Dec 21st, 2015

Author: donich_admin

Hello my love, Hello….

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about how I was trialling out using an Android phone instead of a Windows phone (Goodbye, my love, goodbye….). You can see from the title of this post what has happened about that…
I realize that it is my own fault, but not being overly keen on Google as a company, I removed standard Android and put Cyanogen Mod on it. This was a bad plan, because although I am somewhat of a geek in most respects, with regard to my phone I just like it to work. And minus any of Google’s service, Android is not a fun experience. You can’t just install apps from a store, you have to think about where to get APK files from. And this being Android, a really, really good way to get malware on a rooted phone is to go to random sites and install the crap you find there… So every app that you want takes a degree of research, which you don’t want to do when (for example) you are on a train in Belgium and want to look up train times.

But the worst thing of all was that what I really like doing with my phone is taking pictures with it and putting some of them on this blog. Windows Phone auto-uploads these to my One Drive, and then when I am sitting writing a post, I can just upload them to WordPress. I wouldn’t deny that Android does this too; but whilst WP uploads a small version of the image, nothing I could do could induce Android to do anything other than copy the full sized image up. And I can’t put this onto my website because a) it takes ages to upload and uses up our very limited bandwidth, and b) for anyone with a slow connection it slows opening the website posts to a crawl. I know this is a #firstworldproblem but having to go and get a cable, copy the files off the phone, resize them and then manually upload them, removed my enthusiasm for writing posts which I normally do at the end of the day when I’m tired and not up for a load of faffing about. Finally, I have to say in all honesty that I greatly prefer WP from the point of using it; it is fun and different and I can’t say that for Android.

So when I was in Belgium I had reverted to using an old WP which I had in the house for testing purposes (my Lumia 1020 had already left for its new home), and yesterday I finally gave in and reverted my main number to it. The Moto G will have to be used as a camera when it is wet and to use the Viewranger app – basically when R and I are out in the hills.

Please, please Microsoft – bring out a waterproof Windows Phone….