My first smart phone.

Quote: DRich

You named your phone? That seems odd.

I name all my devices, when possible. It makes it easier to identify them in blue tooth lists.

Quote: Nareed

The new phone is named Misix, after a character in a story I'm trying to work on.

Beautiful Christmas

Actually I named her after the Mr. Meeseeks character from rick and Morty, only with a different spelling.

Quote: Pacomartin

The specs are not that impressive for a phone of that price. I have the same resolution display on a $30 phone that I got at Walmart. You have better cameras and more memory, but it is 4X the price.

RAM Memory 2 Gigabytes

I've highlighted the real problem.

And mine came with 8GB

I got a 32 GB SD card (ok, micro-SD card), and I can move apps to it (can't install them there directly, you gotta move them one by one). So without any additional apps in the main memory, the damn thing keeps running out of memory. The problem is there's nearly 3 GB of crapware and other software that cannot be moved to the card or uninstalled. If it were mine, I'd root it and install a clean slate Android. As it is, I'll ask one of the guys in IT to see if there's anything they can do.

One thing's for sure, I'm not going to be using it as an everyday phone. The RAM problem alone makes it nearly unmanageable.

Quote: Nareed

The really good news is we're also changing carriers.

I thought Carlos Slim had a lock in Mexico. Slim has the largest share of the prepaid phones in the USA, but he buys the data time wholesale from the four major carriers: Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint

Rumor is very strong that Sprint and T-Mobile will try, once again, to combine. The Obama administration was against the merger, but the Trump administration may permit the merger.

Quote: Pacomartin

I thought Carlos Slim had a lock in Mexico.

There are three major cell companies: Telcel, Iusacel and Movistar. A bunch of smaller ones sell SIM chips with air time and data and unlimited social networks, but they probably buy the service from the big ones.

"That's it. That's all I know."

BTW, I keep having to backtrack on the new phone. In my defense, this is the first "device" I've had with additional storage. It turns out that when you install an app in the SD card, it may keep storing data in the main RAM. So Pocket was eating over 1/8th of the phone instead of 1/32nd of the card. That's the good news. The bad news is I've no idea where some of the games and Kindle keep their data, and I see no means to choose...

So if it won't keep reminding me it's out of memory, I may be able to use it.

Still, Misix will most likely wind up on loan to the first person in the department whose phone is lost or stolen. And seeing it's a nice phone, they won't rush to replace it. But if that happens, I'm taking the SD card and putting it on my other phone (Gloria, if you must know).

Ok, Misix is driving me insane.

You'd think 8GB, while not a lot these days, should be good enough for a phone. After all, most extra apps like games, Audible, Kindle, and even Waze and Telegram, run off the additional 32 GB storage in the SD card.

After I moved Pocket's storage tot eh SD card, all seemed well. I had like 6.5GB of 8GB internal storage used. Next day I get the low memory warning again, and now the phone is using up 7.9GB.

What the f***!

Right now, I'm trying to disable some MS apps like One Note and PowerPoint I don't foresee ever needing (can't uninstall them), which were taking up over 500MB altogether. I'll try that with other bloatware and crapware apps as well later.


On the other hand, she does her namesake proud:

Franklin: What does "kren" mean?
Misix: Payment.
Boyle: Payment?
Misix: Valuables or currency given in exchange for goods or services.
Boyle: I know what payment means!
Misix: Really? You could have fooled me.

Misix has been an angel today, leaving at least 725 MB free, which is enough not to trigger a low memory warning.

Meantime, tomorrow we switch carriers, so today I'm busy using up as much data from the old carrier as possible. I just don't want it to go to waste.

The thought has crossed my mind to root Misix.

The problem is that she's company issued, and rooting voids de warranty, even if you later restore the phone to factory settings (and assuming they can tell).

The real problem is why Samsung makes, and sells, and the company buys, an expensive piece of hardware that isn't good for much. Look, 8GB is a decent fraction of memory, but not when the OS takes up over half of it.

I tried using voice commands yesterday.

I was caught in a traffic jam, and I tried to set a few reminders. But we crawled often enough to make it difficult. So I thought I'd give the voice commands a shot. It still feels silly talking to the phone, but I was mildly impressed.

For one thing it's 3 out of 4 transcribing reminders. For the record it got right:

Fall of Rome
Emissions check
Moisturize

It got wrong:

Check studio F online. For some reason that came out as "check studio app online. Considering early experiences with voice recognition software, it wasn't too bad.

It also opened the Audible app when I said "open audible."

Thus far it's quite limiting. For one thing, I have to pause the podcast to talk to it. For another, many times it displays results visually. If I could look at the screen, I could easily do the search myself.