Be Excellent To Each Other

Aw, I've already written to them today. I'll do that tomorrow.

Can't fail.

Change of plan.

Hearthly Jnr's old Moto-G V2 is very much end-of-life now, obviously it stopping getting Android updates about three centuries ago, the storage is all maxed out, it's slow and clonky, and we can't even install stuff like the Battle.net authenticator on it due to old OS. The battery is totally spannered as well.

As such I have renewed my contract and got a shiny new Sony Xperia XA2 for 'free', which she can have.

It won't even have a SIM card in it, she just uses her phone in the house on wifi as a mini-tablet, camera, email client, YouTube viewer and suchlike. She has a Google account and she loves the way her photos sync up to Drive so she can get to them straight away on her PC, for example.

The XA2 is a brand new phone and has reviewed pretty well, comes with 'Oreo' out of the box and has a very good camera on it by all accounts.

I'll see if I can get another two years out of the S7.

I'm curious why you'd give her the new phone rather than handing the S7 down?

I'm not sure the XA2 is necessarily any 'better' than the S7, and it'll be nice for Jnr to get something new as opposed to handed down.

Plus, the S7 has got all my authenticators on it and I've got it set up just the way I want it (well, apart from when Samsung decide to move things around or put extra shit on it), so I wouldn't much relish setting up a new phone anyway.

Apart from Samsung's shittery I think the S7 is a fantastic phone, if it lasts another two years I'll be more than happy to keep it for that long.

Fair enough, I had assumed the XA2 was a new flagship phone but now I actually look at the specs the S7 does beat it in most areas.

The S7 will definitely last another two years if you keep it plugged in the whole time.

Affordable

http://www.cheshirerepaircentre.co.uk/s ... rvice.html

The battery is holding up OK to be fair, but yeah, not sure what state it'll be in after another two years.....

Got the XA2 set up for Jnr last night, for all the world it feels like a high-end smartphone to me, the screen in particular is superb.

Sony have done an admirably 'light touch' job on Android, and there's also an option as part of the initial setup to choose what extra apps you want installing. I don't know if this is Google mandated now or a Sony thing, but it allowed me to simply deselect all the Sony apps so all that's on there is Google stuff.

Beyond that is was pretty much just a case of logging in with her Google account, letting the various updaters do their thing, making sure Drive/Photos/Camera/etc all had permission to what they needed, that Drive was backing up new photos OK and suchlike.

USB-C is good (it goes in either way, fnaaar), but we only have one USB-C cable in the house, the one that came with the phone.

We took a few test photos and the quality is excellent.

So yes, nothing thrilling, but as a £300 phone it makes the idea of a £600 phone pretty silly IMO.

Certainly if my S7 breaks in the next two years I'll be replacing it with something in the £250-£300 bracket.

If you buy a spare or two make sure they're built properly.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 55741.html

Nah, my S8 is still as full of uninstallable Samsung shite as you'd expect.

Hats off to Sony then, for a manufacturer to basically say, 'We realise you might not want all our crap apps on your phone, here's an option not to install them' is quite splendid.

Play has an ability now for OEMs to install a number of apps at first-run, rather than baking them into the ROM. Sony are probably using that and Samsung aren't.

But more importantly:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 11455.html

There's been an update to my phone and now it seems that the notification bar is always present. I don't think it was there before?

I can't think I've ever seen a version of Android that didn't show it all the time (except when something was running full screen).

The Gmail app on my s7 recently stopped auto populating my frequently used contacts when I enter email addresses. It populates email addresses I haven't sent anything to for 10 years (e.g. an old work email address) but not that person's current address.

What's a good alternative to the Gmail app for email? It would need to handle three email accounts.

Have you tried Inbox?

Cheers! Just given that a download and it looks good, though hampered by the fact I have one yahoo address. May be time to decommission that one any way, if there are no better options.

A few months ago my S7 stopped doing autocomplete on URLs in Chrome. It happened completely randomly one day for no apparent reason, without me having changed any settings or anything.

It stayed like that for a couple of weeks, and then once again, with me changing nothing whatsoever, it started working again.

My Google Drive auto-backup still randomly breaks occasionally, which started happening ages ago after Samsung pushed one of their bollocks updates to it plugging their Samsung Cloud horseshit.

If you go to Settings-> About -> build number and tap it seven times, you access Developer Mode which gives you Options Galore!

Hnngh, for Boring Reasons it's proving hard to disband my yahoo address. Which is a pain as the sweep function on Inbox is ace.

Have been through Type App, Yahoo Mail and Outlook. Suspect I will end up with the latter if I can't get rid of my yahoo address/ add it to Inbox.

Yahoo! Mail has a forwarder, if that helps.

If you don't mind paying for an app, I use Maildroid Pro, which isn't cheap, but is on sale at the moment at £5.99.

Cheers! It looks nice but I'm on outlook now, which seems fine at the mo. Provided it can bring one type of CRM email into the 'focused' inbox we should be good. Thank you for the recommendation though, will pick it up should I have further issues with utlok (typo, keeping it. The norse god of communication)

After a few days, I'm impressed with Outlook on Android. Seems much snappier than the Gmail app and the "Focussed" inbox does a much better job of only showing me the emails that matter to me (i.e. not marketing guff). Would recommend it.

As would I. The only problem I have with it is the calendar. I don't like the look of it as I find it difficult to see what I have in there at a glance.

I use Outlook for email and DigiCal for my calendar.

Definitely agree with that, I still use the Google Calendar app if I need to know what's going on.

There was no calendar functionality in the Gmail app (that I was aware of) so doesn't feel like a downgrade in that regard.

This sounds relevant to Beex interests (and iOS-bearing Beexers too)

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-04-13-friday-the-13th-killer-puzzle-review-a-surprisingly-cute-horror-show

I can't find it on the Play store

"Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle - Android is being a little slow to update tonight! It will be available in the UK soon!"

Considering getting a new phone this year, all going well with house shit. Do I want a Pixel 2 or an S9?

What do you have now?

Is a headphone socket or SD card slot a requirement?

S6 edge


No to both

I've looked at stats and specs for both and feel like it's much of a muchness tempted to just flip a coin

NB: the Exynos CPU in the S9 has bad power management issues at the moment:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12615/im ... -s9-part-1

That's what you get in UK S9s. Most US reviews are reviewing the Qualcomm one, which is different.

I can only offer that my Pixel 2 is awesome and I love it

Considering my current Google Support fun, I don't think I'll ever be buying a phone from them again. I started the "my battery is broken, sort it" process in September. Still waiting.

Maybe I should just stick with my s6 longer then

I'd go for the Pixel. My S8 has a number of issues that make me dislike it and the S9 will be no different. The curved screen is fucking stupid and the fingerprint sensor is straight up awful.

The S8 is disappointing, I agree. I can't imagine the S9 is much better.

I'm going to go with something super cheap next time.

Things I especially like:

1) the intro mocks F13’s overly complex back story neatly
2) the frame rate limiter can be set to 30, 60, or 666 FPS
3) the settings section has a KiKiKiMaMaMa button

Here it is: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... .f13puzzle

The 8v1 F13 game is a lot of fun. Mr Dave, Sat, Fun Sally and I played it quite a bit on PC.

I accidentally sold my "start with a radio" perk, and then I could never find a radio.

My S7 has been mithering me to do a large software update for a few days (around 1GB of update). I acquiesced last night. Woke up in the morning and the phone was stuck in a boot cycle, never getting past the Samsung logo.

I eventually did a factory reset, which means the phone now works, but I seem to be stuck with Samsung's launcher. I try and install the Google Now launcher and apparently it no longer works with the OS version I'm running (8.0).

Is there a decent alternative/anyone else had this problem?

I use Evie as I wanted a simple, straightforward launcher and it's been great so far.

I use Evie and it crashes regularly.