiding because it's not good for your health?

Psychological vs. Physical Health

Imagine a little child who is having her favorite toy she's playing with every day. Suddenly, you would take that toy and wouldn't let the child play with it, while still keeping the toy in such a place that the child could see it. Guess what will be the child's reaction. Crying, shouting, begging, all for getting her favorite toy back. Well, maybe you can tell the child that if she played with the toy, the bad dwarf would come and kidnapped her. Or any other nonsense, just to make the child scare to play with her favorite toy. If you're lucky, the crying and begging will stop and the child will be silently walking past her favorite toy, having in mind the bad dwarf. Everything seems like problem solved but answer honestly the following question: Do you think the child is really happy now?

This story is a little metaphor to healthy food. Specifically, the toy is junk food, the child is you, the strict parents are food experts and the bad dwarf, of course, represents the human diseases. You don't eat junk food because you believe in the dwarf, or the diseases respectively, and you're scared of them, trying to avoid them, thus you make up your mind and avoid junk food at all. But a similar question arises as for the child, are you really happy about what you're eating?

As you're struggling on eating only vegetable, avoiding fast-food, fats, sugars, wheat or whatever else you read is not good for you, you're restraining yourself from the tasty food you'd like to eat and putting yourself under pressure that you need to keep eating healthy. Any time you would take a piece of junk food or drink a glass of alcohol would be a huge failure for you, something like a sin. All these create stress which constitute to depresses, angriness and other negative manifestations of bad psychological health. That's why it could be said you are exchanging your psychological health in pursuit of as good physical health as possible, albeit with unsure result.

Eat Whatever You Like, But Not Too Often

Does it mean you should ignore all food experts' advice, doctor's warnings and completely give up on healthy food, eating only the junk food you like? No. Not really. The problem is all those warnings and advice are not only false alarms, there's some truth in them - if you'll drink a lot of alcohol every day, eat junk food from breakfast to the dinner and never take any vegetable or fruit into your mouth, you will end up badly. And it can come pretty early.

According to me, the best way is somewhere in the middle, the golden mean. Maybe more to the side of the healthy food. But not in the extreme. Let the junk food be your occasional pleasure! Don't give up the alcohol entirely, constantly refusing to drink with others, just limit it. Limit is as much as you feel comfortable with. After all, a glass of whiskey once a month definitely can't kill you and so it won't have an extreme effect on your health. One visit to McDonald's per month can raise your blood sugar temporarily but it's a bit difficult to imagine you could become obese or develop a diabetes from that one burger.

What's more, there's a great advantage to this style of behavior. Not only you don't need to give up anything but also every time you drink or eat the junk food, it's like a feast for you. You can use it to celebrate important days or as a motivation, to reward you for something useful you do even if it requires a hard effort. Paint the living room and enjoy a meal at McDonald's!

To conclude it, do not give up anything, just limit it. Take your favorite junk food as a pleasure. When not eating it every day, you'll enjoy it even more.

Stay free of any something-free diets!

Why I have chosen Windows mobile phone

Android, iPhone or Windows? That is the question. The question which all people buying a new mobile phone need to decide. For the moment being, let's suppose for normal users this question reduces to Android and Windows, as iPhone has its own users base, users who are buying it because, well, just because it's iPhone. And they are able to stand in a queue for couple of days, in a rain and wind, just to be within the first users of the brand-new but same-looking, still-no-better and even-more-overpriced model.

Anyway, let's get back to the decision Android vs. Windows. I, personally, did such decision about three years ago and chose Android, because at that time it seemed to me as the better option. However, the times are changing, my requirements for a mobile phone are changing and also my experience with Android is growing and so since the time of my first decision, I have gradually made up my mind that my next mobile phone will be with Windows operating system. I'll try to politely explain my thoughts behind this decision and say my opinions - in any case I'm not persuading anyone about my truth, as different people may have not only different opinions but also different expectations from a mobile device.

The dark sides of Android

I must admit I don't have almost any previous experience with Windows mobile but there are still some bad things at Android which I believe I will get rid of by changing to Windows. Let's start from what many people judge a lot and what they overestimate often - the performance. Android users are saying they can get an Android phone with better performance for the price of Windows phone. And basically they're right, on the paper the Android phone will be really stronger. However, only on the paper. In reality, Android is more demanding on the hardware resources and thus even a “weaker” phone with Windows can work faster in real than high-performance Android.

Keeping the focus on performance, a disadvantage of Android is that the system might be quite fast when freshly installed but the performance decreases quickly as you're using it, installing apps etc. Of course, there's always a possibility to reinstall the system, but it's nothing I would be willing to do every two months.

The straw that breaks the camel's back is for me the error message about insufficient memory whenever I try to install a new app or even update already installed one. Why? Why the system is talking about insufficient memory when half of the RAM and half of the SD card is free? Isn't it just poor way of working with available memory by Android? I know those tips, clean the cache, move apps to phone memory instead of internal memory and so on. But all of these solutions are only very temporary and I need to face the same problem again when installing or updating next app.

Apart from performance, it's also about visual aspect. The icon matrix on Android is, in my honest opinion, a bit chaotic. A few pages (or desktops) full of icons, making it difficult to find an app and reminding a Windows desktop of many users, also unorganized and overfilled with icons. Despite having not much experience with them, I think tiles on Windows are providing with a better organization.

Finally, I don't like that Android is too much open system. All apps can do whatever they want and in fact all apps require permissions to everything - even things that have absolutely no connection with the app's function. By the way, no, I don't prefer the way iPhone system works either, because it's the other extreme - too closed system. Windows are the golden mean, from my point of view.

Less apps, more quality

Very often I hear the argument against Windows - there are much less apps for this system. In essence, this argument is true. However, it's important to realize that you actually use only a few apps. For example, on Android there are thousands apps for doing one thing, on Windows there are only tens. First, you still have usually a choice, even on Windows, and second, on Windows the apps are on average of more quality than on Android, which means, in practice, that you don't need to browse through hundreds of useless apps to find the one that will fit you.

Similar argument is being told by Android users about the selection of phones. And again it's true - there are much more phones with Android than with Windows. Let's not dig into discussions if it's the same as with apps, that Windows phones are of more quality on average (anyway, I personally think so). The import thing is, there are already enough Windows phones in the market, enough that basically everyone can choose what he needs and wants.

Maybe certain people will also say something like “I don't want Microsoft”, as an argument against Windows phones. I guess most of them have a PC or laptop with desktop version of Windows, by, surprise, Microsoft. Anyway, I personally simply don't mind neither Google, nor Microsoft and decide according to different features.

My choice of phone

Finally, a few words about which phone I am going to buy. Microsoft recently introduced new Lumia x50 series of mobile phones which are probably among the best phones you can get in their respective price categories. As I need Dual SIM phone and Lumia 950 is just too expensive for me, I was a bit disappointed at first. However, after most recent introduction of Lumia 650, I didn't hesitate too long. Pretty nice design, acceptable size, LTE, Dual SIM, not bad parameters overall, good price and, of course, Windows operating systems, it's my reasons in favor of this new phone.