Be Excellent To Each Other

I promised Gaywood a drink and he sent me all the photos Myp has taken so far, so it appears not.

https://privacy.google.com/intl/en-GB/how-ads-work.html

"We do not sell your personal information to anyone"

"We give it away for free!"

"we just provide excellent methods for third parties to gather your data directly"

I'm cutting my coat according to my cloth. Can't justify £1000+ on a new iPhone. Got a Samsung Galaxy S8 instead. It seems nice so far.

You do realise 2/3rds of the new iPhones won't be £1000

(They'll still be more than that S8 tho)

Don't worry, I still have my 12.9" iPad Pro to use when I feel like looking down on you all still

My Note 8 arrives this week. Meanwhile, unless something very surprising happens, there's a strong chance the face unlock thing kills my enthusiasm for the iPhone X.

How does it cope with monozygotic twins?

The 6 Plus 64GB I bought two years ago was £819. Are you telling me that the 8/7s will be a similar price despite Brexit and the £ tanking?

In any case I'd want the X which is going to be £1,200 or thereabouts. Time for me to tap out now before I'm destitute.

We don't know yet, ask again later

The 128 GB iPhone 7, today, is £699. The 7 Plus is £819. Those prices already have the post-Brexit currency shift priced in; the pound hasn't moved all that much since September last year. I anticipate very similar pricing for the 8 and 8 Plus. And £819 is a lot, but it's still a long way short of a grand.

How does it cope with monozygotic twins?

Or celebrity looky-likeys

Once again, Microsoft have lead the pack on this then. Always innovating while everyone else is imitating.

It's not about security, it's about pointing your phone at your face being dumb

Yeah, I was only being sarcastic. I have used Windows Hello on my Lumia 950 and while it does exactly what it's supposed to, even in pitch black conditions.. It just means that you have to hold your phone at an unnatural angle to your face.

It'll never catch on.

So I'm curious: so far, what do you like and dislike the most?

He likes me the most. He dislikes you the most.

HTHHAND

I like the way it tells you who's calling even if they're not in your address book. I like being able to swap out the default calendar, keyboard and web browsers if you don't like them (which I don't). I like the heavily customisable geofencing you can do so I don't have to unlock the phone when I'm at home for example.

I don't like the default Samsung apps much. Some apps are better (e.g. Duolingo) and some are worse (Sleep Cycle). Mostly it's just learning where everything is as it's all different!

Oh, Google Assistant is like a billion times more useful than Siri

No idea what it's called, but one of the features I like most is the one where you hold down the home button and Google scrapes the screen for actionable things like phone numbers, websites, that kind of thing. It's v useful.

You might be talking about Now On Tap, which has gone away, but the same functionality (better, actually) is in Assistant now.

Yes, that's really nice.

What have you switched to?

Excellent.

BTW, if you want a Twitter client, Flamingo is my favourite.

How are you finding notifications? I vastly prefer Android to iOS. Mostly because you can dismiss notifications with one swipe, and you're not left with unread counters on app icons after dismissing a notification.

Or he might be talking about Assistant

Amusingly, if you use the assistant option "what's on my screen" it includes the assistant popup in the lookup, so the top result every single time is a Google search for "what's on my screen?"

Oh wow. That's rubbish. How did they miss that in testing?

Yeah notifications are much better. For some reason Words With Friends keeps coming up with 10 badge notifications every time I open it though. It's a nice touch that you can get rid of them from the home screen, but they keep coming back.

I'm using Gboard keyboard. Will try the Twitter app.

Words With Friends seems a bit flaky with its notifications. I have my phone permanently on vibrate, but I set WWF to notify but with no sound or vibration and it just ignores that and vibrates every time anyway, so I've ended up turning off notifications from the app completely.

It was Now on Tap! I remember the demo the young devs gave where they showed you how to learn about Skrillex while listening to Skrillex. This is a use-case I've never been required to explore.

Right? I can only imagine they used it a lot in testing, how would you not notice?

I can't repro this. Might be already fixed.

I mean, it's not fixed until it's on my device

If only there was a bug report button right on that very page

The biggest problem with Android is idiots like Samsung thinking they can do anything better than Google do themselves.

My only complaint with my S7 is the Samsung crap it came pre-loaded with, including their shit UI (which I replaced with Google Now as soon as I realised that was a thing thanks to DocG's advice), and the changes they've made to it over the last 18 months in terms of their software 'updates'. Security/stability updates I'm fine with, but they've moved things around on menus, inserted plugs for their own cloud solution into bits of the UI, and stuff like that. (And it's one of their updates that's made the auto-upload to Drive flaky as well, and I've never got to the bottom of that.)

My chum who has an S8 is fuming with them because it has a physical button on the side that invokes Samsung's take on Google Assistant, which is obviously shit compared to the actual Google Assistant. You can't remap this button to do anything else. So someone wrote an app that lets you change what this button does (y'know, to something useful and not shit), so Samsung pushed an update to the phone that broke the app and put the button back to summoning their shit assistant.

I still think the Nexus 5 is the single best phone I've ever owned. My next phone will be a 'pure' Google phone.

If you haven't already: Settings > User > Emergency information

It's different on Samsung. Apparently

Yes

Already done it, but yeah, it was somewhere else.

I like android quite a lot but here are a few of the things that I find a little jarring after switching from iOS over a year ago:

• The menus are all over the place (sometimes it's within the app, using the '3 bars' button, other times I have to swipe in from the left side; other things are in the
  separate 'settings' app; widget settings are found by a long press on an empty space on a homescreen)
• There are two news feeds (one is the 'cards' that appear on the Google Now page, the other is a separate 'news & weather' app. It's also easy to 'lose' a story I'm reading if I don't finish it in one go.
• I kind of miss the 'badges' from iOS - I find it's easy to dismiss a notification (like a text from my mum) and then totally forget about it without that little on-screen prompt.
• Crashes far more than I was used to with iOS (may be my Nexus 5X)
• Volume of notifications received when listening to music are inconsistent

Things that I have really liked:

• Good integration with the other google bits (mail, photos, drive etc)
• Assistant is actually useful (I like barking 'take me home')
• Small cards on homescreen (eg time to work/home from current location, traffic alerts, parcel dispatch, sport scores etc)
• Customisability (I've got a little energy meter at the top of the screen, a few px wide that goes through various shades based on battery charge)
• Customised homescreen elements
• Waking the phone with 'OK google' seems modern
• Ability to put remote control elements on the lock screen (eg to control my HTPC from the sofa)
• Swiping on the fingerprint sensor to see the notification 'shade'
• Warning of suspected spam calls when incoming

My last smart watch was pretty fronty, but this one is the Samsung Gear S3 Frontier.

Only major issue so far is that I can't get it to silence notifications on the phone when I'm wearing the watch. So I've disabled notifications completely and that seems to work. But it's a stupid solution as it means I won't get any notifications when not wearing it.

My contract is due for renewal soon and I’ve decided that I’m going with the new Nokia 8.

It seems that I have an unintentional brand loyalty with Nokia going back to my N95 days so I thought I’d stick with Nokia. I don’t want an iPhone and my other choice, the upcoming Pixel 2 is rumoured to not have a headphone socket which is a deal breaker for me so.. it’s a Nokia 8 that I’ll go with. Hopefully I’ll be picking it up on the 7th October.

I haven’t owned an Android device for years so I’m looking forward to getting to grips with it. I’ve had a Windows Phone for a good few years now so it’ll be interesting to see what I’ve missed out on.

Oh, and I’m looking forward to posting plenty of “Bothie’s”… Yeah, a Bothie. The new Selfie according to Nokia.

Or a small communal hut in the mountains of Scotland.

Pretty much everything. HTH

On a more serious note, that new Nokia looks like a nice bit of kit so I'm sure you'll be happy with it.

Ugh, a bothie - is that because it has 'both of you' in the shot? I always thought that a 'selfie' was an arm-outstretched-style photo one takes of oneself, but now it seems that any picture of an individual is being labelled a selfie. Fucking kids, eh?

Since updating to 'Oreo' at the weekend my wallpaper seems to keep changing every morning. There's probably a setting somewhere but I can't be bothered digging around. I'll just use google and search for how to find this setting instead.

Also, Opera somehow activated a 'lock screen news page setting' which I found most strange and was keen to deactivate. Not sure how it became enabled, as I only ever use Opera for looking at porn.

It's video recorded from both front and rear cameras simultaneously. There's an example on here. Terrible name though.