On Fri, Jun 02, 2017 at 04:12:19PM +1000, russell@coker.com.au wrote:
On Thursday, 1 June 2017 7:40:40 PM AEST Craig Sanders via luv-talk wrote:
Both my phone (~2010 HTC Desire HD) and my tablet (2012 Nexus 7) are ancient so it's about time to upgrade one or both of them. looking for some recommendations...
What exactly do you want from a new phone given your stated plan to use no apps other than a simple calculator?
4G is about the only good reason I have to upgrade the phone and even that's not essential. other than 4G, the main motivation for replacing it is that it's ~ 7 years old now, and won't last forever. Also, i've already replaced the battery on it once, doing that again (probably necessary in the next year or so) seems like a waste of money that could be put towards a newer phone. The CPUs and other componenets have improved a lot in those 7 years.
- ARM CPU fast enough that I won't have to consider upgrading for another 5+ years - 1920x1080 resolution absolute minimum. more is better. - 8" minimum, 10" or larger preferred. something that can fit a full A4 or US Letter PDF page and still be readable without having to squint.
Maybe a larger phone would be an option. A Nexus 6P meets most of those criteria, it's screen at 5.7" isn't that much smaller than your stated minimum and may allow you to only carry one device.
not as a tablet replacement. i want something with a larger, higher resolution screen than my nexus 7. i mostly want it for more of what i'm currently using it for plus i've recently re-discovered qpython and want to write my own custom apps for it (mostly simple database things without the spyware and excessive permissions demanded by the garbage in google's play store). Also Termux and command line sh, awk, perl etc scripts - with a bluetooth keyboard and Termux I can use it as a tiny laptop substitute. i do some of that now with the 7" nexus, but the screen's a little too small and squinty for that to be comfortable. Tablet size and weight does not bother me. i never go anywhere without at least my roughly A4-sized satchel and often a small backpack too.
One last thing - if I get a tablet that has 4G capability, does anyone know if it's possible or easy to put my SIM card in the tablet and use my existing HTC phone as a handset via bluetooth or wifi?
That might be difficult as phones aren't designed for it. But most (maybe all) tablets that will take a SIM can make and receive calls. As they support bluetooth they should work with a bluetooth headset in the same way as a phone, or you could use wired headphones with a built-in microphone for calls.
i'll stick to separate devices for phone and tablet then. which means i'll probably only upgrade the tablet. the phone can wait until either the HTC dies or 4G becomes essential. i remember seeing a brand of phone & tablet a few years ago that could do this, was one of its selling-point features. might have been one of the LG models, maybe not. but it seemed like it was a brand-specific bit of software...i was hoping that there was a generic app to do it. searching for anything on google's play store that you don't already know the exact name of is beyond pointless - there's so many worthless spammy and/or spyware and/or malware shit apps there(*) that you can't find anything, millions of turds hiding the rare useful thing. fdroid's better, but they didn't have anything like that when i searched. (*) hooray for the "free market". hooray for "consumer choice".
(*) Why purge the youtube app? because every time i enable wifi on the tablet, it becomes completely unusable for at least 10-20 minutes while youtube, hangouts, and the rest of the thundering herd of unwanted apps that can't be removed go apeshit trying to connect to google spyware HQ.
You can configure recent versions of Android to not allow those apps to talk to the Internet in the background. There's a "network restrictions" page that allows you to set which Wifi APs are running on 3G/4G (or otherwise pay for data) and which are unlimited and
my nexus 7 runs Android 5. there doesn't seem to be any such option. i made the mistake of NOT rooting it and installing cyanogenmod as soon as i got it and now i've got too much stuff on it that i don't want to lose (rooting it will erase it) or have to backup and then sort through and manually copy/reinstall. laziness, i know...it would only take a day or so to backup, root, re-flash, and then restore my data. cyanognmod/lineage may have more recent versions, but this tablet is barely capable of running v5.x. When I get another tablet, I'll wipe this one and install an AOSP-based Android 4 ROM on it.
Turn off background data on youtube, hangouts, play services (play store), maps, and Chrome and you'll achieve your stated aim.
no, i won't. i want these apps not to run at all. i want them to not even be installed. there's no reason for them to be running in the background, and there's no reason for them to be even installed. I *never* use them so there's no excuse for them to be running, ever. this is not an exaggeration or me just forgetting that i sometimes use them, it is the literal truth - i NEVER use them and NEVER want to use them. I looked at youtube once on this tablet years ago and decided "nope, too slow, too annoying. and no adblock", but apart from that I have never once chosen to run them, ever....but they always start up when wifi is enabled. this is an anti-feature - i have no idea what, if anything, they are reporting to google, or why all these apps are trying to connect, and it certainly does not benefit me at all for the tablet to become unusable for 10 minutes if i enable wifi to quickly (ha!) check something on the internet or fetch something from my network. when i want to watch something on youtube, i have a perfectly good desktop machine with a choice of browsers and a nice 27" 1440p monitor for that. by "unusable", i mean that the tablet can take a minute or more to respond to any touch event. per touch. after 10 or 20 minutes or so it settles down and becomes usable again, but is noticably noticably slower than when wifi is disabled even if i'm not actively using the network. i usually run the tablet in airplane mode to maximise battery life.
PS: i am in no great hurry to upgrade, so if there's a new generation of cpus/screens etc just about to be released, i'm happy to wait for that.
Maybe there is. Google has no tablet offering at this time and the range of tablets that Kogan is offering is very small.
The Samsung Tab A is one of the models I'm considering. I've seen some reasonable prices (around $330-$380) for 2016 models, but that's with only 16GB storage which is not quite enough. My nexus 7 has 32GB and with a faster tablet i'm likely to use it for more things and thus use more storage space. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>