Smartphones and Tablets
A discussion thread for those things a lot of us can't seem to live without these days.
What kinds have you owned over the years? What are you using now? How do you feel about it? Any plans to switch hardware? Stuff like that.
What kinds have you owned over the years? What are you using now? How do you feel about it? Any plans to switch hardware? Stuff like that.
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I have a smartphone but sometimes I wish I still had a dumbphone.
Since a week or so after my last birthday in October I've had an HTC One M9, my first phone on Sprint and the third HTC phone I've owned in general.
My feelings about it are mixed. I definitely have more breathing room for apps and games on it than my previous phone (a Moto X 2014) because of the 32GB of onboard storage space but HTC's skinned version of Android, Sense, has some questionable design choices, and overall the changes made to the stock Lollipop/Marshmallow experience don't do very much for me to really prefer it over my last phone beyond the space thing. If I had the choice, I would probably go for either a current Moto X Pure or one of the Nexus models to try to get that unaltered Android feel back, but I'm not in the position to be able to purchase my own hardware yet, so for now I will deal.
It forces me to choose carefully what to clog it with.
And it's ample enough for me to take tons of pictures anyway.
I could also get myself a better microSD card but I haven't really felt the need yet.
Fun fact: my microSD card's storage capacity is smaller than my phone's.
Various options were disabled in the upgrade from Kitkat to Lollipop. This include something so basic as being able to swipe down the on-screen keyboard to make it disappear.
Good on my dad for never upgrading his phone.
It's a system app. Google wants as many people using their services as possible so most Android phones come with at least a few of them out of the box (YouTube, Chrome, Gmail).
Comes with the territory, I suppose.
The Moto X Play is available here, but it's exclusive to Verizon and got renamed the Droid Turbo 2 as a way of tying it in with their long running line of VZW-exclusive Droid smartphones.
I was disappointed by thus, but not particularly surprised.
My first was the Kindle Fire HD 7 from 2012 (codenamed Tate), which I modded the crap out of to run Cyanogenmod KitKat and Lollipop (and occasionally a few other ROMs here and there) while I was using it. I spent a good 2 and a half years with it, from Christmas 2013 to August 2015. It served me well, especially for a gift I didn't actually ask for (my parents just got me one because I have a tendency to not ask for anything and my sister wanted one for herself).
My current tablet, and the thing I'm typing on now, is an iPad Air 2 given to me as part of my scholarship to UK. I love it dearly; perhaps ironically, it's been more reliable as a life companion than the MacBook Pro I'd wanted for years.
(Also, my dad and mom both have the iPad Mini 2, with my dad's serving as a replacement for his now broken iPad 2, which has been passed down to my kid sister.)
Also for some reason the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the thread title was My Favourite Things.
Smartphones and tablets and classic Intel chips~
If I wanted a phone that forced me to use on-screen controls for basic navigation, I'd get an iPhone. :|
On-screen buttons are better for standardization because they're baked into the OS as is so it's less likely (though not impossible) for the OEMs to play around with them too much, whereas with hardware buttons there never was an agreed set of inputs or order to them (we're getting that even to this day, with Samsung continuing to be ~unique~ by putting their back button on the right side of their latest phones).
Plus, less likelihood to screw up and press a key while doing something in a full screen app (videos, games).
I tried swipe-typing but it was only good as a novelty.
I only use SwiftKey Flow (my keyboard app's Swype equivalent) occasionally, and often I do so while also using simple button presses (including during the typing of this sentence).
I use SwiftKey almost exclusively on Android; it's a little buggy but nothing unmanageable, and I own a black and green theme for it so it looks very Tre. Google's standard keyboard is top-notch, however. (I may or may not switch now that Microsoft owns SwiftKey. We'll see.)
On iOS I switch between SwiftKey and the standard Apple keyboard, largely because the OS kind of forces you to (third party keyboards can't type passwords or other sensitive fields like credit card numbers, and SwiftKey doesn't have an option to access Siri's voice typing, presumably because Apple intentionally withheld that from the other keyboards' permissions).
i can't operate them with the other side of my pen
Definitely tempted to try to pick up a G5 at some point, or maybe another LG phone if their output continues to intrigue.
If I had the chance to get any phone right now it'd probably be between the Nexus 6P, the G5 or the Galaxy S7 Edge, though realistically the latter two are the only real options because I'd be limited to things being offered by Sprint (which, unfortunately, Google forgoed this time around in lieu of just selling direct, which is a better strategy for the user but has the unfortunate side effect of cutting off nerds who still rely on their parents' phone plans).