samsung – Moe Lane

New phone.

My J7 is a couple of years old, and was starting to do mildly weird things, and more importantly was a couple of years old. So my wife and I went to the local Metro by T-Mobile. It somehow worked out that I have a new phone (Samsung A20) that’s a marked improvement on the old one for free, and our new phone bill will now be significantly smaller than our old, combined ones. Which is why I brought my wife along: she exudes this kind of practical energy field that makes this sort of thing possible.

Moe Lane

Quote of the Day, I’m No Longer Impressed By Apple’s Battery Life, Either edition.

Ars Technica reviewed the 8 Series iPhones, and this sums up their reaction to the battery: “We tested the battery life in both the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus and were not encouraged by the results.” …I’ve been using a Samsung Galaxy J7 for the last week or so, having bought a sufficiently large microSD card to transfer all of my music over, and I have to say: I’m not surprised. The extra battery life is remarkable. Now, admittedly, I had old devices… but Glenn Reynolds has a point, here. It’s lovely that Apple products are so slim, but at this point it feels like they’re not so much ‘slim’ as they are ‘starving.’ I am holding up surprisingly well carrying around a phone that is somewhat larger than I’m used to, but able to do little things like hold a charge for more than 24 hours at a time.

Now if I can just find a reasonable alternative to the iPad…

New phone! Not a Jesusphone!

I thought about it, but I haven’t been impressed with Apple’s products since the Toymaker died. There’s just something missing there, now. So I replaced the Amazon Fire Phone (yeah, I bought one of those) with a Samsung Galaxy J7* and put in a SD card for an extra 64 gigs. Why? Because I am now transferring all of my music to my phone, and iTunes can go whistle. I’m tired of dealing with their nonsense. After I get everything cleaned up, I’m resetting both the old phone and the iPod, parental-controlling them, and handing them off to my kids to play with. They’re both perfectly good video cameras for small children, after all.

Alas, all of this means that I had to miss the movie. I’ll go see It tomorrow.

Moe Lane

*The one that doesn’t explode. I made sure to ask.

Begun the Note 7 Recall War-Hunt It Has.

So, remember the Samsung Note 7? New smartphone, excitingly thin, very popular, had a distressing tendency to ignite. Samsung has managed to get 90% of the ones that they sold back, but the remainder seem to be owned by people who will give up their Notes when you pry them from their charred, dead fingers. Personally, I’d just reprogram all those rogue Note 7s out there* with a terse IF YOU USE THIS PHONE YOU MAY DIE, BUT MAY NOT SUE US, but I guess that there’s a legal reason why they can’t let evolution do its intricate dance of consequence. Instead…

Judging from Korean news reports, however, Samsung is ready for the final step. It plans to issue software updates that stop the phone from working altogether.

The big question now is whether the type of people who’ve been determined enough to keep using the phone for so long are also the type of people who’d find a way to block or disable such an update.

Continue reading Begun the Note 7 Recall War-Hunt It Has.