review

As a foreign student in the UK, the question of mobile phones is always one to ponder. I heard good things about one month rolling contracts, so I tried one out for a month with a cheap SIM free phone.

Phone: Nokia Lumia 530

The Nokia Lumia 530 is well in the ‘bargain' bracket of smart phones. After a quick look online at the time of writing, you can get it for a ridiculously cheap £50. So, what do you get for your money?

The phone fits nicely into your hand and although the case feels a little plasticy, the bright green of my handset certainly makes it stand out from the crowd. At first, I struggled to get the back off to get to the battery and sim slots, but that may just be me.

It uses the Windows operating system, and as with any new platform, it can take a little time to get used to, but actually the customisable tile layout is pretty easy to master. For a cheap phone it actually handled my day to day usage pretty well. I could, for example, have several apps open and be using the web and there would rarely be any noticeable slow down.

Last month has flown by; May has been hectic with the end of my first university year abroad. I was meant to make the most out of my stay but the weather has forced me to stay in!

I was watching the news the other day on a French TV channel and the reporter claimed that cinemas have made huge profits recently due to the poor weather. This is most likely to be true, as I have been going cinema quite often and I have couple of reviews for you here. First and my favourite as well:

Fast & Furious 6

The movie is definitely a must-see, with humour and terrific action scenes. Even though the ending was a bit long with the world’s longest take off, the movie remains great.

I have been surprised by how great the movie was (well to my opinion at least) although it contains a bit of drama as it is a classic, typical action movie with fight scenes, explosions, and car races…

It is a great action film that offers an adrenaline rush and breathtaking scenes. I recommend it warmly.

I went to watch the film in 3D last Saturday and I was pretty excited as I had previously watched the trailer numerous time. I was expecting something big as the trailer is really something- it sets you in a dark atmosphere and shows some real trouble caused by a great villain (you can watch it below).

The movie follows last summer's epic The Avengers which I have watched too many times to tell you I enjoyed it so much. The film, Starring Robert Downey Jr, shows Stark's ups and downs since the events in the Big Apple, as Stark has a post-traumatic breakdown. It reveals some personality aspects of Stark we would not have expected.

Yet we soon meet the charismatic hero and joker again, as well as the Mandarin- the new comic book villain depicted as a TV menace and played by Ben Kingsley. Love is also in the air, with Downey and Paltrow a fabulous screen couple to my opinion.

The movie gets off to a hot start and introduces some eye-popping action sequences with the use of awesome new technologies and formidable explosive combats.

A much-awaited album was set to be released in 2012: The xx's second studio record, called ‘Coexist'. It carried big expectations following their very successful debut album ‘XX' (2009), which brought fresh air to the alternative music scene and influenced many artists to come (like Alt-J, whose own album review you can read here).

The band's trademark playing style is definitely minimalist: Jamie Smith & co managed with just a few instruments and simple electronic beats to create a great chill-out atmosphere in each of their old tracks, using low-tone vocals which gave the listener many reasons to keep thinking, sometimes for hours, about the lyrics and the whole meaning of the songs.

However, it seems that with ‘Coexist' this approach has become a little bit excessive, and their melodies are not as interesting as they were.

Beats sometimes keep on playing for minutes without any real aim, without any really bright spark. The vocals do not provide any further interest - making it very difficult to get the messages of many songs, which remain completely hidden and leave the listener with some reasonable doubts ('Tides', ‘Reunion', ‘Our Song').

Some time ago, while still in Italy, one of my assignments for the ‘Philosophy of Science' course was reading ‘Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond- a physiology and geography professor at UCLA. The size was not promising, at all, but the content was anything but boring.

The book opens with Diamond describing his meeting with a New Guinean tribe chief who, whilst they were walking on a beach, asked him: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?".

With the word ‘cargo' meaning ‘material goods', the question gains a huge reach in the professor's mind. So, reformulating it, the question is: "How and why have all these differences between groups of people developed?". It is a really big question that some people have preferred to avoid by labeling others as ‘inferior' giving a start to racist theories, which Diamond wants to disprove with his whole argumentation.

The title may mislead the reader, the main argument is not about war or anything similar. ‘Guns, germs and steel' are actually the closest reasons why some groups of people throughout the world are more developed than others. It might seem rather obvious, but these are just the closest reasons.