Interesting point on phone battery life in Wired’s article on the Google Nexus line:
One and a half days doesn’t matter….In the morning you want your battery to look 100 percent when you leave for the day. So either somebody solves it for a week battery, or you have to give reliably one solid day of battery.
Friday afternoon my phone finally got the OTA update for Android 5.1. After several hours stuck on the swirling boot animation, I decided it was time to admit that the phone wasn’t going to finish booting on its own.
I tried everything: Pulling the battery. Clearing the cache from recovery mode. Removing the SD card. Even a factory reset. I’d tried to avoid that, but eventually decided all the important stuff was backed up, and dammit, I needed a phone for the weekend!
If it had been a carrier phone or an actual Nexus device, I could have flashed a fresh system image, but it’s a Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Play Edition. Nobody wants the responsibility of supporting it.
In the end I bit the bullet and installed CyanogenMod. Even if I messed it up, the phone was already unusable and long past any warranty it might have had two and a half years ago. I didn’t really have anything to lose.
I had to read through the instructions a couple of times, but the process was actually pretty simple since I already had the ADB tools and could install Heimdall on my Linux desktop through Fedora.
It’s a bit weird because the UI feels like I’ve gone back in time a couple of years.
But the phone works again, and I was able to do it overnight. I didn’t have to spend three days emailing tech support back and forth. I didn’t have to go into a store on Saturday and be told I can either buy a new phone or wait a week while they send it in for repairs.
I may still end up replacing it in the near future — it is 2 1/2 years old, after all — but I don’t have to, which makes a big difference!
Update!
The phone worked great for camera, navigation, texting, and everything else I wanted to use it for at an event Saturday and at Long Beach Comic Con on Sunday.
Unfortunately, the dial pad doesn’t always respond during calls, which makes phone menus unusable. It’s not just the problem with the proximity sensor thinking my face is next to the phone and blanking the screen — I’ve had that on the official firmware for ages. I can get the keypad to display, but it won’t react to touch.
My carrier has an app for voicemail, but I’ll have to do something to be able to deal with other phone menus.
The Nexus 7 Android tablet has been discontinued in favor of the Nexus 9. (via Slashdot.) I’ve had a Nexus 7 (2012) almost since the beginning, and while it’s showing its age, I’ve been trying to stretch out its lifetime, because I actually do still use it on a regular basis.
Most of what I do these days with it is reading. Email. Books. Comics. Feedly. Pocket. Some photo management and searching. My four-year-old plays games, most of which run fine once they’re up but they take forever to load. I’ve also started introducing him to photo editing apps like Pixlr and Aviary. I used to do more typing and web browsing on it, but it’s just gotten so slow that it’s actually faster to pull out my phone or go over to a computer. Katie doesn’t use it much at all because she has a Note, which is almost into tablet territory already. (She’s not alone. Since the iPhone 6S came out, Pocket has noticed that people with both tablets and phones use their tablets a lot less often if their phones are larger.)
But the 7″ tablet form factor is perfect to keep with you at the breakfast or lunch table, or kick back on the couch.
The thing to remember about the Nexus 7 is that the original release was a proof of concept. There were android tablets before, but the market was still considered something of a joke compared to the iPad, and Google wanted to prove that (a) there was a market for a good Android tablet, and (b) there was a market for a tablet larger than a phone and smaller than an iPad. The iPad Mini didn’t exist at the time, and Apple was still ridiculing the concept.
It succeeded. But they made some mistakes with the hardware that were corrected in the 2013 model. Unfortunately those mistakes have made the first edition notorious for slowing down.
Mine was getting close to unusable around the time Lollipop was released, and upgrading finished the job. Fortunately wiping it and doing a fresh install cleared up a lot of the problems, though as I’ve added more apps, it’s continued to slow down. Chrome is too slow to use, and while Firefox is a little faster, I basically can’t surf the web on the tablet anymore.
But for a core set of apps, it’s still useful. I’ll read/reply to email and skim Feedly in the morning at breakfast, saving items to Pocket to read later. Then at lunch I may read a book or catch up on those saved articles. Since Gmail and Pocket both work offline and sync in the background, I can still use them in places without WiFi. Mobile data would be nice, but offline+sync makes it less critical, and I’ve saved a few hundred over the last three years by not having an extra data plan.
I am going to have to replace it soon, but I can’t decide what with. I don’t want the larger size that the Nexus line is moving toward, and while I’ve been looking at Samsung’s Galaxy tablets, the models I’ve tried all feel a little too small or a bit too big. I don’t want a 10″ tablet, and I don’t want a giant phone. I want a device that’s just big enough to read a full comic book page on it, but still small enough that it feels like a paperback book.
Note: I didn’t actually post this when I wrote it. I’ve backdated it to the original date because it’s no longer timely, but I wanted it online so I could link to it.
Every time someone announces a smart watch (today it’s the Apple Watch), people trot out the idea that the wristwatch is obsolete because look, I already have a smartphone with a clock on it. But phones don’t completely replace wristwatches. They completely replace pocket watches.
The wristwatch thoroughly replaced the pocket watch for most of the twentieth century because it’s so much more convenient. You don’t have to pull it out of your pocket to look at it. You don’t have to worry about dropping it. You don’t even need free hands to check the time.
The only reason we went back to pocket watches is that the new ones can do so much more than the old ones did. That and so many of us are spending so much time sitting in front of a glowing rectangle with a clock in the corner. (Note to fellow geeks: not everyone does this, so don’t generalize your experience.) As with cameras, music players, and portable game systems, we abandoned a specialized device in favor of a multitasker that wasn’t quite as good at the job. The difference is that with the wrist watch, its advantage wasn’t something that newer technology could catch up on. It was the form factor.
Smartwatches, in concept, are not a step backward, even if this generation’s specs leave something to be desired (and I’m not just talking about enabling the wearer to “start and stop the flow of time”). They’re a step sideways to a different use case. It’ll take time (no pun intended) and experimentation by real-world users to shake out what it’s best suited for.
Usability researchers like Jakob Nielsen have long contended that people read differently online than on paper: they tend to skim, follow links, and jump off quickly if they don’t find what they want. (Rather than being judgmental, Nielsen simply advises that you tailor your online writing to this.)
Now the Washington Post reports that people are observing a spillover effect, with online skimming habits interfering with concentration when it comes to more in-depth reading…even when reading print.
Sadly, the article mostly distinguishes between two modes of reading:
There’s nothing to distinguish, for instance, reading on a dedicated e-reader (without the siren call of Facebook or hyperlinks) from reading on your laptop. Nor is there anything to distinguish casually reading on your phone’s tiny screen from reading at your computer, or sitting on the couch and reading on a book-sized tablet.
Personally, I’ve found display size to be the biggest factor in maintaining attention. I get tired of reading on my phone, and I tend to skim on a desktop or laptop, but a handheld tablet (I have a Nexus 7, which is close to the size of a paperback book) works out about right. I’d much rather read a long article on that tablet than on a computer, even with the browser window sized for optimal column width.
So yeah, it’s much easier to concentrate on something long in a book than on a desktop or cell phone…but an ebook reader or a tablet is a lot closer.
There are still tradeoffs: My Les Misérables re-read changed drastically when I switched from a paperback to my tablet…not because I couldn’t concentrate on long passages, but because my method of notetaking changed. My reading actually sped up, but my commentary slowed down. (It did ultimately take me longer than I expected to finish the book, but only because I had so many other books I wanted to read, and ended up taking breaks and reading them instead.)
The main problem I do have with a tablet isn’t continuing to read, but starting to read. Even without a wifi signal, it’s tempting to catch up on email, or saved articles in Pocket, and before I know it, I’m done with lunch and I haven’t even opened the book I’d planned on reading.
