Sometimes new toys are the least fun to play with
So last night I visited Grandma for a bit and put some rows onto the Warlock Sock. Then I got home, had a quick dinner, and started fiddling with the new Android.
It was past midnight by the time I pried myself away from the phone long enough to feed the bunnies (who were giving me impatient nudges to the ankles when I got up -- they knew it was damn well past the time they should have been given their nightly greens), and since I tried to get it to connect to my desktop afterwards I wound up dozing off on my bed while the computer tried to download and install the required driver. Woke up around 4:30 (lights on, teeth unbrushed) and noted the installation window was still at the exact point in the process it had reached before I crashed. Unplugged the phone, turned off the computer, yanked the SIM card and replaced it in my Blackberry, brushed my teeth and went to bed to nap for the hour before my first alarm went off. (Unsurprisingly, I overslept.)
There are things I was charmed by -- the big lovely screen (which I haven't trying watching video on yet, but a YouTube app came preinstalled, and a Netflix app was available for free), the vast app selection, the gorgeous star map app I'd heard about but not realized I'd get to try out for myself that uses GPS and the positioning of the phone in your hand to identify the stars you're looking at right this moment. (Which would have been more fun if the sky hadn't been overcast last night when I was standing in the backyard trying it out.) But I pulled out the receipt and purchase paperwork and stashed the phone back in its box this morning because I'm probably going to be returning it this weekend -- overall, I found the phone to be frustrating and unsatisfying.
Some of the problems come down to the usual new technology learning curve -- exacerbated by me being used to a completely different model of phone. The touch screen is a major issue, since I haven't had anything close to that since my PDA -- naturally, I dislike it intensely. I'm having a hard time working it -- it scrolls when I want to highlight or open a given icon, and opens when I'm trying to scroll, and the onscreen keypad is too small for my fingertips but not sensitive enough to use a fingernail (like I used to on my PDA) -- and of course, no stylus was provided with the phone. I keep forgetting to slide out the keyboard when I need to type something -- and when I slide it out or back, the display sometimes hangs up for a while before rotating to the new orientation.
Also the display likes to rotate based on the angle the phone is held at, which is really freaking annoying because I'm never doing it deliberately. (It's a bug, not a feature, for anyone who spends as much time fiddling with their phone while lying down as I do.) There are no options for hiding the preinstalled functions that it won't let me delete but that I'll never use and that I got sick and tired of accidentally opening while trying to scroll around -- eventually I created a new category to start moving the voice-input and games and T-Mobile apps and other stuff I don't like into, so I can keep it minimized and away from the stuff I'm interested in. And I hate voice-input anything -- there is absolutely nothing on my phone I'm remotely interested in speaking to (and this includes the telephone function -- I spend less than ten minutes a month in using my mobile as a phone, and that only when forced to) -- but there's a stupid freaking button that keeps pulling up voice input options as though they were an exciting feature I should want on hand at all times, and it's on the fucking corner so I keep hitting it by accident all the goddamn time. (At least my Blackberries let me disable the voice input buttons -- all the buttons on the sides, in fact, since I kept hitting them unintentionally just holding my phone.)
But this is all minor shit, things I should eventually get used to (or learn to disable). A more serious issue is the way it reached a point last night where it evidently decided I'd had enough internets for one evening and wouldn't maintain a wifi connection anymore. A whole slew of applications showing up with red Xs on my screen as being nonfunctional without a connection, and the phone refusing to pick up even when I got up and walked over to the router itself for maximal signal strength. Could have been due to the battery getting too low, after the hours of fiddling I'd been doing with it. (Which would be a problem, if the battery life is that short.) Could have been due to us switching from watching something off the DVR to Mom watching live TV (and in HD, as well), competing for bandwidth with the wifi since the cable and internet are coming from the same source. (I didn't notice if the wifi dropped out when we changed shows, or if Mom was really watching live rather than off the DVR. Going to be another issue if I can't use the internet when Mom's watching TV, though.) I'm used to having connectivity issues in my bedroom (at the opposite corner of the house from the router), but the living room is a good signal area and there shouldn't be a problem in there.
The worst thing of all, though, is the way neither my netbook nor my desktop recognized the Android as a device when I hooked it up. They demanded installation software, none of which was provided with the phone. My desktop at least claimed it could get the required driver from the LG Industries website -- but the installation window froze up at a certain point in the process. There had been a warning I'd seen at some point about it taking a while and appearing to freeze up, so there's a chance it actually worked and the next time I try turning on the desktop it'll work with the Android. I'm not optimistic, though. (Another point to Blackberry, which happily registers as a USB drive if connected to a computer to which no device-specific software has been installed. I was expecting that much at a bare minimum for the Android.)
The claim is made, incidentally, that the phone syncs easily with Outlook -- written on the back of the box as a bullet point, in fact. It was one of the major selling points for me, thinking it would make it comparatively easy to port over the contacts/calendar/tasks/memos from my Blackberry, so long as I made a point of syncing the BB one last time before hooking up the Android. I cannot test this claim, since I can't get the phone to connect properly to one of my computers, but when I googled (hah!) on the topic of syncing Android with Outlook I turned up this gloomy article, which starts off with a warning that comes too late: "There's a little secret to buying an Android phone, one that you may not learn until it's too late: Google really wants you to use Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar." Ah ha hah. It goes on to explain that there are few really good options for linking an Android phone to Outlook and the best ones are expensive apps. (Though on my second try at searching for info on the topic, I turned up some other suggestions, some of them apparently free.)
Here's the thing: I'm not actually attached to Outlook. I only use the program A) at work and B) for backing up the contacts/calendar/tasks/memos on my Blackberry. I don't have Outlook on my desktop (it wasn't until last night that I even became aware of the existence of Windows Live Mail, evidently its replacement for Win 7), and the sync function for my Blackberry was the only thing left I had to do on the netbook rather than the desktop. If and when I can get those four types of data transferred to the Android, I'll stop caring about Outlook and probably gladly use whatever backup functions Google recommends for me. And thanks to a mobile sync function T-Mobile created a while back, my address book was kept backed up to my account and automatically transferred to the Android when I moved the SIM card. I can live with porting my calendar info to Google Calendar. I can live with manually retyping my tasks list -- it's short, and I suspect I'd have to find a new "to do" list app for the Android anyway, since if it has a built-in tasks function I didn't see it. I can even handle manually pasting the text of my memos into e-mails and sending them to myself for recopying into whatever format of text file I wind up finding most convenient on the Android. (Turned up several free memo or text apps as well as the preinstalled one -- figure I can try them out and see which works best for me. Definitely room for improvement if I can do a bit of formatting the BB memo function won't permit. Also, need to see if I need to find an Android app to allow me to copy text around -- I paid for that app on the BB, and the function has been well worth whatever it cost me.)
The make-or-break factor here is whether I can get my desktop at home tweaked to the point of working with the Android when I connect it. If I can't directly transfer pictures and MP3s and even e-books as I see fit, this is going to be a problem. Worse than battery life or being finicky about the wifi connection at home, worse than having to do a lot of file-by-file transfer of information from the old phone to the new one.
If I haven't gotten the Android properly connecting to my desktop by this weekend's grocery run, I'm returning it, and getting a new Blackberry in a month or two instead. (Probably the same model of Bold I already have -- not the new one with the touch screen.) A bit disappointing not to get new and improved features with the new phone -- a major reason I didn't just order a replacement Blackberry last weekend. But at least I won't have all these adaptation headaches. (And I'm debating with myself how much time I want to spend tweaking settings and unplugging things trying to get the desktop to work with the Android. I don't have that much free time, and I'd allotted myself an entire weekday evening to get the Android up and running, with occasional tweaks and individual apps being added over the next few days as required. I've lost enough sleep over this, and right now it looks like even if I solve my connection problem and get all my Outlook data copied over, I'm still going to be continually aggravated by the touch screen and the voice-input button. (I'm guessing the rotating screen and flimsy slide-out keyboard are things I'll get used to with time. Frankly so might the touch screen and the voice-input button -- but those might be things that just aggravate continually over time instead.)
So, I have a two-week window in which I can return the Android (and, presumably, be able to use my upgrade credit to knock a few hundred off a Blackberry after all). I'll let myself have the rest of this week to be sure this won't be a workable phone for me -- realistically, I suspect tonight I'll stick the SIM card and battery back in and test whether I can get it to A) connect to the house wifi again (perhaps even in my bedroom) with a fresh battery and B) whether I can get it to work with my desktop without spending another week googling suggestions and tweaking settings. And hopefully, not spend too many hours tonight in my room fighting with the Android, because this would be a spectacularly good night to be in bed by 10pm. (Or, possibly, deliberately crash as soon as I get home and wake up and play with tech at like 2am.)
The upshot being, I really wanted to smash the Android with something by the time I got to bed in the wee hours this morning, and I'm probably going to return it and get another Blackberry instead. Probably. Unless it starts cooperating with my desktop the next time I try connecting it.
Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
Do these conjoined twins share consciousness? -- "Susan Dominus has penned a remarkable piece for the New York Times about Krista and Tatiana Hogan, the 4-year old conjoined twin girls from British Columbia who are attached at the head. Scans show that the two girls have brains that are interconnected by a never-seen-before 'thalamic bridge,' an indication that they might share conscious thoughts. And if their early behavior is any indication, this may very likely be the case."
One of these days I'm going to get around to rereading at least A Dance with Dragons, if not plowing through the entire ASoIaF series again. (Though, you know, I could do that -- but there's a lot of unread stuff on my Kindle, and that's a lot of reading for something I've been through twice before. At least until the next book in the series is finally coming out. Though I might decide I'm in withdrawal with the TV season just finished.) And I'm saving this for my own future reference: A proposed reading order for going through A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons more-or-less chronologically, in the order they might have been published had George R. R. Martin not decided A) the book was too long to publish as a single volume and B) to split it up by characters rather than by picking a rough halfway point in the action as a whole. It appears to be fairly workable, just jumping back and forth between the two books at selected points, and not having to go back and read chapters out of order in their individually published book... (And reading on Kindle makes it a lot easier than if I were lugging a pair of dead-tree editions around with me. Especially that monster hardcover ADwD.)
Senate GOP Blocks Pay Equity Bill -- "Today, Republicans in the Senate blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act by filibustering the bill. The legislation would have strengthened protections for women who are being paid less because of their gender by creating larger penalties for employers who discriminate, creating more transparency of salaries so that women know whether they are being paid less, and protecting those who sue for pay equity."
Okay, managed to reach yesterday's starting point on Tumblr, which is important since I'm not going to be at my own desk tomorrow -- or Friday, or next week until... um, no, turns out the receptionist gets back from her vacation on Friday but I'm going to be out that day, so. Not till Monday the 18th. So, yeah, going to be away from my desk and my own computer. Which doesn't mean I won't be on Tumblr or LJ in that time -- just that it'll be slower and with less tabs and more annoying. And I should see about spending a bit more time on my computer at home in the next couple of weeks. (Though not tonight, probably, judging by thunder and lightning going on. Probably just as well to postpone more fiddling with the Android until I've had a few days to relax about it and maybe do a little more online research and, oh yeah, catch up on sleep.)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
It was past midnight by the time I pried myself away from the phone long enough to feed the bunnies (who were giving me impatient nudges to the ankles when I got up -- they knew it was damn well past the time they should have been given their nightly greens), and since I tried to get it to connect to my desktop afterwards I wound up dozing off on my bed while the computer tried to download and install the required driver. Woke up around 4:30 (lights on, teeth unbrushed) and noted the installation window was still at the exact point in the process it had reached before I crashed. Unplugged the phone, turned off the computer, yanked the SIM card and replaced it in my Blackberry, brushed my teeth and went to bed to nap for the hour before my first alarm went off. (Unsurprisingly, I overslept.)
There are things I was charmed by -- the big lovely screen (which I haven't trying watching video on yet, but a YouTube app came preinstalled, and a Netflix app was available for free), the vast app selection, the gorgeous star map app I'd heard about but not realized I'd get to try out for myself that uses GPS and the positioning of the phone in your hand to identify the stars you're looking at right this moment. (Which would have been more fun if the sky hadn't been overcast last night when I was standing in the backyard trying it out.) But I pulled out the receipt and purchase paperwork and stashed the phone back in its box this morning because I'm probably going to be returning it this weekend -- overall, I found the phone to be frustrating and unsatisfying.
Some of the problems come down to the usual new technology learning curve -- exacerbated by me being used to a completely different model of phone. The touch screen is a major issue, since I haven't had anything close to that since my PDA -- naturally, I dislike it intensely. I'm having a hard time working it -- it scrolls when I want to highlight or open a given icon, and opens when I'm trying to scroll, and the onscreen keypad is too small for my fingertips but not sensitive enough to use a fingernail (like I used to on my PDA) -- and of course, no stylus was provided with the phone. I keep forgetting to slide out the keyboard when I need to type something -- and when I slide it out or back, the display sometimes hangs up for a while before rotating to the new orientation.
Also the display likes to rotate based on the angle the phone is held at, which is really freaking annoying because I'm never doing it deliberately. (It's a bug, not a feature, for anyone who spends as much time fiddling with their phone while lying down as I do.) There are no options for hiding the preinstalled functions that it won't let me delete but that I'll never use and that I got sick and tired of accidentally opening while trying to scroll around -- eventually I created a new category to start moving the voice-input and games and T-Mobile apps and other stuff I don't like into, so I can keep it minimized and away from the stuff I'm interested in. And I hate voice-input anything -- there is absolutely nothing on my phone I'm remotely interested in speaking to (and this includes the telephone function -- I spend less than ten minutes a month in using my mobile as a phone, and that only when forced to) -- but there's a stupid freaking button that keeps pulling up voice input options as though they were an exciting feature I should want on hand at all times, and it's on the fucking corner so I keep hitting it by accident all the goddamn time. (At least my Blackberries let me disable the voice input buttons -- all the buttons on the sides, in fact, since I kept hitting them unintentionally just holding my phone.)
But this is all minor shit, things I should eventually get used to (or learn to disable). A more serious issue is the way it reached a point last night where it evidently decided I'd had enough internets for one evening and wouldn't maintain a wifi connection anymore. A whole slew of applications showing up with red Xs on my screen as being nonfunctional without a connection, and the phone refusing to pick up even when I got up and walked over to the router itself for maximal signal strength. Could have been due to the battery getting too low, after the hours of fiddling I'd been doing with it. (Which would be a problem, if the battery life is that short.) Could have been due to us switching from watching something off the DVR to Mom watching live TV (and in HD, as well), competing for bandwidth with the wifi since the cable and internet are coming from the same source. (I didn't notice if the wifi dropped out when we changed shows, or if Mom was really watching live rather than off the DVR. Going to be another issue if I can't use the internet when Mom's watching TV, though.) I'm used to having connectivity issues in my bedroom (at the opposite corner of the house from the router), but the living room is a good signal area and there shouldn't be a problem in there.
The worst thing of all, though, is the way neither my netbook nor my desktop recognized the Android as a device when I hooked it up. They demanded installation software, none of which was provided with the phone. My desktop at least claimed it could get the required driver from the LG Industries website -- but the installation window froze up at a certain point in the process. There had been a warning I'd seen at some point about it taking a while and appearing to freeze up, so there's a chance it actually worked and the next time I try turning on the desktop it'll work with the Android. I'm not optimistic, though. (Another point to Blackberry, which happily registers as a USB drive if connected to a computer to which no device-specific software has been installed. I was expecting that much at a bare minimum for the Android.)
The claim is made, incidentally, that the phone syncs easily with Outlook -- written on the back of the box as a bullet point, in fact. It was one of the major selling points for me, thinking it would make it comparatively easy to port over the contacts/calendar/tasks/memos from my Blackberry, so long as I made a point of syncing the BB one last time before hooking up the Android. I cannot test this claim, since I can't get the phone to connect properly to one of my computers, but when I googled (hah!) on the topic of syncing Android with Outlook I turned up this gloomy article, which starts off with a warning that comes too late: "There's a little secret to buying an Android phone, one that you may not learn until it's too late: Google really wants you to use Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar." Ah ha hah. It goes on to explain that there are few really good options for linking an Android phone to Outlook and the best ones are expensive apps. (Though on my second try at searching for info on the topic, I turned up some other suggestions, some of them apparently free.)
Here's the thing: I'm not actually attached to Outlook. I only use the program A) at work and B) for backing up the contacts/calendar/tasks/memos on my Blackberry. I don't have Outlook on my desktop (it wasn't until last night that I even became aware of the existence of Windows Live Mail, evidently its replacement for Win 7), and the sync function for my Blackberry was the only thing left I had to do on the netbook rather than the desktop. If and when I can get those four types of data transferred to the Android, I'll stop caring about Outlook and probably gladly use whatever backup functions Google recommends for me. And thanks to a mobile sync function T-Mobile created a while back, my address book was kept backed up to my account and automatically transferred to the Android when I moved the SIM card. I can live with porting my calendar info to Google Calendar. I can live with manually retyping my tasks list -- it's short, and I suspect I'd have to find a new "to do" list app for the Android anyway, since if it has a built-in tasks function I didn't see it. I can even handle manually pasting the text of my memos into e-mails and sending them to myself for recopying into whatever format of text file I wind up finding most convenient on the Android. (Turned up several free memo or text apps as well as the preinstalled one -- figure I can try them out and see which works best for me. Definitely room for improvement if I can do a bit of formatting the BB memo function won't permit. Also, need to see if I need to find an Android app to allow me to copy text around -- I paid for that app on the BB, and the function has been well worth whatever it cost me.)
The make-or-break factor here is whether I can get my desktop at home tweaked to the point of working with the Android when I connect it. If I can't directly transfer pictures and MP3s and even e-books as I see fit, this is going to be a problem. Worse than battery life or being finicky about the wifi connection at home, worse than having to do a lot of file-by-file transfer of information from the old phone to the new one.
If I haven't gotten the Android properly connecting to my desktop by this weekend's grocery run, I'm returning it, and getting a new Blackberry in a month or two instead. (Probably the same model of Bold I already have -- not the new one with the touch screen.) A bit disappointing not to get new and improved features with the new phone -- a major reason I didn't just order a replacement Blackberry last weekend. But at least I won't have all these adaptation headaches. (And I'm debating with myself how much time I want to spend tweaking settings and unplugging things trying to get the desktop to work with the Android. I don't have that much free time, and I'd allotted myself an entire weekday evening to get the Android up and running, with occasional tweaks and individual apps being added over the next few days as required. I've lost enough sleep over this, and right now it looks like even if I solve my connection problem and get all my Outlook data copied over, I'm still going to be continually aggravated by the touch screen and the voice-input button. (I'm guessing the rotating screen and flimsy slide-out keyboard are things I'll get used to with time. Frankly so might the touch screen and the voice-input button -- but those might be things that just aggravate continually over time instead.)
So, I have a two-week window in which I can return the Android (and, presumably, be able to use my upgrade credit to knock a few hundred off a Blackberry after all). I'll let myself have the rest of this week to be sure this won't be a workable phone for me -- realistically, I suspect tonight I'll stick the SIM card and battery back in and test whether I can get it to A) connect to the house wifi again (perhaps even in my bedroom) with a fresh battery and B) whether I can get it to work with my desktop without spending another week googling suggestions and tweaking settings. And hopefully, not spend too many hours tonight in my room fighting with the Android, because this would be a spectacularly good night to be in bed by 10pm. (Or, possibly, deliberately crash as soon as I get home and wake up and play with tech at like 2am.)
The upshot being, I really wanted to smash the Android with something by the time I got to bed in the wee hours this morning, and I'm probably going to return it and get another Blackberry instead. Probably. Unless it starts cooperating with my desktop the next time I try connecting it.
Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
Do these conjoined twins share consciousness? -- "Susan Dominus has penned a remarkable piece for the New York Times about Krista and Tatiana Hogan, the 4-year old conjoined twin girls from British Columbia who are attached at the head. Scans show that the two girls have brains that are interconnected by a never-seen-before 'thalamic bridge,' an indication that they might share conscious thoughts. And if their early behavior is any indication, this may very likely be the case."
One of these days I'm going to get around to rereading at least A Dance with Dragons, if not plowing through the entire ASoIaF series again. (Though, you know, I could do that -- but there's a lot of unread stuff on my Kindle, and that's a lot of reading for something I've been through twice before. At least until the next book in the series is finally coming out. Though I might decide I'm in withdrawal with the TV season just finished.) And I'm saving this for my own future reference: A proposed reading order for going through A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons more-or-less chronologically, in the order they might have been published had George R. R. Martin not decided A) the book was too long to publish as a single volume and B) to split it up by characters rather than by picking a rough halfway point in the action as a whole. It appears to be fairly workable, just jumping back and forth between the two books at selected points, and not having to go back and read chapters out of order in their individually published book... (And reading on Kindle makes it a lot easier than if I were lugging a pair of dead-tree editions around with me. Especially that monster hardcover ADwD.)
Senate GOP Blocks Pay Equity Bill -- "Today, Republicans in the Senate blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act by filibustering the bill. The legislation would have strengthened protections for women who are being paid less because of their gender by creating larger penalties for employers who discriminate, creating more transparency of salaries so that women know whether they are being paid less, and protecting those who sue for pay equity."
Okay, managed to reach yesterday's starting point on Tumblr, which is important since I'm not going to be at my own desk tomorrow -- or Friday, or next week until... um, no, turns out the receptionist gets back from her vacation on Friday but I'm going to be out that day, so. Not till Monday the 18th. So, yeah, going to be away from my desk and my own computer. Which doesn't mean I won't be on Tumblr or LJ in that time -- just that it'll be slower and with less tabs and more annoying. And I should see about spending a bit more time on my computer at home in the next couple of weeks. (Though not tonight, probably, judging by thunder and lightning going on. Probably just as well to postpone more fiddling with the Android until I've had a few days to relax about it and maybe do a little more online research and, oh yeah, catch up on sleep.)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.