In the process of wrapping up Ausdroid, I’ve become all sentimental.

It’s multi-facted -

  1. It’s the friends I made and kept along the way
  2. There’s the cool products I got to write about, and some that I got to keep
  3. It’s the fun places I went in pursuit of tech news
  4. There’s the awe moments when a really new, exciting bit of technology landed. It’s this and so much more … and I wanted to pen a few thoughts about the things I loved the most.

Friends and Fun People

Ausdroid wouldn’t have existed without some awesome personalities … and some of the challenges that came from them as well.

Ausdroid started in 2010 as a bedroom project (quite literally) of Buzz Moody, and while Buzz fairly quickly stepped away to focus on uni (and you know, just life), Dan, Jason, Phil and Scott quickly joined the show, and along the way we’ve had David, Scott, and countless others who joined in and then moved on.

Some of these people I’ve had the privilege of spending time with outside of Ausdroid (such as Scott’s wedding, and spending time with Phil and his son Alex in Adelaide during health woes), and some I’ve had the fun of traveling with around the world to attend tech events (most of the team for MWC, with Duncan to Taiwan for Computex, and more).

We usually got along, sometimes we didn’t, but I guess that’s just how life is. I’m looking forward to staying in touch, despite Ausdroid fading into the distance.

Great Products

So much of the products I reviewed have faded out of my memory, and looking back at reviews I wrote was an interesting case of “wow, I must’ve reviewed that, but nope, no recollection”. However, some products really stuck with me for being groundbreaking at the time, or just great bits of kit.

Some of the favourite things I got to review were (in no particular order):

  1. Google’s Nexus One, and the Nexus 7 tablet. Gosh, I loved that thing. It stuck with me for YEARS longer than it should’ve.
  2. Huawei’s Watch, which was one of the best Android Wear (or now Wear OS) devices I ever got to use.
  3. Meta Raybans .. smart glasses that actually looked cool, and did useful things. I still own a pair of Meta HSTNs (slightly newer, Oakley glasses, but the same concept).
  4. Some amazing headphones and earbuds, many of which I still have and use. Bose QC 35 IIs were groundbreaking at the time, and my son still uses them (albeit with newer ear cups).
  5. A heap of smart vacuums and the like; every time I see a robot vac trundling around the house, I think I’m living in the future still. However, some of the things I reviewed I honestly wondered why I had. They were trash. Not every tech innovation was actually a good one … and while I won’t name names, I can recall a good number of woeful devices that really should never have been released to the public.

I also recall with some sadness the furor that surrounded Huawei when it lost its licence to use Android, and it pivoted into its own OS (Harmony?). Ultimately, this took one of the most innovative and exciting smartphone and technology makers and reduced them to near the bottom of the pile, at least for Western markets.

Huawei were really generous to Ausdroid, in terms of review product, travel opportunities and more … the trip I took in 2015 to Bali for a Huawei conference I still fondly remember. Unfortunately, the US trade sanctions all but killed the brand in the mind of western users, and a real innovator was effectively lost.

Fun Places

I think I’ve lost count of the number of trips that we variously took for Ausdroid. That I can recall, we were able to variously attend things like:

  1. Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain - I think we attended three or four shows … but sadly, the last one we attended didn’t feel as special anymore. The gloss was definitely wearing off by the end.
  2. IFA in Berlin, Germany - we attended a couple of times, but really, this wasn’t super relevant to our niche; it was fascinating to see, but just not of much interest to our readers. There wasn’t a lot of mobile news coming out of IFA.
  3. Computex in Taiwan - interesting, but ultimately not all that useful .. unless you’re really into PC gaming.
  4. Google’s I/O events in the US - I never got to one of these, but Dan, Scott and others did, and they were always a blast to watch.
  5. Various media famils in Asia, Europe and the Americas. The trip to Huawei’s factory in Shenzhen and Guangdong was eye-opening (and a great trip!), and attending a phone launch in Paris for the Huawei P30 Pro was amazing. Attending the LG and Huawei launches of their Google Pixel devices in San Diego was also a highlight. Others traveled elsewhere, and we should also recall with fondness the domestic trips we were able to take for famils, press conferences and whatnot as well. These also gave us a great opportunity to catch up with fellow team-mates and colleagues from other publications, too.

The “Wow” moments

These were few and far between, but being in the audience at MWC for a huge Samsung mobile announcement was quite exciting - the rock-star reception that Mark Zuckerberg received was quite something, might’ve been for the Samsung Galaxy S9 if memory recalls? Great phone, but an even greater launch.

Sadly, after that, Samsung didn’t have much of a showing at MWC opting - as other major brands had done - for their own, stand-alone events to showcase new technology.

Seeing real-world technology demos of 5G mobile connectivity before it was widely available was something I remember quite fondly, as well as the huge advances in camera technology that took mobile phones from potato cameras to something to rival (if not best) what you could accomplish with a full-featured DSLR.

It’s not uncommon these days for smartphones to have up to 100x zoom, and they take better photos than you could with nearly anything else. Smartphones all but saw the demise of digital cameras as a stand-alone device … and while you can still buy them, I wonder why anyone really would.

In Closing

For me, really, the biggest wow moment was that I got to be a part of something so much bigger than myself, which at its peak was read by hundreds of thousands of readers each month.

Sadly, Ausdroid doesn’t achieve anything like that anymore … and while there’s a multitude of reasons for that, there’s a few things which really stand out to me as having changed since Ausdroid was young:

  1. Independent media seems to be all but dead (or dying…), and where it lives, it’s nearly invisible. Mainstream media has all but seen off independent media - advertising money is gone, sponsorship is gone, and the readership along with it. People don’t seem to want to read a tech review by some nerd on his own blog … they’re content to read some clickbait nonsense from the MSM instead, and then go spend thousands on a phone without thinking much about it. Great for the tech companies selling stuff, less good for the little guy. It makes me wonder why I’m maintaining this site … 🤣
  2. The financial viability of independent media was always questionable, and the only ways to make money were to sell out, accept sponsorship from places you probably shouldn’t, or just shill for paid sponsors etc. relentlessly across TV and radio (which, incidentally, are also dying). Independent media just doesn’t seem to fit the paradigm we’re in at the moment.
  3. Big tech companies don’t need to spend big anymore to gain influence and mindshare - carefully crafted reviews and news are nothing next to the onslaught of coverage one can get by throwing a few dollars or other things at social media influencers, or shills who’ll spruik anything on TV. Why fly a handful of journalists to an international press launch when you can simply send them a link to an online presentation? It’s cheaper to go after social media influence than anything else, and I’d wager it delivers much better results too. I laughed at it ten years ago, but in 2025 … it makes a lot of sense. These combination of factors very quickly turned Ausdroid from something that could cover its own expenses to something that cost time and money to run, with little return besides good feelings and the occasional review gadget to hang onto for a while.

I’m extremely grateful for all the opportunities afforded to Ausdroid, our team, and myself. I’m also very mindful of the cost that Ausdroid has had on all of us too - the sleepless nights covering news breaking overseas, the time away from families and friends in pursuit of news, the financial cost of maintaining infrastructure despite dwindling revenues, and so on.

That’s why it feels like time to say so long, thanks for all the memories, etc. and to wish Ausdroid and her former team all the best with their respective future endeavours.

Go well.