Adventures in Tech

Last week I made an impulse buy. I was at the Microsoft store trying to pass time while my kids were enjoying painting on the surface laptops and playing games on the Xbox. I walked around the store in search of something interesting and stopped at the phone display. The display had the newest family of the Samsung Galaxy phones, preloaded with Microsoft business applications. I picked up the biggest model and started to play with it. I liked its bigger edge-to-edge screen and the quality of the display. I must have enjoyed it very much, because I tried a lot of my favorite sites and applications, and compared how easy it was to read on the bigger screen than on my smaller iPhone X screen. I was so absorbed in the comparisons, that I did not see the sales associate approaching. She was very cordial, and started to chat about the differences between the two eco-systems—Android and iOS, and that most of the applications that I used including work applications ran on both. Then she...

About a year ago I switched from the iPhone to the Samsung S3, and was initially pleased with the switch. What's not to like about a bigger screen, better technical specs, and easy expandability and connectivity. As I gained more experience with the phone, I started getting annoyed by the quality of the software, the inconsistencies between applications, and all the wonderful carrier add ons that I could not remove from the phone, unless I rooted it. And not to mention the dropped calls and the garbage collections that rendered the phone unusable at times. The poorly written software and the carrier add ons drained my stock battery so quickly even with minimal use, that I had to replace the stock battery with one that has 4x the capacity to get a usable phone. The replacement came with its own inconveniences that a bulky phone brings. It made me think about how a superior hardware spec and a bigger screen do not necessarily make a good phone, and that the unified experience ...

I have had my Samsung S3 phone for a bit over a year, and the most annoying thing for me is its poor battery life. I mainly use my phone for work email, with the occasional phone call or text message, and the minimum Internet browsing, and despite that light usage, I can barely survive a day on a single battery charge. I used every trick possible, from power savings mode, to manually syncing emails and accounts, and finally through installing Juice Defender, an Android application that turns off most of the unnecessary radio antennas when the phone is not in use to maximize battery life. The most I got was almost 10 hours of usage without charging. Better than nothing but not ideal. I attribute the poor battery life to the poor software that runs on the device, including Samsung's and AT&T's add-ons, that I cannot uninstall after their latest update. Most of that background software eats up the battery in no time. Barring a software fix, a hardware answer would do. A...

I have been an iPhone user for about 4 years now, but have recently been frustrated with the poor battery life on my phone especially with relatively moderate usage--I use the phone for the occasional phone-call or text message, and use it primarily for work emails. I grew tired of having to charge the phone multiple times per day, and started to look at other options. My coworkers have been pleased with the battery life on the Samsung S3, so I decided to give it a try. I went to the AT&T store, and upgraded my phone. Before I did, I looked at the iPhone 5, and while it is a beautiful design, I thought its screen size is a big disadvantage compared to the Samsung. My first impressions with the Samsung were not very positive: the usability is inferior to the iPhone, and things were not as intuitive or as consistent. However as I continued to use the phone, I discovered a lot of features that in my mind overshadowed the usability issues, and the phone started growing on me. Fi...