On Saturday, 3 June 2017 9:24:02 AM AEST Craig Sanders via luv-talk wrote:
You didn't buy a cheap phone last time and you seem to have got value for money out of it. Buying something that's designed as a high end product is probably a good strategy for you.
my usual strategy for computers is high-end, one or two generations behind - bug tested and cheaper. Phones and tablets disappear from the market too quickly for that to work as well (and are designed to be disposable fad gear for the fashion-conscious), so "mid-range, new models of last year's tech" is probably the best strategy for me here.
I have a similar strategy. For PCs it was always cheaper to buy stuff that's not cutting edge and if you time it right you will on average have a more powerful system than you would if you bought really high end gear less frequently. Nowadays I get PCs from corporate rubbish piles. I prefer HP, they design things well and a lot of them get thrown out. Lenovo is nice too. But sometimes there's a white-box system that's too nice to refuse (like the i7 on my desktop right now). The LUV Beginners' SIG is a good place to get PCs. There are usually old PCs there on an e-waste pile and people to help refurbish them for anyone who needs such help. For phones after about 9 months they drop in price as a release of a new model each year is expected. Older models are sometimes still on sale for years at an only slightly lower price point and they are almost as good as the latest ones. There isn't a lot of scope for improvements in modern phones. 64G of storage is nice but for most uses 32G is enough. 3G of RAM is enough for most things and you can do with a lot less if you don't play Pokemon Go. FullHD was always pretty good on a desktop monitor, you don't really need more than that in a phone. Even in a tablet you can survive OK with FullHD.
in a rooted Android I could just delete the damn things.
I've just done a quick test of my Note 10.1, and Android 4.4.2 supports none of the features you want for restricting data usage.
I don't care about data usage. It's WIFI, and only ever enabled at home where I have far more download quota on my ADSL every month than i ever use.
The same features can be used for restricting Wifi. But not in Android 4.4.2.
I care about a dozen or more unwanted and un-used apps running in the background using up CPU power and battery life and reporting unknown information to google. I'd care about that if it was even 1 app using a tiny, un-noticable amount of CPU "phoning home", the fact that the tablet becomes unusable for a time after enabling WIFI just makes it worse.
what's so hard to understand about "I don't use this shit, I don't want it running, and I don't want it spying on me"?
Not hard to understand. But my Note 10.1 2014 edition is working quite well in spite of it. As a matter of principle it sucks. As a practical issue of getting stuff done it's not a problem.
Fortunately it's still as fast as newer Android devices like my Nexus 6P (and noticably faster than
like I already said, I don't want to just hide the problem by getting a faster device where the symptoms aren't noticable, I want to eliminate them by deleting the unwanted apps.
The problem is that it's so much work to update Android devices. The development of Linux is largely credited to the availability of common hardware (the IBM PC clone market). But one thing that's often forgotten is the ease of fixing problems. When Linux first came out IDE disks were just starting to take over from ST-506 and also dropping in price. It was practical to take a DOS system, buy a second hard drive, and use that for Linux. If you decided to stop using Linux you could just plug the DOS hard drive in. If installing Linux on a PC in 1993 was as hard as installing CyanogenMod now then the user base (and developer base) would have been much smaller. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/