On Friday, 2 June 2017 6:25:31 PM AEST Craig Sanders via luv-talk wrote:
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.
Well, I know someone who was happily using a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 on Amaysim (the Optus network) when it suddenly stopped working. It seems that either Optus or the service Amaysim rents from Optus stopped providing the 3G frequencies used by that phone in the areas of relevance. So while you might not have a need for 4G, you might not get a choice given that GSM is already gone and 3G is apparently not a priority.
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.
True. You can probably still buy batteries for that but they may be old stock with some shelf-life issues nowadays. I'd think about an external battery and duct tape, but a new phone is probably due.
- 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.
The 2012 Nexus 7 has a 1280*800 display which is less than any phone you might desire nowadays. The Nexus 6P has a higher resolution than the 2013 Nexus 7. Not that this matters if you want a physically large screen.
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.
There was one that had a phone that plugged in to a tablet to run the same apps and data on the bigger screen. It apparently wasn't that popular and disappeared from the market.
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.
You can't properly back it up without either OS support (not available in the default build) or rooting the device.
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.
Later doesn't necessarily mean worse. Newer versions of Android have some better optimisations, sometimes a newer version runs faster.
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.
In recent versions of Android you can disable them and have them not run. I think you can do it with Android 5 but there is a tendency for some Google apps to get enabled again - this isn't a problem in more recent versions.
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.
A higher resolution screen also drives more storage space... -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/