I bought an android smartphone. Having being one of the last to jump off the sinking windows phone, I was hoping that android would be the answers to my problems.

I don’t subscribe to corporations that believe in milking their customers and riddling everything in sight with DRM so an iPhone wasn’t even considered. I’ve had enough problems with that horrific program called iTunes where everything is designed and set up to be as unintuitive as humanly possible. Anything Apple based is to be avoided at any cost.
I jumped ship at an airport, I saw a competitively priced phone on sale and bought it on an impulse. And for the money I paid, I don’t regret it. However, it isn’t perfect.

It’s a godsend that this phone has a removable battery as it locks up so often. The thing is barely usable and unstable at the best of times. Removing the battery is the only way to get the phone back by restarting it

I’ll be the first to admit I’m a sucker for Snapchat, but is it too much to ask for a phone that can run Snapchat without crashing? Yes, it seems.

Snapchat was the final reason I jumped. There was a third party app for WP, called 6Snap. It was perfect, and in some ways better than the Android offering. However Snapchat cruelly smothered it about a year ago and locked anyone’s accounts attempting to login via any third party app. I’m also going to drop in that Snapchat’s latest advertisements are really beginning to get in the way of enjoying the Snapping experience.

There are a few benefits though. A removable battery is nice. It even came with a decent bump case and screen protector, however the screen protector left the touch functionality mostly unusable.  An microSD card allows for expanding the somewhat limited internal storage.

And as for downsides, it’s ridded with Google apps that I’ll never use, I have no use for Google Now, Hangouts, Keep or the Google movies and music stores. I understand that Google develops Android and it has the right to place apps here but it would be nice if they were removable to help use less resources on the phone. I wanted a bargin phone that I could run as lightly as possible with as little drain on system resources. I wanted the thing to run slick.

I was disappointed to find that the dual sim card feature only supported 4G/3G/2G on one sim slot, the other being only 2G. This is not too much of an annoyance for me but it would have been nice to have this labelled on the retail boxing.

I’m sure some of you will say buy a flagship android and stop being cheap about it. Some of you will even mention iPhone, but I’m not shelling out £700 for a phone that, by Apple’s track record, will update itself to the latest iOS and run incredibly slowly.

I can snag a cheap Windows Phone, made by (Nokia) Microsoft for under £120 and the thing will run sweet as a nut. I never ever had my Windows Phone lock up on me. From 2012 through to 2016. It’s a shame that it seems that Microsoft is imminently going to pull the plug on Windows Phone as in my experience it’s a far more elegant OS, both in coding for it, its simple intuitive GUI, not to mention the cameras they came with, which make the latest iPhone photographs look like they were taken with a potato camera. 42 Megapixel camera on a smartphone, just because they could. That’s the way the mobile industry should be going, not designing systems to shut phone’s cameras off remotely, Apple.

Currently I’m still on this mixed bag of a phone. Having tasted the benefits of Android I’m not sure if I will be going back or not. I’m at a fork in the metaphorical smartphone road everyone who is under 50 is currently walking down. I want to return to a world where my phone doesn’t crash every other day but my craving for a certain photo sending app is getting in the way.

So if I lose this phone or smash it or break it or it has a horrific accident with a hammer traveling in the vertical direction it really won’t upset me too much. As long as the SIMs are intact. Then i’ll have to fork out for a decent phone.

</rant>

Slick Productions