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 barely on the radar in 2011, but I'm still not super interested in a non-*nix based platform. Phone are now also huge, the reign of the 1080p and greater displays pushing most phones into what would have been considered tablets a few years ago. I laughed. Then grumbled.

I did briefly look into the stranger things out there. I took a gander at the Jolla, FirefoxOS, and Ubuntu Touch stuff they had out there, but the developer ecosystem and overall support for the devices seemed comparatively small. I even found a small, exclusivity-driven phone called the OnePlus One, supposedly a "killer" phone, but you have to have an "invite" just to buy one. Reports were that they had a decent product, but their support was disorganized, at best, or non-existent at worst.

Leaning towards Android, that still left me with a lot of options. The Google Nexus 6 looked like a decent contender, but wasn't available anywhere I checked. Plus, it was godawful expensive.

There was the Moto X, which I was somewhat excited about in its first generation (enough to put myself on a mailing list, which I unsubscribed from after a while). Looking again, I found they had released a second generation of the phone, which had a number of nice features:

• AMOLED display, aside from being pretty, was also capable of displaying pixels without a backlight, meaning you can use the phone to get time/notifications in dark spaces without lighting up the room. I liked that a lot.
• Near-vanilla Android, with very few customizations outside what was provided by the Google Play store, and for the few customizations, most were well done.

The problem with the Moto X was that it is a sealed product: no removeable back- plate, no replaceable battery, and no upgradeable storage. Also, the pain of being outright abandoned by Motorola for software updates with my Atrix still pissed me off.

The alternate was the Samsung Galaxy S5. (Slightly) smaller than its Note companions, it has almost the exact same specifications as the Moto X, has a removeable back-plate, as well as boasts that its case design is intended to keep dust and moisture out (by way of some meaningless certification), as well as be able to be submerged for short periods of time. For how many times my phone emerged sweaty and gross from my pocket, this seemed pretty valuable.

There's also that Costco put the S5 on sale for $150 off yesterday, putting it down to $50 for a 2 year contract renewal. So, that's what I went with.

As some of the reviews had said, Samsung does weird things with its software, and a lot in terms of bloatware. I spent about three hours configuring the phone last night, but I probably spent 45 minutes uninstalling/replacing the things I didn't like or wasn't interested in. I spent some time finding a drop-in replacement for the AMOLED low-light notifications, which I ended up being very happy with. Also, a few other things I'm trying on for size:

• Full phone encryption. Spent about an hour this morning encrypting itself, and the device won't boot normally unless I enter my screen unlock password.
• I'm going to try Swype, the gesture based software keyboard. It's supposedly more efficient/accurate, but... it's going to take some practice, particularly with entering passwords.
• I'm going to see how well Google's voice recognition software goes. In doing phone encryption, I've signed myself up for a password that I will never (and should never) try to enter while driving. The few tests I had last night were pretty successful. I do feel silly saying, "Okay, Google..."

I also did a test last night. MMS, both in groups, and with images, work swimmingly, which I feel is sort of a game changer. I'll never have the right colored bubbles for my friends with iPhones, but that's okay. I'm alright being the weird bubble.