I started at MobileSyrup as an intern in February of 2018, and it was a dream come true. I don’t take for granted how much of a privilege it was to share my thoughts with you all every day, and I’m going to miss it immensely.
I’m moving on, and you can follow me on Threads or Twitter to see where in about a week or so.
That said, you can never move forward without looking back a little bit, so I’ve been reminiscing on some of my favourite stories and decided to share them here in case anyone else wanted to walk down memory lane with me.
My first story
When I walked into MobileSyrup for the first time in 2018, the office was actually pretty empty because MobileSyrup OGs Pat and Rose were at MWC, but it slowly filled up with people who would go on to become my friends and mentors over the next seven years.
After a brief tour of our space, the owner at the time (and founder) Ian Hardy just threw me a story and said something along the lines of “there’s no better way to figure out how to write besides doing it.” And with that small line that I think about all the time, and share with whoever will listen, I started my career.
Story one: Vivo shows off concept smartphone with pop-up camera and in-display speakers.
My first reviews
About a month later, I had finally proven myself enough to be allowed to write a weekly column about an app or game that I liked. I started with VSCO, which I’ve moved off of lately, but has been a staple on my phones for years and is a great cheat code for any mobile photographers looking to get some quick vibes.
It’s not a great story, but I got to take another swing at it two years ago, and it’s kinda fun to compare the two stories to see how far I was able to go in my time here. (Sorry, some of the image links have broken as we’ve moved our site through various owners over the past couple of years).
My first product review was a UE Boom speaker that my mom still uses to this day. This was after I had bought my first camera and started to learn photography. It’s crazy to look back on it now, but I was so happy with these photos, and with how I had learned to Photoshop dust off of things, a skill that has probably eaten up days of my life accumulatively over the past years.
My first phone review came in 2019 when Dean let me take a crack at a low-cost Huawei device. This was a learning experience, and I guess I can admit now that I dropped the phone and shattered the top back corner. So this is when I had to learn a lot more about Photoshop to hide the spider web cracks for my product photos. I like to think my first real review was the OnePlus 7T that came up a few months later.
My first videos
For years, I really wanted to be a video journalist. I grew up idolizing The Verge videos like Finding Paul Miller. So after getting my camera, I really tried to push to make more videos at MobileSyrup. There was only one problem: I kinda sucked.
MobileSyup devices editor Dean and I actually made one, maybe two, videos together that had audio that was so bad we weren’t even allowed to publish them. But we stuck at it and finally got one to come together with the LG ThinQ phone. That first shot of Dean was actually shot in my old bedroom.
I kept at it and made a few more videos, including one about Chromebooks that blew up to over 100,000 views. I actually think this was key because this early taste of success kept me driven. I knew I could do it, I just needed to find a way to do it repeatedly. (I also got a comment about my hair that led to me wearing hats in videos for years after this lol).
About a year after this, Blue Ant Media acquired MobileSyrup, and I bought my first Fuji camera — an older XT3 and the 16-55mm lens to go with it. This really let me step up my quality, and I decided to take another crack at video. This time, I was able to carve out more work time to commit to it, and over the summer, I was able to bank a handful of videos that taught me almost everything I know about making content.
The first video I worked on was the music app one linked above. That is actually the third version of that particular video. But I think it goes to show that if you stick with something, you can figure it out. Out of this era, my favourite videos are actually the ones where I take a MacBook Pro to an island for a battery test and the review of Niagara launcher at Niagara Falls. To me, these videos really show off my real personality through and through.
This all came together when I got to cover my first Apple event. It was WWDC 2022, and the new M2 MacBook Air came out, so I also got to review a real brand-new Apple product, which was a huge moment for me. From there, I made way too much content to write a blurb for each one, even though I want to. But, if you’ve enjoyed any of it, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.
My favourite videos
- iPhone 13 Pro at WWDC photographic styles vlog review
- Cadillac Lyric first drive event
- OnePlus 10T review
- iPhone 11 retrospective review
- OnePlus 10 Pro review
- Fujifilm XH2S review
- Shot on iPhone vlog
My favourite stories
- DJI Mini 3 Pro review
- iPhone Air review
- Bell Giga Hub Review (this is my most popular story ever lol)
- M4 Mac mini review
- AirPods USB-C review
- Apple Watch Ultra 2 review
- Vision Pro review
- MacBook Air M3
- Gaming in the living room, the hard way
- What it’s like to build the Teenage Engineering Computer-1
- I hate streaming, so I built a Plex server
- OnePlus 10 Pro review
- Fujifilm XH2s review
- Apple Watch Series 10 review
- iPhone 16 Pro review
- OnePlus XPan mode
It’s been a pleasure,
Love Brad B
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