Be Excellent To Each Other

Just a heads-up there was a shitass Windows Update went out last week that incorrectly flagged up some Nexus devices as an Acer ADB Interface (or some such crap).

You won't notice anything is amiss until you plug your Nexus into your PC and it totally fails to appear as a drive in My Computer, which is what happened to me this evening.

The fix is to uninstall AND DELETE the erroneous Acer driver files from within Device Manager (if you don't do the delete option it'll immediately just put the shit Acer ones back on), then reconnect your Nexus, and it should pull back the original Nexus 5 drivers and work again.

There are a few variations floating around out there but that's the one that worked for me.

Rather irritating.

Done. Eventually. Ordered a blue S5. I thought a gold one was a bit, well, Lancastrian.

This also means I will have a new phone number.

Why?! For all that's holy, why?!

Getting too many calls from recruiters and stuff. Also, my current number has too few eights.

*narrows eyes*

Samsung throw a few more things at the wall during their IFA presentation:

• Galaxy Note 4. The screen size stays the same but the resolution goes up to QHD and the actual construction is a good deal nicer this time around apparently (presumably in response to the reception of the One range). I'll probably pick one of these up when they're properly released next month.
• Galaxy Note Edge. A bonkers variant on the Note 4 which has a flat screen apart from two horizontal strips at either side which are angle. Fuck knows what's going on there.
• Gear S smarwatch. New Tizen-running smartwatch with massive fucking screen; the watch takes it's own SIM card so you can use it entirely without a phone, if you're a mentallist who wants to type on and shout at his wrist.
• Gear VR headset. A VR headset, made by the Occulus guys, which doesn't seem to do much that Google Cardboard doesn't do; with the added downside that the Gear VR can only be used with the Galaxy Note 4. So totally niche and pointless basically.

I am excited about smartwatches.

Not that one, though.

Nexus 5 has just had a price drop, now down to a frankly ridiculous £266 on Amazon.

Doubtless the Nexus 6 is imminent but that's a huge amount of phone for the money.

Cor. This is a bit posh. Really like the S5 already.

only if the screen is ~6in.

Bit of a flawed naming scheme really, when they refreshed the Nexus 7 they called it... Nexus 7. you have to check you've got the right one by comparing weight and so on.

Got myself one of them there Chromebooks today (the Toshiba 13, to be precise).

Aren't they ace!

Just £200 and it's a really nifty little bit of kit. I was after a cheap and cheerful laptop to take to work, away on trips, and generally just for day-to-day light duties but with a fair heft of battery life.

I was looking at the cheap Windows 8 laptops but using Windows 8 makes me lose the will to live, plus they tend to be bulky and heavy with shit battery life unless you lay out a wedge of cash. On top of that I really don't want another PC/laptop to look after in terms of updates and housekeeping and anti-virus (yeah I know MSE is hassle free but even so) and all the other shit that comes with a Windows machine.

Anyway, the Chromebook is fab. Logged in with my Google account and everything is just 'there', Netflix and Youtube both work fine at 720p, it seems to cope with a lot of stuff running at once, despite having a lowly Celeron processor and just 2GB of RAM. It's running off a teeny 16GB SSD/flash/whatever but boots in seconds, sleeps in second and wakes in seconds, and everything's in the cloud anyway.

For the cash, very impressed. Lightweight too, runs silently, will be easy to carry around.

What happens if it can't get online?

They work pretty well offline these days, proper offline docs, gmail, and so on. Then they just sync up again when they have a connection. Loads of the apps work offline too and stuff innit.

So it says in the reviews anyway, I haven't tried it offline or anything. (I don't expect mine to be without internet for any amount of time so it's not really a concern.)

Just had a little play around with it in offline mode. Created a new document and stuck some text and images in. It cached it locally and then as soon as it got a network back it synced it up to Drive, and seconds later I can open Drive on my Nexus 5 and the doc is there and up to date.

Same goes for composing emails.

Seems to work fine without an internet connection, which was always one of the bugbears with early versions of the OS.

PC Pro did a fairly sizeable write-up on the OS this month and concluded it's actually a pretty capable and acceptable OS for a decent number of people, a decent amount of the time.

Also, the hardware I've got is pretty old (the Toshiba 13 has been around for a while), when I turned it on for the first time there was ONE single update it wanted to apply, can you imagine buying a Windows laptop that's been sat on the shelf for six months and turning it on for the first time.....

Totally bargainous for £200. (This was off the shelf at Currys, you may be able to manage cheaper online.)

New Hudl tablet announced and it's a pretty damn good spec for the £129 they want for it (or apparently £65 with Clubcard voodoo which makes it stupidly good value):

http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/03/tesc ... -launches/

It's still running stock Android which is nice and it's got a bigger screen; the full list of differences between the old and new one here:

http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/03/tesc ... _truncated

More RAM than any Apple tablet / phone, too

It's not the specs, it's how much better than everyone else it makes you feel.

My new work phone is the stupidly named Motorola Moto G 4G LTE.

Does it actually have 4G LTE?

No idea, haven't received it yet.

yes.

An android phone? Won't that be difficult to use once you have wrapped it in tinfoil?

He's only going to ever use it to send nonsense messages to made up contacts. The man won't get anything from him!

I don't really care when it's for work.

Champagne activist.

Lobbying for corporate privacy? Not really my thing.

It's arrived. Bit plasticky, but I guess it's to be expected with a budget phone. Screen is nice.

Disabled all Google apps - let's see if I've broken it doing that.

It's pathetic that I've got to have a Google account to download a free alternative browser to Chrome. Open ecosystem, my arse.

You don't.

Perhaps you should learn how to use your phone first. If only you could Google it

http://www.pocketmeta.com/download-andr ... ount-6291/

Why bother doing that when I can moan about it on here and have someone oblige me with a link within minutes?

Also, thank you.

Cunt.

That link probably won't be much use to you, as the service only has a limited amount of usages per day for anonymous folk.

There are lots like it, though - or you could just download your APK from somewhere else and sideload it.

I'll figure something out. Just need to be able to download my company's app and a different browser. Cheers.

Better hope "APK Downloader" isn't infecting its downloads with malware and/or have fun explaining to your boss why you have a virus on your phone that's leaking company data.

Jesus Christ.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Opera-Software- ... ords=opera

It's...not bad. I like some aspects and dislike others.

What exactly was ever your problem with Android though? If you remove all the Google hate and your nonsense moaning about 'openness' are you really that surprised that a modern smartphone OS is at least decent?

He's a contrary arse?

This isn't going to work if you just hand him the answer on a plate.

No he isn't.

Works for me.

Hello android users, my contract is up in November and I think I have decided on android as my next os as apple is too pricey and fragile and I want to move on from win8 which I found to be very good, but am tired of missing out on all the apps that 'normal' phone users get. Unfortunately Nokia seems firmly tied to windows and my Lumia 8....20? Is the best, most bombproof, reliable phone I've ever had. Samsungs feel cheap and nasty to me (Mrs.w has a S3) same for htc.

I could go a bigger screen a bit.

or do i just keep the old beast and put up with the poor app support?

Have you tried the Sony range? They're pretty well put together at the top end

Coin-ki-dink! Just been looking at the z3 compact! Sounds good on paper, ill have to watch some videos to see if i like it more...

Wait a couple of weeks and see what the nexus 6 turns out to be.

If you have big hands, the Samsung Note is an incredible bit of kit.

I shall bide my time untill nexus 6 then although I've never even seen a nexus let alone played with one. A visit to a physical shop might be in order

the battery life on the Sony seems ridiculously good. 13 days with use? Naaah

edit: the note looks unpocketably huge, i have to be able to get it into the top pocket of my overalls which is the only place phones don't get crushed.

It fits in the top pocket of my overalls.