Rant about complaining over cell phone cameras (skip to the next bold text if you don’t care): If you want a good camera, you don’t get it in a $200 phone! A $200 dedicated point-n-shoot camera will also produce marginal results that probably aren’t much better than the ones that come off of the Teracube 2e and the camera doesn’t do anything else!. (Alternative for a cheap camera for specialty photos, if you plan on taking crazy-wide fish-eye photos or extreme close-up macro photos, you can use a Raspberry Pi hobby computer with a camera sensor board and special lenses for not too much money. The resulting photos will not be large, but will be better quality than anything else out there that was produced on equipment that cost less than $1000.)
If you want great photos for “cheap,” go buy a used Sony a6000 mirrorless camera system (costs about $600, used, for the camera body without any lenses)! Let me put this into perspective. The best camera on the market in a cell phone is likely in the OnePlus 9 Pro or the iPhone 12 Pro. The OnePlus has better hardware with current, high end point-n-shoot-sized image sensors from Sony and lenses from Hasselblad. But unless Sony is also providing them with the photo processing software in addition to the camera sensors, OnePlus likely didn’t take full advantage of their hardware. Thus, for around 5 times the price of a Teracube, you can get a phone camera that is, at best, a decent backup camera for the aforementioned Sony a6000, which came out nearly 6 years ago.
Quick aside: Sensor size, sensor brand, sensor tech generation, lenses, and photo processor are the 5 specs to look for in a good digital camera. Sony makes the best sensors that are 35mm and smaller and the best photo processors, followed very closely by Canon and Fuji. Nikon uses Sony’s sensors and their own excellent photo processors that are probably tied with Sony. Canon is not more than a whisker behind the others and produces excellent equipment of their own. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in the resulting photos, until you start using them in extreme use cases that pushes EVERY camera to their limits.
Another quick aside: The OnePlus 9 Pro beats every other phone on the market in at least 4 of the 5 specs. (Apple just may have the best photo processing software in a phone, ever.) The used Sony a6000 beats the OnePlus on 4 of the 5 specs (it loses by having a sensor that is 5 years older than the OnePlus camera sensors) and beats the iPhone on all 5 of the specs (Apple seems to use the best sensors that are known to be well built and well tested, then builds the best software they can to process the images).
Phone Camera Rant Over, Begin Rant About Teracube 2e
Well, this part is not really a rant.
I love that I can uninstall or disable all of the GApps that I don’t use. This saves my phone a ton of memory, processing power, and battery. The only GApps I left on are the Play Store, Play Services, Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Docs, and Drive. I’m getting ready to turn off Google Photos, Google Docs, and Google Drive. Google Maps will probably be turned off soon after that. The installed Phone, Contacts, Calendar, Clock, and SMS apps are all from Google and I use those, but they are simple apps and they aren’t the core of the GApps that cause the most problems. I’ve even turned off the Google Assistant and the core Google search app.
I also love that I can root my phone, load custom ROMS, and do other things to make my phone even more mine, without voiding the long warranty,
I love that, with most GApps disabled, the apps I use run faster and smoother on my phone than they do on friends’ phones that cost 3 times as much.
I love that Teracube is trying to counter the ever pervasive tide of planned obsolescence and toxic electronic waste. I am no tree hugger and I don’t think global warming/climate change is near the problem that some claim. Nor do I believe that most of it is caused by humans–as the sun cycles play a much bigger role than we do. That being said, I also believe it is a sin to be wasteful and that we have a divine duty to take care of what we have on the Earth, both for ourselves and for our descendants.
I hate having to buy a new phone every two years because the perma-battery in my phone died. I love that I can instead, send the battery off to be recycled and buy a new battery.
I love that this phone has two SIM slots. My wife and I travel a lot and when we go overseas, we buy a local prepaid SIM card online before we get there. Having that second SIM slot means that as soon as we land, we have phone and internet without having to fiddle with changing SIM cards in an airport.
I love that the 4000 mAh battery on my Teracube lasts as long as the 5000 mAh battery on my wife’s Motorola. Of course, she’s a heavy GApps user and has a bunch of other apps that are constantly loading ads, so it makes sense. (I try to use/support Open Source as much as possible–it leads to better privacy, no ads, and more efficient use of resources.)
I love that this phone has 64 GB if internal storage with an SD slot that can take a huge card. It makes it so I can put my photos, music, movies, offline maps, and ebooks on the external, taking up about 50GB of space, and the system along with all of my apps take up about 28GB of space inside the phone, leaving plenty of room for anything that may come along–such as pre-downloaded items from Amazon Prime Video, that are generally stored in the phone–for those times I’m traveling and want to watch a movie without internet. (32 GB would be a touch tight for my usage patterns.)
I love that Open Camera from f-Droid runs quickly, can burst-shoot photos, and fixes the worst of the lens and color problems of the camera. It still has lots of noise in low light, but what can you do about that on a small sensor? Answer: not much and everything that you can do involves losing photo information with de-noising your photos. This camera is just fine for taking random photos in good light.
I love that the case is bio-degradable and has little flecks of wheat embedded in it. It’s unique and reminds me of my youth, growing up on my dad’s cattle ranch with several hundred acres of attached farm. (When I was 16, the soil conditions in many of the fields called for a rotation of wheat, so it brings back memories from the summer when I was 16. I spent much of that summer delivering wheat to a neighboring ranch that didn’t have as much crop land and so needed grain and straw for the winter.)
I love that someone in the US finally started making a phone similar to the FairPhone and other European long-term use phones. Thanks for making it. This phone fits me well.
