On Fri, Jun 02, 2017 at 04:12:19PM +1000, russell(a)coker.com.au wrote: 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. 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. 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". 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. 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. 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(a)taz.net.au>