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Flagship phones are outrageously expensive it's clear that people are

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done shelling out a thousand plus dollars year after year after year but I

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mean you do still need a phone ideally one with a decent screen and camera and

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at least 128 gigs of storage for apps and pictures well I don't play a ton of

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mobile games no one likes their toilet time interrupted by stuttery gameplay so

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the answer is obviously to pick up a mid-range phone there are an

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overwhelming number of options what the heck is everyone else buying okay this

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is weird Samsung's a53 only has 3 000

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reviews but it is at the top of Amazon's best sellers with an impressive four and

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a half star rating I mean I knew the a series was wildly popular but Samsung's

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marketing and their review program especially in North America is so

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focused on note and fold and S series that I have to confess I have never

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actually been hands on until now I guess

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it's time to find out just why the advertisement friendly words all of you

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are buying this phone and what is this

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to describe the size of the a53 I'd use

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the words right sized it's easily handleable but you're not going to be

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squinting at it it's a really good middle ground it came out in mid-march

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of 2022 and it's got almost all the major features you could want decent

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storage capacity with MicroSD expansion a 64 megapixel camera with Optical image

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stabilization to keep your shot steady a 120 hertz Super AMOLED display with up

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to 800 nits of brightness for good outdoor viewing and HDR content and even

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5G Network capability we've got the base model with us today just like the rest

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of you I mean the thing that stands out to me first and foremost is just how

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good the build quality feels it wasn't that long ago that budget phones even

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mid-range phones had gigantic bezels around them or really cheap feeling

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materials but this feels great if you

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told me this cost 300 more or I still

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wouldn't bat an eye it doesn't have a three and a half millimeter headphone

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jack which is a real bummer but it does

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have an amplified earpiece speaker meaning that you will get stereo sound

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out of it there's no stupid Bixby button I consider that a feature and I guess I

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never mentioned it before but the screen is six and a half inches let's talk

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cameras now since for most people their phone is their primary way of saving

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precious memories from top to bottom on the back we've got a 12 megapixel Ultra

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wide a 64 megapixel main camera and a 5 megapixel depth camera the little guy on

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the top is a 5 megapixel F 2.4 macro camera bringing us up to a total of four

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sensors on the back of this thing and on the bottom is our light or Flash

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the front-facing selfie camera is 32 megapixels and oh I guess I was turned

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to the side that time but other than the a little bit overdone smoothing then

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again I'm old I kind of need it now I'd say the quality is pretty darn good and

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thankfully it doesn't take up a ton of space on the screen as for the back it

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might not be technically the best camera but

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man I have a hard time finding anything to complain about it is absolutely all

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that you need to capture the moment which for me is really where the bar is

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as for the display I advocated for years that at these sizes anything over 1080p

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class is just wasted cost and wasted

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power I mean it's over 400 pixels per inch for crying out loud and it looks

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great the blacks are OLED deep and the 120 hertz refresh rate makes the phone

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feel and look smoother than pretty much any of the competition at this price

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point more on that later by the way however that comes with a caveat just

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like on a PC there's not much Point having a high refresh rate display

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unless the hardware can keep up with those frame rates and while the menus

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and navigation and simple games look great there's no Snapdragon 8 gen

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whatever processor in here so don't expect top tier performance and gentian

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impact or other more demanding mobile games of course none of that affects

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consumption of movies and TV shows which look amazing though of course there is

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more to life than looks let's just do a quick audition of the speakers here crab

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rave crab Rave let's do it oh my God ads this

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is my version of Adblock I will look somewhere else hey the Creator still

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gets paid I will sleep perfectly tonight

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didn't like these good Sound Stage though

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I haven't gotten to the drop yet

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I think you judged it too harshly you're right there's not a lot of bass but good

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Sound Stage good Clarity good volume and

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while I'm not putting much stock in the support for Dolby Atmos if scruffy Dan

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broke a stray on his guitar around the campfire you wouldn't be a monster for

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pulling this out another area that impressed us was the

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battery life thanks to both its mid-tier processor and whopping 5 000 milliamp

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hour battery the a53 boasts up to two days on a single charge and that is not

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in crap tier monochromatic display mode

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disabling all the processor cores or whatever that's with regular usage auto

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brightness and Wi-Fi on around the clock and we know this is true because ploof

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the writer for this video is one of you he actually bought this phone and Day

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lead it for a couple of months only selling it because a colleague offered

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him a free side grade and he likes his S10 but has actually not been happy

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about certain aspects of it particularly going back to Nightly charging when you

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do need to charge on the a53 it supports 25 watt fast charging getting it back to

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full in a flash now obviously that battery life is going to degrade as the

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years go by but if you start from a really good point well even degraded it

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should be a good experience you know what else is like that our new Henley

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shirt from LTT Store com it starts great and well obviously it's going to wear a

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little its clothing but it'll last a really long time trust me bro now for

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the fun part what's the catch here given its lower price point of 350 dollars

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that's down from 450 at launch it's kind

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of hard to complain I just really like this thing but it's my job so I'm gonna

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do it let's start with the clearest drawback the processing power as I

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alluded to before the GPU in this thing is a Mali g68 now for the average person

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that doesn't make the experience awful or even bad it's a lot faster than its

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predecessor but it certainly could be better what will affect pretty much

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everyone in everyday use at least eventually is the CPU like a flagship

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chip chip the exynos 1280 has an 8 core CPU but those cores are running

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significantly slower and while ploof didn't encounter any slowdowns over time

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with his phone he doesn't load up his phone with random apps and games and he

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only used it for a few months so he didn't have to deal with that slow down

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that tends to come from multiple generations of software updates if

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customer reviews are anything to go by though it might even be a problem today

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in fact looking through the one to three star ratings for this device complaints

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about processing power are a clear pattern for one star some people simply

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got lemons one hated on Samsung support several people were upset about the lack

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of an included charging brick that's fair enough even if it looks like this

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might be the new normal Honestly though I'm actually more annoyed by the

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inclusion of a type c to type c cable I mean if you're not going to give me a

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brick okay fine but this is a mid-tier device what are the odds that the brick

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that I already have with my old mid-tier device is a type c brick read the room

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Samsung you guys not not happy USBC bricks

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another Common Thread was the allegedly terrible call Quality when using this

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phone via Bluetooth in your car allegedly I take calls in my car all the

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time and that's doesn't make any sense I'm gonna have to try that

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hey you sound fine but are people coming I'm walking away are

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people complaining about what comes through from my side or the other way

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um I think it was coming through from on

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my side I don't know you sound fine to me yeah you sound cool I kind of wonder

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if they just had a bug at some point uh maybe I mean there were quite a few

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reviews but yeah it's possible that new software updates was kind of fixed that

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it's been up for almost a year I don't know what to tell you

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it's fine at least with this car I'm not saying

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you imagined it once we move up to the two and three

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star reviews people start complaining more about the text-to-speech feeling a

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little sluggish so processing again a lack of memory resulting in apps

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freezing momentarily lack of dual SIM support though there is an international

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version with dual SIM so it seems like they might have bought the wrong model

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poor facial recognition we found a couple complaints about this in the four

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and five star range as well but they don't seem to really be bothered by it I

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guess because it's still a five-star review and then another big one is the

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unresponsive fingerprint scanner the good news is that a lot of these

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features might not matter to you that much particularly dual SIM support and a

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good hack for Samsung's poor fingerprint recognition is to register the same

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finger multiple times they are just a little bit slower than the competition

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funnily enough most of the four star reviews complained about bloatware but

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from my point of view it's really not that bad especially if you don't sign

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into a Samsung account during setup we did a regular installation with just

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Google account and honestly like what

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this that's it I don't even know if I would actually get rid of anything that

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was pre-loaded on this device but this is an unlocked device and it's possible

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that some of these folks are leaving reviews with their carrier bloated

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versions and then ah the rest of the complaints at this tier were pretty

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focused on the lack of wireless charging which is kind of valid at this price

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point what is interesting though is that in spite of all these complaints and

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shortcomings y'all seem to pretty much love this thing five star reviews made

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up 64 of all reviews with another 20

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being 4 star I mean I can't think of just about anything in this polarized

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world that 84 percent of people agree is damn good so what do you guys love then

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expandable storage decent camera really

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decent camera great battery life nice display 5G but we've talked about all

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that the biggest one is the value plenty

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of you guys are paying between 3 and four hundred dollars with many remarking

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that they either came from the thousand plus dollar Flagship scene and just

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didn't want to do that anymore or they never had one and wanted to avoid

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shelling out big bucks in the first place interestingly we didn't see too

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many comments from people who appreciated it being affordable without locking into a carrier contract but that

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was a major factor in blue spying decision so I think it's worth

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mentioning also worth mentioning is the main competitor for this model the

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Google pixel 6A while they're both the same price both now and at launch the 6A

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only has 650 ratings total so it's clearly less popular but that doesn't

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surprise me that much given that Samsung is a bit more of a household name than

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Google is at least when it comes to phones as for how they differ well the

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camera on this one may be technically better actually in some ways Google

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software is so darn good that the pixel 6A ended up taking first place in

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mkbhd's blind camera test so if that's all you care about then maybe go for the

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pixel but if you care about just about anything else like a smooth display La

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the a53 walks away in just about every

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other category meaning the herd mentality approach might not be a bad

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one if you're shopping for a value phone oh and if you're into the herd mentality

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this video make sure to check out some of the others from this series like the

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mouse we looked at recently why is everybody buying that one