July 1, 2015 – The Metrognome

Here are surefire ways to identify a shopping addict and get them help before they are completely broke and depressed.

by Reyna Mathur

All of us know at least one person who is so addicted to shopping, he or she will not think twice before spending even when they are broke. Do you identify with this scenario: A young girl works in a private firm. In her spare time, she surfs shopping sites and keeps adding items to her virtual shopping cart. Not a single day passes without her buying something for herself, and when packages arrive at her home and office on a daily basis.

Then her credit card bills catch up on her. Soon, she buys many credit cards to settle the bills on the previous ones – and also to increase her spending power. The situation soon lands her in huge debt, but through it all, she still can’t stop shopping.

If this sounds familiar, you or someone you know is a shopping addict. It is a dangerous addiction that lands people in a severe financial crunch, but like other addictions, this one too compels the victim to give in to his or her constant urges to acquire the next object of their fancy. Unfortunately, most people don’t take this addiction seriously enough, and fail to see that it is a form of mental illness.

It is easy to tell when a person is a shopping addict.

1. Constantly wanting to buy things. All of us like to shop, but some people take it to another extreme level by buying something, big or small, every single day. If they pass by a store and see something on display that they like, they will buy it immediately without considering if they have enough money for it.

2. They are unable to rest till they buy what they want. There have been cases where shopping addicts have reported insomnia, anxiety and depression to their doctors and therapists, all brought on by their inability to buy something they really liked. They see it as a personal failure to be unable to gratify their own wishes, and this leads to feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness. In the West, there are support groups for people falling under this category, where people come together and share their fears and insecurities about themselves related to their finances. Many of them express a wish to get professional help after finally understanding that they are in the grip of an illness.

3. They don’t much care how much something costs. All of us are fitted with an invisible ‘radar’ that alerts us when we are considering a purchase. The voice in our heads cautions us with questions like, ‘Can you afford this new TV? Shouldn’t you first pay off your maintenance bills before buying that dinner set?’ The difference with a shopping addict is that he or she can choose to ignore this radar at will, often leading them into a deep financial pit where they flounder but cannot come out of.

4. They are the biggest consumers of EMI spending. Many e-commerce sites have smartly tapped on to people’s tendency to purchase something expensive if there is a reasonable monthly EMI attached to it. A shopping addict will normally explore this option, because it means they can adopt the same principle and buy several more items that month.

5. They borrow money to go shopping. We are conditioned to spend only what we have in our pockets, so it goes against the grain to borrow money. However, most of us borrow money for sudden unavoidable expenses and we set targets to repay the money back as soon as we can. But a shopping addict, normally running short of money owing to his or her spending habits, has no qualms borrowing money to buy a new mobile phone or an expensive saree or even to go on a trip. There is a very high chance that the money will not be repaid on time, because the person will never have enough cash to pay back the loan in time.

6. They don’t use most of the things they buy. For a shopping addict, the thing is in acquiring the object of their affections, not necessarily in using it. With so many purchases piling up one over the other, it is little wonder that they get around to using even half the items that they buy so passionately.

(Pictures courtesy www.addictioncam.com, feinlawyer.com. Images are used for representational purpose only)

Review: Nubia Z9 Mini

We take a look at Chinese company ZTE’s new phone and find a great camera and just about passable features.

by Manik Kakra | @Manik_K on Twitter

ZTE is a Chinese company that’s into 3G dongles and smartphones, but like a few other brands (Micromax has YU), ZTE too, is now out with a separate sub-brand that caters mainly to online retailers. The Nubia Z9 mini, available exclusively on Amazon, is a mid-range Android 5.0 smartphone that the company says is more than any other smartphone launched in this price category. But is this claim really true?

The looks. The Nubia Z9 mini (NX511J) follows a rather premium design and feel. As soon as you hold it, you will notice its double glass back and front (both are prone to smudges) as well as metallic rim across its sides, and if you don’t spot that rear-cover slot, you may conclude the cover doesn’t come off. The front has three backlit capacitive touch keys — you can change what function other two buttons perform (Menu/Options or Back), the circular Home button is more prominent and doubles up as LED notification.

Above the 5-inch full HD screen, you have an 8 MP front-facing camera, speaker grille and sensors. On the back, the 16 MP camera as a Red outline, LED flash, Nubia logo in horizontal all over a nice dotted pattern from the phone’s black colour. Removing the back cover reveals the microSD card and non-accessible 2,900 mAh battery unit. The right side has volume rockers and Power/ Lock key (both are tactile), and the left side only has SIM card tray (two nano SIM card slots). At the bottom, there’s the chrome-outlined microUSB port, loudspeaker jack and primary mic; while the top has 3.5mm headset and secondary mic.

The screen. The phone’s 5-inch full HD LCD has good bright colours. It can handle HD content, but struggles with its viewing angles. For general photo viewing and Web browsing, it is just as good a screen as any in this price range.

Camera. The phone boasts a 16 MP (f/2.0) camera, and here are a few sample images.

The camera is the best thing about this phone. The rear camera takes detailed shots with good contrast levels. In daylight, photos came out saturated, while low-light, too, wasn’t bad. There’s a Pro mode that lets you play around with camera settings among other modes like Field of Depth and HDR. This is surely one of the best phone cameras available under Rs 18,000 today.

Audio. The loudspeaker at the bottom isn’t great. It performs well for pop music, but is extremely inadequate for rock, something that I haven’t seen on phones for a while. In-ear voice quality, though, is on par and so is network reception. The only connectivity issue I found was that the phone just won’t switch off location (GPS). It will keep showing you the GPS icon in the status bar even when you have manually switch it off.

Battery. The phone struggled to last 20 hours on a full charge. With brightness at around 25 per cent, two Email Accounts in sync, a lot of Twitter and some YouTube videos, this phone’s 2,900 mAh battery is not meant for a full day’s use in case of heavy usage.

Software and performance. The phone is equipped with a Snapdragon 615 SoC (1.5 GHz quad-core + 1.1 GHz quad-core processor, Adreno 405 GPU) along with 2 GB of RAM. The device runs on Android 5.0.2 with Nubia 2.8 UI on top. In terms of general performance, I found the phone to be initially pretty responsive. But once you have a few apps opened and Webpages on browser, it starts to slow down a little. It worked fine for baisc apps but does get a little hot when playing games.

Nubia UI follows no separate app launcher pattern, and is mostly made of Red and White gradients. Apart from a few grammatical errors in the OS and weird-looking pop-up box for Shut down and battery low message, Nubia UI seems aesthetically nice. Nubia UI has similar customization options as most other Android OEMs today and nothing much that stands out or is worth mentioning here. However, the company could certainly try and fix bugs like clearing Recent Apps list doesn’t work from the clear button in horizontal list or from the toggle button. The user gets about 11 GB of storage space, which can of course be further expanded using a microSD card.

Thus, the Nubia Z9 Mini is a mixed bag. It has a great camera, good screen, standout design for this price range, but average battery life and passable software. It really depends what your priority is — camera, looks and screen, but if not, you may prefer looking somewhere else.

(Picture courtesy www.gizchina.com)