Yes, I’m still gorging myself on ice cream sandwiches all because of stupid Google and their delicious Android OS naming scheme. I’ve probably eaten more ice cream sandwiches in the past couple of months than I did in the previous 10-15 years.
It never fails to make me want to eat an ice cream sandwich whenever I read an article about Android OS 4.0 whose code name is “ice cream sandwich.” So yet again I got some ice cream sandwiches because I made quick work of my previous box of them. The thing is that I didn’t remember to get them until I was at Key Food who only carries “Weight Watchers” ice cream sandwiches.
My laziness somehow manages to speak louder than my stomach who says that I’ve never ever ever enjoyed low fat desserts. So now I have five more crappy ice cream sandwiches with boring vanilla and sandwich parts which don’t taste chocolatey at all. Oh well.
It’s really sad that all our cool gadgets nowadays have batteries whose estimated lifespan are based off of using as few features from the cool gadget as possible. I wonder what would happen if a company released a product and gave an estimated battery life based on every single feature being on, then people found out that turning off certain features gave it comparatively crazy awesome battery life!
Yesterday I took my phone out into the wild after it being upgraded and I had 4G and GPS turned on because I was testing it out. After my two hour kung fu class and subsequent return home the battery was down to 50% ouch! I’ll have to see how it lasts when I use it like I normally do which is without the 4G or GPS on unless absolutely needed.
Yesterday, the very popular Android ROM Cyanogenmod released version 7 which is based off of Android 2.3 “Gingerbread.” I had heard that it was the most popular alternate Android ROM, but saw that for my phone there was no 4G capability in it, and I wasn’t about to install the unstable builds that were being released every night. Now there’s finally an allegedly stable version with all the good stuff so I spent a lot of yesterday getting it to work on my phone.
I had all the proper backups, but for some reason things weren’t all hunky dory and at one point everything seemed okay except for some missing apps and the fact that my phone wouldn’t turn off. Then when I rebooted it wouldn’t get past the startup screen.
But eventually I prevailed and everything seems to be working okay. I’ve convinced myself that it is indeed running faster and giving more consistent framerates during general use or when playing games. There are some slick widgets in this new version and also the free portable hotspot totally works now. Yes, and it looks like turning off an old TV when you press the power button. Hopefully this is the phone experience I’ve been waiting for.
The previous custom ROM I was using had some nice features, but I felt like my phone was kind of janky in some day to day operation. Only time will tell if this truly proves to be a better experience. Oh and battery life is supposed to be much better, that’ll probably be the biggest difference except better speed overall.
I don’t like most phone games because playing most of them makes me feel like a cat playing with a ball of yarn. I think the appeal of Angry Birds is like Peggle where you have some illusion that what you’re doing is takes any skill at all, but really the game to a degree is playing itself and giving you rewards every step of the way. I mean, every single crushed block gives you points so it’s constant positive reinforcement with pleasing sounds.
I haven’t been an Angry Birds hater by any means, more a person sitting on the sidelines wondering how the heck this game could explode like it has. I tried playing it but couldn’t get past level 10 for a very long time which was very frustrating because there’s no way to skip a level. So I just left it alone for a while.
Then I tried Angry Birds Rio which seemed to have a more level learning curve and also access to the other bird varieties earlier on. Then I don’t remember how but I ended up finally using the birds properly and suddenly the game wasn’t nearly as hard. It still involves a ton of trial and error but I “got” it. Still, despite my new found knowledge of the mechanics of Angry Birds, part of me still feels like a cat playing with a ball of yarn.
Also, Dude’s disembodied head looks totally creepy.
Thankfully this comic wasn’t inspired by my mom getting an Android phone, but my heart goes out to my good friend A.M. His mom recently got an Android phone after her 7 year old Nokia phone died. The guy at Radio Shack sold her on the Motorola Cliq citing that “All phones will be like this soon.”
If I were a cell phone salesman and I saw an older person who was clearly not tech savvy come into my store I’d like to think that I would have the foresight to get them a phone easiest for them to use that would put a bare minimum of stress on their young offspring that would inevitably be tasked with providing tech support if I were cruel enough to give them a mini computer for a phone. Seriously, you don’t give a tech unsavvy person a device with a simple purpose which has an infinite number of buttons.
Lately my battery felt like it was dying even faster than usual. Also the music players have been choking and stuttering which is unacceptable. That’s why yesterday I was doing some research for android apps to create a whitelist for what apps have permission to use the cell signal to connect to the mobile network. I found one, but I needed to root my phone in order to do it.
CUT TO: Me still at my desk playing with my phone at 3:00 AM. Thankfully I had no problems at all. The only problem was that I couldn’t stop. I seriously opened Pandora’s box, but already I’m seeing the benefits of rooting my phone. The new custom ROM I flashed my phone with has some pretty sweet options and I haven’t even had time to play with it much.
There’re so many tip calculators out there for every smartphone, but even though I downloaded one when I got my phone I still just use the calculator on my phone. Most of the time I’m with just Anna or with friends and we’re probably splitting the bill evenly so no major calculations have to be made. I think the only situation where things get sticky is if someone isn’t drinking alcohol or didn’t have much to eat. I wonder how many people out there even know how to calculate percentages?
Right now the Android phone community is in a tizzy because the latest OS version 2.2 (aka “Froyo”) is rolling out for a number of different phones. Mine just got it today, and so far I’ve only seen a handful of things different.
Flash is now supported on the phone, but I’m currently having trouble thinking about sites that use flash that I would now want to visit in some capacity on a phone. I use my browser mostly for little things, but maybe I’ll remember a thing or two that I’d want to use the flash for. There are a lot of flash games out there, but I’m limited to games which only require mouseclicks.
The overall experience is supposed to be up to 4X faster, but the phone was already pretty snappy so I haven’t noticed much. Youtube videos seem to play at a better framerate though.
There are some small tweaks to Gmail and the messaging application. Also the little icons and settings pane in the camera window now rotate depending on how you orient the phone (and certain things let you have the phone in landscape mode rotated to the left or right). And you can use the LED light while in camcorder mode. I never use the camcorder but I guess if I want to blind people while filming them I can now do that. Also the “recent apps” pop up is in a different style window and shows eight apps instead of six.
There are features I can’t take advantage of now because I can’t run Chrome on my computer.
Oh, and more apps seem to be launching in the background without my knowing. Joy.
It’s true. The price of having a cool phone that can do a lot of stuff is that you have to control how much stuff you want to let it do on its own lest it runs itself out of energy. I’ve actually been having pretty good battery life recently, but for some reason yesterday it inexplicably went down to 20% while I was playing some Uncharted 2 multiplayer. I don’t have auto-syncing turned on for anything but email. My guess right now was that my weather widget was having trouble connecting and trying to connect all the time ran the battery down.
