http://www.idkfa.com/v3 idkfa: syndicated http://www.idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=6839&msg_id=6845 Some updates: Full phone encryption is pretty seamless. The phone boots into its encrypted partition, and none of the user-facing applications have any idea. Plugging the phone into a computer requires you to enter your password in order to expose the unencrypted drives to the computer (which is nice). The only place I can see a performance hit is taking pictures and videos, and even so, it's not terrible. I just turned my settings down from 16 megapixels. Nobody deserves that many pixels. Swype is... getting easier, but still awkward as hell. Even if I don't end up using Swype input (you can just tap the letters, like any software keyboard), the configurability of the Swype keyboard is better than the the stock Android keyboard. Notably: I can remove the "talk to type" button. Because... Voice recognition on the phone isn't particularly useful. Or usable. The two options I have for voice are Samsung S-Voice and Google's Now/Voice search. Samsung S-Voice doesn't expose itself correctly at the lock screen, and the voice recognition either doesn't work or is pretty poor. To use it effectively, I would need to unlock my phone, which I can't really do when I'm driving. Google Now/Voice exposes itself at the lock screen reasonably, but does not plug in to the few features I would want (reading text messages, notifications, etc.). To do so, I would need to plug in to Google Now, which I don't need or want. I was surprised that Google had its own SMS/MMS handler, aside from its Google Hangouts integration. I kind of like it. It does one thing, and it does it well, a philosophy I wish more phone apps would adopt. It also gives me the ability to "archive" SMS/MMS threads, so that they don't appear in the main list, but I can still revisit them if I need to. A few days after having my phone, a few weird apps wormed their way to the forefront and started bothering me about signing kaiden@idkfa.com (kaiden) Cognitive Surplus Mon, 01 Dec 2014 11:26:00 -0900 http://idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=6839&msg_id=6845 http://www.idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=6839&msg_id=6841 Very insightful content. I expect nothing less with your 2020 upgrade. Green Man@idkfa.com (Green Man) Cognitive Surplus Tue, 25 Nov 2014 19:30:14 -0900 http://idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=6839&msg_id=6841 http://www.idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=6839&msg_id=6840 I CARE, JOSH! kitacek@idkfa.com (kitacek) Cognitive Surplus Tue, 25 Nov 2014 17:04:31 -0900 http://idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=6839&msg_id=6840 http://www.idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=6839&msg_id=6839 SPDCA: New Phone I ended up getting a new phone. My prior device, the 2011 Motorola Atrix 4G, had long since been obsoleted by its manufacturer, leaving it up to me to find operating system updates. As such, I could keep up with the individual application updates, but it was still running Android 2.X, compared to the now 4.4.X. Often, features of newer applications would be disabled due to my inability to find updates, if the features would work at all: Group texts all but rendered the phone unusable, especially if MMS messages contained any sort of multimedia. Video players quit for a month. Then came back after an update. Then quit again. Then started to work randomly, but had a chance of hard-rebooting the phone, or causing a strange "overlay" effect when the video would render into a layer that could never be written to again. Software keyboard would randomly insert Z's. The hardware was also falling apart. The protective filter in front of the camera had shattered at some point, causing understandably blurry and greenish photos. The touch screen would only work on every second or third unlock, and the metal speaker cage had eroded allowing the speaker diaphragm to be punctured, making for weird gaps in the sounds it was capable of (notably: most of the alarms were whisper quiet). It still had its charms, though. Standard USB cable recharging, mounting as a USB drive, replaceable battery, upgradeable microSD storage, and a sense of elitism, entitlement, and a sort of "you kids get off my lawn" feeling. However, spending a weekend trying to communicate with people over MMS pretty much sold me on an upgrade. It'd been three and a half years, after all. In phone years, that's a healthy age. In researching, I found that some things had stayed the same, and some things had changed. Android is still the Wild West. I still don't want to go back to an iPhone. Windows phones were kaiden@idkfa.com (kaiden) Cognitive Surplus Tue, 25 Nov 2014 16:56:56 -0900 http://idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=6839&msg_id=6839