Chislehurst Bridge Club Nov 2011 - May 2017
Lots of Samsung Galaxy Europas, 5-6 years old, 2.8 inch glass screen, refuse to go wrong, they were £39.99 from Carphone Warehouse in 2011. Needed a tweak to Android (2.2) to stop phone from freezing. Some members think the screen is too small, some think it is fine. All in gel/leather cases, no screen protectors.
A number of Alcatel Pixi 4 4inch. Nice and shiny with gel cases and glass screen protectors. One for £10 special offer from O2, others £20 from EE and £25 from Tesco (both Black Friday offer 2016), several at £23 from Currys PC World seconds shop (March to May 2017) on eBay. Nice size.
One Nexus 4, my old mobile phone, 4.7inch. Nice size.
A 7inch LG tablet v400. Android v5. I think it takes too much space on the table. 4-5 inch screen is better.
A few small LG L20s. I was thinking of giving them away, as the screen was too small and it wouldn't quite fit. John's new software now scales the screen, so it all fits. Font is small but the phone fits in the palm of my hand. The great thing about them is the battery life - it uses about 5% of battery per session.
Battery life - on Galaxies and Pixis - can be used for three to four club sessions, run them with 1 minute display timeout.
An old Asus router, RT-N12B, John bought 3 for £10 each and flashed them with third party dd-wrt firmware. Serves one room of up to 24 tables and a small side room of up to 4 tables. Talks to laptop over wireless. Pinned on the notice board. See attachment.
When uploading results to BridgeWebs, just unplug the router and turn on my mobile hotspot. Laptop automatically connects to this and the results are on BridgeWebs within 15 minutes of the end of game. In time for the pub postmortem.
Laptop, second from 2011, first Acer didn't survive dropping on the floor. Current one is HP Stream 14, solid state disk, nice, light and compact.
2 x 10 port Anker chargers, got them on sale for £20 each. A bit of a luxury, but a huge improvement over the extension leads. All phones fit nicely on a dining room chair when charging.
A box of screen wipes at hand, I like to hand them out clean and not with fingerprints from the last session.
Oh yes, some stylus pens, very few used, 3 - 4.
Recently acquired (Sep 2017) a 5 inch Alcatel POP 4 as used in Mountnessing. Nice size, screen has wider angle than Pixi 4s - better for viewing around the table. Battery life excellent. Twice the price of Pixi 4.
UPDATE:
Our little Galaxy Europas are retiring now - going to a charity for recycling. We acquired more Alcatel POP 4s all second hand mostly from ebay Tesco store.
We now use Caffeine app to prolong battery life. You can download it from here:
https://apkpure.com/caffeine/nl.syntaxa.caffeineUPDATE:
When using hotspot for upload to Bridgewebs, it is important to point out that the hotspot connection is set as 'metered connection' to avoid any Windows updates mopping up my mobile allowance.