Privacy concerns about Big Data well-founded

Since I wrote about escaping from Google's walled garden on my Android phone, I have made some effort to further implement this on my desktops as well. Geoffrey A Fowler is a columnist in the Washington Post and he has written a number of articles about these privacy concerns about Google's vast data mining efforts that they are making across a range of platforms. These columns have been carried on Stuff's website and the most recent one, just last week, took a hard look at the Chrome browser.

From my perspective, it's simple: I ditched the Chrome browser after I switched to Linux. It wasn't something I thought about immediately; Chrome is produced for the most common Linux platforms (Debian-based distros in particular) and I actually did use it for a time, but eventually I switched to Firefox, mostly at that time because of Mozilla's reputation for openness and privacy. The Mozilla platform has inspired a much larger community effort in the development of extensions, which offer much more customisation of the browser, and I've long been a fan of Firefox and Thunderbird in particular, although the latter is now developed by an independent community. Generally I have chosen to use Firefox Developer Edition and on each computer that I run it on, it is installed into my user profile (as is Thunderbird), which saves another step when reinstalling Linux.  It took a while before I felt that Firefox was good enough for me to replace Chrome completely but after a couple of false starts, I have stayed with Firefox and haven't looked back. It's only on the R-Pi that I have Chromium because they don't build Firefox for their platform. I hadn't actually thought much about privacy until quite recently, or that the Chrome browser itself could be spying on me, but it makes sense that this is probably what Google is using Chrome for.

Since then, more recently having become aware of Google's practices and having switched my phone off standard Android (especially since it's a Google phone), I have switched to a different search engine in my browser (not Google). DuckDuckGo is an example that I have tested which is nearly as good as Google. I don't know if their reputation is any good. There are others, so I am not sure which is the best choice at the moment, but the issue is that most of them are commercial operations that have to have some interest in what you are putting through their sites and possibly still collecting data in some shape or form. It's interesting that some people claim Apple iOS is a better more private phone / handheld platform. Whilst Apple does take privacy more seriously than Google, they are still a business and there is still plenty of data mining happening on Apple devices. The key issue is that people should be able to completely opt out of having their data mined on any platform, and whilst Apple does give people more options, it's still hard for anyone to really have a free choice and full knowledge to be able to stop this happening on iOS.

The next step after a better browser is to start limiting web site tracking that a lot of sites do. For example Facebook and Google and a lot of other companies have web site trackers that tell them when you access certain sites. Firefox now comes with tracking protection built in, and I recently have set it to the strongest settings, and have noticed almost no impact on what I can do in Firefox. Secondly you may want to look at an ad blocker; I chose to use Adblock Plus. The issue is not that ads are annoying or intrusive, but that they are another way to gather tracking data about the sites you are visiting. There are a small number of sites I've experienced that block you from accessing content because you are using an ad blocker; with a scripting extension that I haven't yet tested, it is possible to block sites from detecting the ad blocker, but the number of sites that work this way is actually quite small (IIRC the Washington Post is one of the few).

Another useful idea is deleting cookies from a site when you close the site. Some news sites use cookies to limit the number of free articles you can view before they start blocking you. The technically astute can always configure the browser (perhaps with an extension) to delete the cookies when you close the site, and stop this particular level of tracking.

Firefox also has Facebook Containers and Multi Account Containers, which are extensions that you can use to manage the ability of different tabs in a browser session to access data from other tabs. Essentially these extensions group together either all Facebook tabs, or other tabs that you choose, into containers that don't have access to the data in other containers. Mostly I have found it useful to be able to log into multiple different Google sessions in the same browser. However for most of the time it is more useful to use separate Firefox user profiles and have a desktop menu shortcut that starts Firefox with each particular user profile in order to access the multiple accounts each in its own browser window. The main point of Facebook containers is to limit Facebook's ability to access the data outside the container (i.e. all the other websites you use) which is another privacy management technique.

It's also very important that you don't use your Facebook or Google (or Wordpress or any other site) credentials to log in to another site, because that gives that site access to your Facebook or Google profile and some of the data in it. Likewise, some apps that you install in Facebook can create this problem. In both types of situations, sites or apps can gather data from Facebook/Google and can even post spam on your Facebook or Google profile.

To finish off here's a few articles from the Stuff site addressing some of these issues.

• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/103165837/the-spotlights-on-facebook-but-google-is-also-in-the-privacy-hot-seat
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/113653726/new-technology-for-text-after-a-decade - a big concern if Google wants to take over from texting because they can collect every message. In no way should you be handing over your private communications to a data miner like Google.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/103021108/facebook-not-the-only-company-using-kiwis-data - this one highlights some of the above, as well as things like loyalty schemes. The supermarkets using their OneCard or ClubCard etc are a big concern because these cards will enable them to record every single purchase you make and it can be linked online via the email address in your profile. Since these cards only give quite small and specific discounts on purchases there is not much to lose from shunning them.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/apps/102929604/how-to-stop-haemorrhaging-data-on-facebook - it's a bit scary how much we use Facebook and potentially how much data they can collect on us. Since I changed my phone to remove social media apps, I've also had a policy of limiting the number of personal posts I make on my social media timelines. Most of the time I only use social media for interests like the various areas covered by the blogs I post and the church ministries I engage with. This does mean some data is being collected about me but it is limited to only specific areas and not all of my personal life.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/102524553/firefox-maker-mozilla-to-stop-facebook-advertising-because-of-data-scandal
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/world/107355983/google-quietly-started-logging-people-into-chrome-without-their-consent - this is a pretty serious privacy intrusion, and one of the things Google can make happen with Chrome. On a Chromebook, you are always logged into the browser without being given the extra step that you used to get on the desktop edition. Another reason to avoid Google as much as possible - they are just not trustworthy.
• https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-leaving-chrome/ - this one is actually from the source, it's a data mining technology expert saying why he is ditching Chrome. Pretty much adds to the article I quoted at the top of this post.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/world/113082499/while-youre-asleep-data-companies-probe-your-iphone - highlights the data collection happening on iOS by apps, and that Apple doesn't do all they could to stop it.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/99505534/apple-is-sharing-your-face-with-apps-thats-a-new-privacy-worry - highlights that Apple is sharing FaceID data on your device with apps and the concerns this creates.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/102619580/android-should-share-the-blame-with-facebook-for-tracking-calls-and-texts - highlights concerns about the amount of access Facebook has had to call and text data on the Android platform. Apparently, this has been blocked by an update to the Android API, but it basically highlights that a key problem on phone platforms is that apps have the ability to siphon a whole lot of data behind the user's back.
• https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locations-even-when-location-services-are-disabled/ - highlights how you can't even trust Google to respect user's choice of settings to try and stop data from being collected on them.
• https://www.infoworld.com/article/2993308/app-privacy-ios-vs-android.html - highlights how even in later versions of Android, users can still be limited in their ability to set permissions. One of the key issues I did find was trying to block apps like "Google" (the app that amongst other things forces you to use the voice recognition feature) and "Google Play Services" from having access to the phone's microphone - even if I had no desire to use these features, Google would try any way they could to stop me from turning those permissions off. The latest war on the one phone I have that still runs regular Android is getting Google to let me disable the Google app and uninstall the update that it forced onto my phone without asking permission - the much larger latest version of the app that turns on the Assistant and makes it very difficult to disable this feature. I would keep uninstalling the app and Google will keep reinstalling the newest version, making it impossible to trust Google is not going to keep forcing new data hoovering techniques onto my phone.
• https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-state-of-mobile-device-security-android-vs-ios/ - highlights some key differences between the two main mobile platforms, including Apple's much stronger use of encryption by default on their platform.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/98173405/why-you-should-use-incognito-mode-when-browsing-online - highlights browser data tracking issues and suggests using incognito mode. Personally, I think that turning on the tracker protection measures in Firefox that I have mentioned up above is good enough to use the regular browsing mode. I haven't looked at deleting cookies - this is another idea that might be worth considering, but not for all sites.

Escaping Google's walled garden on handhelds [3]: Using Lineage OS - 1

So last time I wrote about the installation experience for Lineage, now it is time to have a look at early impressions of using it. Along the way I discovered some stuff about the Nexus 5X. It turns out that it was first shipped with Android and the final official release of Android for it was 8.1. Also that the last time Google sent a security update package for it was last December. So as far as Google is concerned they no longer feel a need to continue updating Android on this phone.

On the other hand the version of Lineage I was able to flash to it is 15.1 corresponding to Android 8.1 and they are currently working on a release called 16.0 which will be Android 9 so it is possible I could get a later version of Android for this phone that what Google is prepared to support, provided the developers are able to produce an Android 9 release for the "bullhead".

Although I am not using it as a full replacement for the Nexus running Google Android just yet, as I haven't yet switched back to using it as my day to day phone, initial impressions of Lineage are pretty good. It doesn't come with many apps of its own, but one can choose to install one's own from various sources. Of course you have to be sure the sources are reputable and are not going to contain spyware or malware or whatever. I was able to access a site called apkmirror to get first of all the Youversion Bible app and install that. I then didn't install any more apps for a while.

I am currently planning to install the F-Droid app to be able to access their app store (and possibly the Amazon app store as well, although I will be carefully considering that option since I want to steer clear of apps from big multinationals that could do unwanted things on the phone). For further security certain things that are built into Lineage will be activated and the app store apps will be disabled when they are not actually being used. In addition the phone will not be rooted as this is not really necessary as I only plan to use regular apps on it, not ones that need root permissions. All of these measures mean hopefully no security issues with apps from outside the Play Store. However there are many apps that use Google Play Services, and those simply will not run on Lineage.

At the same time I deliberately chose not to have social media apps on my phone and only one email account that is being checked regularly because I simply decided I don't need to have access to social media when away from home. This means apart from the phone and text messaging, the main thing the phone would be used for when not actually at home is reading my Bible or possibly listening to music (it depends on how well the battery lasts). Any time I was away from home for any period of time I can take my tablet with me and use all these apps on it but for regular day to day stuff I won't need any social media apps on my phone. Also I intend to use an Open Street Maps app instead of Google Maps.

So yes it is possible if one is willing to make a few sacrifices about what apps are really essential, to escape the "rat race" of having your phone taken over by gigantic multi national corporations to make enormous profits and just get back to the basics of the convenience of having a phone you can carry with you and which can perform a small number of additional functions.

One of the bonuses so far which is partly because Lineage gives control of the ability to run an app in the background is very much increased battery life. Although I haven't used my phone much in the last couple of days, it is currently 37 hours since the last charge and the battery capacity is 73% which is absolutely unheard of for this phone. If I used it I could expect it to go down a bit faster, but I am still going to get heaps more use out of the battery than I have before. So this phone will probably last a lot longer. Then I suppose I will have to work out what I can replace it with.

I am also planning to install the Android Studio app developer software and maybe some other F/OSS app developers to see what I can do with them, and whether I can develop an app to replace the Auto DND app that I use. But ultimately the replacement for a lot of apps is to use a web browser instead.

Escaping Google's walled garden on handhelds [2]: Installing Lineage OS

So after further investigation I decided Lineage OS would be the most straightforward means of getting my Nexus 5X off Google. This is quite a lengthy process that involves replacing the installed Google bloatware on the phone with the LineageOS installation images.

LineageOS provides guides, which are pretty good except that like me, you can get some steps wrong the first time. And of course the instructions differ depending on your version of Android.

The most important points found are as follows:

• When you install adb you will need to install the udev rules on Debian. Using the instructions for Ubuntu are what worked for me. But of course because Buster won't let us run all the commands in a bash shell, as usual we have to go out to a full screen terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1) to do some of it, and then come back into KDE (Ctrl-Alt-F7) to finish things off.
• When you go into recovery mode, the Lineage instructions have missed out a step or two. The steps you need to follow to boot into recovery mode are
• Power off the Nexus
• Hold down Volume Down and Power to boot into recovery mode
• According to Lineage the next screen gives you "Recovery mode". This is not so. You actually have to press Volume Down button to get to Recovery Mode. By default it just comes up with "Start".
• Then you see a Android icon tipped on its side with a exclamation point hovering over it. 
• At that point you have to hold Power and then press and release Volume Up to get into recovery mode.
• The recovery environment install is tricky because if you don't reboot properly, it seems that Google will conveniently replace the TWRP recovery environment with its own (Android Recovery). How you know this has happened is if recovery comes up to TWRP it is a graphical touchscreen environment. But Android Recovery is all text based and using the volume up/down keys to select options and the listed options do not match the ones for TWRP at all.
• So you have to make sure you reboot properly to use TWRP to run the commands you need because Android Recovery will not let you flash anything into the system. So you can't use it to install.
• So after you have flashed TWRP into the system then reboot properly.
• On the recovery options DON'T CHOOSE REBOOT. Choose POWER OFF
• Once the Nexus is off then turn it on by pressing Volume Down and Power together.
• This will get you into TWRP with its graphical touchscreen and then you can get on with flashing Lineage and any other packages onto the phone.

I have chosen to flash only Lineage and the rooting package. I am no way absolutely never verboten from my cold dead hands etc NOT INSTALLING THE GOOGLE APPS PACKAGE. This means unfortunately not being able to use any app from the Play Store and anything that will rely on Google Play Services if from another source. However that is why I have other devices running regular Android but these devices are not a phone or do not have a cellular services SIM card installed or can be turned off when I am not using them thus preserving my privacy. 

After I had done the flashing I told TWRP to reboot the system. The most annoying thing at that stage was TWRP telling me that I had no OS installed and was I sure I wanted to reboot.  After rebooting you are going to see "Google" and then instead of the animated boot icon for regular Android you will see the Lineage one instead. Then there is a slightly scary moment when the whole screen is black and the system doesn't respond to pressing any buttons. Fortunately after a few more seconds your computer will pop up and tell you it recognises the Nexus (assuming the USB cable is still plugged in) and at that point checking the Nexus shows us that LineageOS boot screen has come up.

The setup steps are practically the same as for regular Android except you don't get asked to do any of the Google apps stuff but I was quite pleased to see it work with the fingerprint reader and allow me to enrol fingerprints just the same as before. After this it went into the home screen of Lineage and at that point was ready to go. I'll leave it there for this post and I am not going to do any more stuff on it right now, that will be covered in my next post after I have had plenty of time to play with Lineage and see what I can do with it. I will be using it initially with my tablet share SIM, which can make phone calls and send and receive texts but can't receive phone calls, until such a time as I might be ready to switch over to it becoming my regular phone again.

Escaping Google's walled garden on handhelds [1]: Intro

I've owned smartphones since 2012 when I was given one as part of a new employment role. It (HTC) was running Windows Phone 7. It was followed by a couple of Nokias running Windows Phone 8 (the later one since updated to 10) and then a low-end Motorola Moto E running Android 4. The next thing was a Samsung Galaxy J2 running Android 5 and a Galaxy Tab A 8" tablet also running 'Droid. My latest phone is a Nexus 5X which is currently on Android 8.

What has become particularly noticeable in handheld operating systems apart from Apple's (in a class of its own) in recent years is the extent to which vendors have sought to take ownership of the user's device and data. MS first did this with Windows 10 and went to extraordinary and obnoxious efforts to push users of older versions into upgrading to 10. 

Google has been sneaking upgrades into Android over the past few years, particularly in the "Google" app which in Android 5.1 has gone from 13 MB to 209 MB in size without any explanation or choice on the user's part as to the justification for installing this massive bloatware. But what we do know about Google's recent efforts is that voice recognition and the obnoxious Google assistant are now enabled by default with every new Android phone or upgrade and are very hard to disable. The assistant in particular is listening to everything that the microphone can pick up and transmitting it back to Google. In addition, it is becoming known that in Android 8, Google screen scrapes data from every app installed in the system, and that it tracks every location that the device travels to.

So we have entered an era where more than ever, operating system vendors are forcing updates onto systems to increase their ability to grab every possible piece of information they can collect on the device owners and transmit it back to the mothership so that it can be used to make increasingly bigger profits. And we are supposed to trust these gigantic multinational corporations that they have a benign intent and really are going to use our data to give us better products and services? LOL! 

So in much the same way as I have been through a journey of giving Windows the boot and installing open source software on my PCs, I am going to be doing the same sort of process with my handhelds. First of all, I will be switching my phone back to the Galaxy J2 with only a limited set of apps, and then the Nexus will be reinstalled with something else. At the moment, Lineage looks good, but I need to delve deeper into its architecture before making a final decision. The Galaxy Tab A will be left as is. If Lineage is what I want then it should be capable of becoming my day to day thing on the Nexus. Of course, it won't be running any of the Google apps or the Google Play Services. 

More to come...

Ubuntu Touch may step in where Firefox OS finished....maybe?

We certainly have a strong case for an alternative to Android because we should get a choice to be free of Google's massive data collection infrastructure that is tracking everything we do and everywhere we go with our phones. Revelations for example that Android 8 screen scrapes every app in the system are mind boggling. I have by choice switched my PCs to Firefox Aurora as the main browser and regular Firefox as a secondary, dropping Chrome for nearly everything, but I still use a lot of Google accounts on my computers. On the Android platform the scope is there for a much more universal collection of data by Google even as the European Union looks at more stringent penalties and regulations to force Google to cut back the scope of its data mining.

Ubuntu Touch is these days more of a community effort compared to when it was officially funded by Canonical. Firefox OS looked good for a while and it's a shame it was dropped. UT does look like it is gaining ground but of course is limited by the degree to which it can be adapted to a very large number of different hardware specifications. So far not many pieces of hardware are supported.

Or of course one can go back to the "dumb" or feature phone I guess....

Apps, apps, apps

I don't write much about mobile so it's time to fill in this gap by blogging about some of the apps I have on my various phones. The main phone I have is a Nexus 5X, and I have a second phone, a Galaxy J2, which has a tablet share SIM (off the Nexus' account) and is capable of making calls, but not receiving them (although it can receive texts). I also have a Galaxy Tab A 8" tablet which also has a tablet share SIM and also can make calls but not receive. 

Apart from those devices which all get a reasonable amount of use and can connect to the cellular network I have two more older phones that are Wifi only and have been used as media players. The Moto E that was my first Android phone and cost $99 new isn't really flavour of the month as a media player now because it has trouble running apps reliably. Not sure if this is old version of Android, CPU/RAM or lack of storage (it only has 4 GB). So that leaves me with my Lumia 635 running Windows 10 Phone (it had WP8 when I got it) which has become the default media player. I always have a separate (low value) device as the media player so you can leave it playing music wherever and still use your phone, and not running down the phone's battery as these smartphones tend to go down too quickly for my liking, it seems that cellular services do drain the battery faster.

This is about some of the useful apps I use every day on the Nexus and also on the Lumia because those two get the most use everyday. In the below listings, everything is Android unless it says otherwise.

• Media Players:  The best media players are the ones that can browse folders on your device. If you are like me and have converted your video clip collection into MP3s for your phone, the tags that most media players need to sort them by artists, albums and etc aren't automatically put into an MP3 so players like the default ones (Google Play Music and Groove) can't pick them up. And of course videos don't have tags like MP3s. Here are some great media players:
• Pulsar music player - easily browse folders, no ads.
• PlayerXtreme video player - folder view (not exactly browsing all folders but just lists those that have videos in them).
• Still trying to find something as good as Pulsar for W10P. Have looked at so far:
• Loco Delight - corny name, a bit hard to navigate, stable and plays well.
• Next-Player - a little tricky to navigate. Plays well when it isn't freezing the phone. I am looking at whether it conflicts with another app to see if I can work out where the problem is.
• One thing to be aware of is that like videos, you need to put a number at the beginning of the name to ensure playback in a certain order when playing from folders e.g. 01, 02 etc. At the moment most of my music collection isn't converted from videos so they don't have these numbers, but as soon as I get around to changing over to converted clips and number-naming everything else, things will be better.
  
• Do Not Disturb: The default DND app in the Nexus (built in Google/Android app) is very annoying because of bugs, the biggest of which is if you go in to check what is turned on (e.g. a rule that may have turned on), just looking at the settings overrides any rule currently in place, so you can't go back to the rule being the higher priority. That's a little hard to explain, but that simple fact means there are many times I have accidentally turned DND on permanently without realising it and only noticed some time (days later often) that it was still on.
• Auto Do Not Disturb is a great replacement for the Nexus default DND app. The profiles give you an option to absolutely be able to make sure the DND is turned off at a certain time every day. I use an overnight profile which turns off alert sounds but leaves me able to receive phone calls and alarms. So no more annoying texts and app alerts in the middle of the night, but DND is forced off every morning. Apart from creating your own profiles for custom days and time slots, there is also a preset coundown  profile you can just click straight onto that will turn on DND for a preset amount of time. Premium version is $5.49 and well worth it.
  
• Mapping and GPS: A simple GPS logger that works a bit like my old cheap eTrex for logging a journey you are taking is a good app to have on your phone.
• GPS Logger by BasicAirData is a FOSS app that does a great job of logging and tracking a journey, with real time display of data including altitude, coordinates and speed. The only thing I found difficult was exporting the data because its data folder isn't accessible on my PC because of the way data is stored on my phone's built in memory. Uploading to Google Drive fixed that.
  
• Realtime Metro Timetabling: 
• Christchurch Transit is the latest app that can display RTTI information for bus services in Christchurch. I found the display cluttered and a little hard to use, and the older Chch Metro app is still my preference for its simplicity, although it is no longer in the Google Play store.
  
• Scanning: These apps can let you scan a photo or document from your phone. A killer feature some have is the ability to automatically correct geometric alignment issues.
• Office Lens is a neat little app from Microsoft that can attempt to correct the shape of photos taken from your phone that are not perfectly aligned. It works quite well a lot of the time, but in practice, I found it easier to turn off the correction for certain tasks (like copying stuff from bound files in Archives New Zealand, where it was hard to delineate the edges of an original). However, it was good for copying family photos, except that if the lighting is insufficient, the gainup adds a lot of noise or resolution reduction.
  
• Data Sync: these apps can be used to synchronise data between a phone and PC for example.
• KDE Connect is an app that can be used to transfer data between a phone and a PC that is running KDE. I haven't used it much, and one consideration is that like Bluetooth it can send maybe only one file at a time instead of a whole folder of files. A great substitute for Bluetooth with desktop computers which mostly lack the hardware for BT.
  
• Camera apps can do more than the built in app of your phone in many cases
• Camera FV-5 has a good reputation and I bought the Premium version of it on the Nexus. However it can have a bit of a learning curve, and has this annoying feature of rotating the display to landscape mode after taking a picture in portrait mode. I do use it when I want to do swish stuff, but for everyday simple things the built in app still gets a lot of use.

So there we have it, a pile of different apps that I find useful, and hopefully you will as well.

HOWTO: Connect a Nexus 5X to a PC

Previously on this blog I have bemoaned the apparent lack of support for the Nexus 5X on PCs. It turns out however that the connectivity is not well documented (not as far as I am aware with Android 8). Earlier efforts failed because I thought a driver was needed, of which no such thing actually exists.

If you are using Debian you generally need to install some extra packages to enable MTP support. However, it appears that MTP is installed by default in Debian 9.5, as my bedroom pc, which has been recently installed with Stretch 9.5, had no difficulty in connecting to the phone without any additional configuration steps needed.

Once the phone is connected to the USB-C cable, "Nexus 5X" will appear in a Thunar window (for Debian with XFCE) but there is still an additional step needed to make the file storage browsable on the phone, and annoyingly this option has to be selected every time you plug the phone in. Simply go to Settings, then open the Connected Devices section, and find the USB section. The options there are "Charge this device", "Supply Power", "Transfer Files", "Transfer Photos" and "Use Device as MIDI". It would be kind of nice if Transfer Files was the default instead of Charge this device, or if charge was able to be simultaneous with a choice of the other actions. On the other hand I find the other options interesting and might look into how they work. But given the limitations of the Nexus's battery capacity I don't expect to supply power to anything else anytime soon.

If you select "Transfer Files" then instantly the phone's file storage becomes browseable and this will be a great benefit, not only in order to extract photos, but also store my music collection which has been virtually impossible to achieve up to now.

I assume the same steps will work on Windows 10 but am not rushing to try it because I don't need the Windows 10 computer for much. I am planning to spend a bit of today finishing the incomplete reinstallation of the Windows 10 computer but I don't need it for many devices and won't bother putting any USB cables onto that computer, whereas I am connecting a full set of three device cables to mainpc because that is the most useful option.

Why I hate the Google Nexus 5X

Well when I got this thing I thought it was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, a Google Nexus phone, with stock standard Android, a lot of available updates from Google, great spec and performance etc. Great hardware, well made quality product. Such a shame about the software though.

Unfortunately over time I have grown to hate the Nexus 5X because of some glaring design bugs in the version of Android shipped with it that Google have failed to remedy. In a respect that is what you get dealing with the likes of Google, Apple. Microsoft and the other majors like Facebook these days. These companies are so big and powerful they can just trample all over their customers by ignoring complaints and failing to fix issues. Because of the experience I will never pay more than $400 for a phone ever again. As it happens this one was just over $400 but Google is screwing their customers big time by charging Iphone-like prices for it's replacement the Pixel. Well I could choose from the Nokia or Moto models this time, probably go for Moto because our family debacle over the reissued 3310 has convinced me Nokia is not much or any better than some of these other outfits. 

So here are my pet hates about the Nexus 5X and why (apart from the huge price) I do not believe anyone should buy a Pixel as I doubt Android will be any better on it, it's not going to be a different interface than on the Nexus. About the only good thing about the Nexus is getting the regular Android updates. But one day Google will stop sending them, or else the battery will go down, and then it's time to throw the thing away and buy a new one. And my guess is that will happen by the end of this year.

Here are my pet hates about the Nexus 5X:

1. The Do Not Disturb feature is extremely poorly designed as you have to click a Done button to save changes to the settings. If you forget to do this then the default is the timer doesn't click in to turn the phone back on after a certain time. So, because of a poorly designed user interface that is different from every other part of the phone (and from other Google products like Chrome) I have on many occasions accidentally left the phone on silent for days at a time without realising it.
2. there is no way (unlike my old Nokia dumbphones) that you can put in a catch all timer to turn off DND after a certain time frame, just in case you forget. I have a timer that puts on DND automatically at night so that only phone calls and alarms work. But if DND is already one, this doesn't turn it off at the end of the timer period, even though it would normally if the DND function was previously off.
3. On one occasion when the phone was set to total silence, an alarm went off on the clock and the phone sounded the alarm even though it was set to total silence.
4. Sometimes even when you use the fingerprint sensor the phone makes you put the pin number in.
5. If you restart the phone, when it comes back up, it will not start Android until you enter the Pin number. This is totally unlike every other phone I have ever had, where the phone comes back up to the lock screen. Again I have been caught out many times by this, not realising that Android had not started and therefore no calls or messages could be received.
6. There is no SD card slot, so you are stuck with the 32 GB of internal memory. I would rather use that for apps and have an SD card for music and pictures so I don't have to worry about using all the internal memory.
7. Even with the sophistication of Android there can be some app that for some reason is hogging all the CPU usage to 100% even when the thing is allegedly on standby in your pocket, and with it sucking your battery dry in a matter of hours, this has caused the phone to go dead without warning on occasions.
8. It uses a USB-C cable which means I had to buy extra cables and can't rely on being able to connect a regular charger or computer cable to it.
9. The battery drains very quickly if you are taking a lot of photos for example, there have been times I was using the camera to take photos of a whole lot of different things and the battery ran down really quickly so I had to switch to a separate camera.
10. There are next to no accessories available for it. Although admittedly that is true of nearly any phone that isn't an Iphone or a Galaxy S, and buying it from someone other than Vodafone doesn't help.
11. Contacts is a disaster, it keeps losing contacts especially new ones. I now expect to be doing a lot of contact editing in Gmail as I have many duplicates and old contacts as well as attempting to fix up this contact loss issue. It may be the contact sync on Thunderbird is causing some issues but it never created any problems before.

I have to admit that with the above and various glaring standout problems in that list that have made the phone unavailable for days at a time that I haven't noticed, because at home I can use PCs to do most of the stuff I would use the phone for apart from calls or texts, it has been a less than happy experience with this phone and I would think twice about buying another one again for sure.

UPDATE: Issues 1 and 2 were overcome by installing an app (Auto Do Not Disturb) which makes the whole experience much smoother and easier.  The contacts issue has not been completely resolved but I did discover that there was an all contacts view which makes the whole experience easier, although there doesn't seem to be any way to make it the default. But at the moment I am coping with using the phone every day as I expect it to have some more years of life left in it yet.

Digikam / Android 8 not perfect / Ditching Outlook.com email

For some strange reason this message (which only appears once in my inbox) has some magical properties that enable it to push itself to the top of the list every so often.

Android 8 seems to have issues with DefaultCarrierApp which puts up a notification that won't go away telling me I have run out of mobile data. This is quite a common issue a lot of people are experiencing as it turns out.

Aside from testing Evolution for email (quite positively so far) I am now experimenting with digiKam as a pseudo replacement for Irfanview. I don't know whether it can do watermark text or renaming the same, or automatically download images from the camera, so it will take a lot of work to test out these features.

RemixOS android emulation

Well about a week ago I was writing about my experiences with Android x86. That particular OS runs reasonably well in a VM on Linux, but on my Windows computer I couldn't achieve anything with it because apparently of the hardware virtualisation limit. So then I upgraded the computer to one that does full virtualisation and I tried again. But I also tried a different Android package - I tried RemixOS, which is far superior to Android x86, being a lot more refined in many aspects.

There are three ways you can run RemixOS:

• In a virtual machine
• As a native install (hard disk or pen drive)
• As an emulator (Remix OS Player)

The native install as a pen drive has been the least successful method so far - giving me the Android startup messages, but then stopping at a black screen with just a mouse pointer visible. In a virtual machine (Virtualbox) on Windows 10, I have only got the Guest mode to work so far (no data saved) while the Resident mode throws error messages and never reaches the home screen. The Player experience has been similar to the virtual machine Guest mode, except that data does persist. Both experiences to date are far superior to Android x86. 

RemixOS isn't just another basic emulation of Android on a desktop - it has adopted some well known GUI elements like a desktop, a taskbar and a start menu as its shell. The result is something that is far easier to use than Android x86. 

That said, Remix is pretty new and there are still a few glitches. Right now with Instagram, I can browse my newsfeed, but can't post anything - selecting an image crashes it. So the Remix people still have a few things to fix on what is actually version 1.0 of their player. The VM run with Resident Mode working is something I am still tweaking to see if I can get that working properly as well, but I would expect it wouldn't be better than the player, so I am going to focus on the player and that means talking to the Remix people about any fixes they can create to address the crashes.

Android desktop options

So after my last post I have had a play with Android x86 on the Linux PCs with very mixed results. Quite why Facebook finds it difficult to support the desktop / browser based version of Instagram with the ability to post images is hard to fathom considering how well they have made Facebook work on the browser (better than a lot of apps) and clearly the only reason Facebook bother continuing to support Instagram is to ward off competition in the mobile app marketplace.

The biggest issue with Android x86 is that the developers have given it a landscape orientation by default and Instagram will auto rotate this into portrait which means you actually have to have a screen you can physically rotate or have hotkeys to turn the screen sideways itself. That is partly the reason I have wanted to run it on Windows where the hotkeys are well supported. I am not sure about Linux support for screen rotation hotkeys. Androidx86 has some hotkeys that will sometimes rotate the screen, sometimes not. So turning the screen or pressing the screen rotation hotkeys seem to be the only realistic options.

The other option is if the developers come up with something that will allow you to choose a landscape orientation by default. I have also tried this with changing video modes but wasn't able to find something that the version of Android itself could cope with so I guess I will be talking to them to see what can be done. Obviously I am quite keen to be able to post in Instagram from my PC without all this having to switch to a handheld to post on IG. But there are pros and cons to the different approaches and I have got around it up to now by composing the posts in Google Docs and then pasting that on the phone. And that approach does have its advantages particularly as you can review the document's character count which has to be held under 2200.

At any rate upgrading the Windows PC will go ahead, and I think putting Windows 10 on it is a highly likely outcome as well. Having Windows 10 means I will also have to buy a Pro license for it sooner or later since I have to migrate off using schools' licenses at some point. Whether the Windows computer when upgraded is going to be good enough with Androidx86 is something still to be tested out. Right now I am going to be probably keep using a handheld with Google Docs composition on the PC which has been very productive (and transferring images using Bluetooth). It is not really that hard and almost makes it unnecessary to have Androidx86 considering the hassle involved with that platform.

Android emulation options

A little while back I wrote about trialling a couple of Android emulators. BlueStacks and LeapDroid were the Windows ones that I tried out, Leapdroid being better. I then decided a tablet was a better option for Android and also reinstalled Windows to discover Leapdroid had been pulled by its developers and can no longer be downloaded.

There is a third option and that is a package called Android-x86, which is an open source effort to produce a version of Android that can run on x86 hardware. It is generally recommended that it be run only on virtual machines, but it does have a number of issues with things like screen rotation that make it easier to run on a second (or in my case third) computer because the easiest way to resolve the screen rotation issue is simply to physically rotate your screen and in fact until recently I actually had the Windows computer's screen rotated into Portrait mode all the time. 

The problem with that computer is that it is too slow. I bought several years ago, a pair of Gigabyte Mini-ITX boards (GA-E350) as a cheap way of getting some extra computers I could use to do my work. These have an integrated AMD "Bobcat" E350 CPU which is probably really a Geode or MediaGX or something under the hood, a low power onboard chip with a small fan. They do quite well for basic use of web browsing or whatever but have turned to be really slow at a lot of other things. I am now discovering their limitations on a daily basis. Whilst one of these computers would be powerful enough to run the Android emulator, the problem is that the Bios doesn't support x64 hardware virtualisation properly (it might be able to fix it with a Bios update, but I know I updated one of them and still couldn't get it to detect properly) which means VirtualBox has to run VMs in slower KVM paravirtualisation and this seems to be extremely slow (the VM first time boot was left running for at least half an hour and never actually completed).

So I will look at upgrading this system to a low-end Skylake board and Pentium G CPU. I could get these both together for about $200. Then 8 GB of DDR4 memory would come in at about $100, so with all the bits I have lying around, upgrading that system for about $300 looks like a reasonable proposition. It's disappointing I have these computers that just aren't powerful enough any more. The two E350s have both had 8 GB of RAM put in them to try to get them to go faster, and this is one of the few times this option didn't work. I would say that made almost next to no difference in fact. The case for upgrading this computer will take a while to justify but I think it will happen in a few months from now, but it will give me a computer with at least five years of useful life. In fact apart from disks or other things wearing out, my guess is I wouldn't need to spend any more money on computers over the next three years.

Android updates not as good as Windows Phone

If you buy an Android phone, the key issue is getting software updates from the manufacturer. With Windows in particular, which is the nearest equivalent (one OS on many different hardware devices), MS has a very good system that provides updates to their core operating system for many years after it is first released. This is possible because MS has fairly tight control over the Windows OS, and because the nature of the OS makes it easy to customise for different hardware.

Android is a very different beast, and that creates problems for end users. Typically the stock Android is customised by a hardware manufacturer for their product, and then further customised by the carrier who sells it to the customer. There is a big shoving match as to which of the three is responsible for updates to the software. But the vast bulk of Android devices out there are not able to receive updates for security issues (and Android has had its fair share of exploits). This is because Google can't make an update for the customised Android that the manufacturer has produced for their platform and that in part is due to the nature of Android (and Linux) in respect of the adaption to different hardware platforms. By and large, manufacturers are passing the buck on supporting non-current models of their phones and it is rare to see a version upgrade (compared to the Apple scenario where new iOS versions come out regularly) let alone a guarantee of security fixes for any period of time.

It is for this reason (and a few others) that I have reluctantly concluded that to be sure of getting a phone that will receive a good level of support from the manufacturer for security and version updates, that I will have to spend a little more and buy a Google Nexus. Google makes these phones (and the newer Pixel series) to compete head on with Apple. But the lower end models are still affordable compared with the iPhone (I have many friends who have iPhones and I can't quite bring myself to ask them how they were able to justify the huge expense, since at the time of writing the cheapest new model is $749) - Noel Leeming has an unlocked Nexus 5X for $399. This is really as high as I could justify for a phone, and a long way up from the $149 you could pay for a locked Samsung Galaxy J2 at current pricing (I paid more than that for mine) - $149 is also what I paid for my Lumia 635 and its predecessor. 

The Nexus has 32 GB of onboard memory, but there is no microSD card slot, and it also has a USB-C socket, which means different charge cables. There is also a fingerprint sensor for the unlock, and you get a stock Android version in it, so you aren't missing out on features the OEM has chosen not to implement (as I found with Samsung's implementation of Do Not Disturb on my Galaxy). It comes with Android 6 but Google has guaranteed availability of Android 7. So we shall see.

More Samsung self serving crap and ripoffs

My first Android phone was a Motorola Moto-E dual sim (XT1022) that I picked up from The Warehouse relatively cheaply as it was end of line at that time. A great little phone especially as it was my first use of Android with the main issue being the lack of RAM (only 4 GB). Because Motorola puts out pretty much the standard Android offering with relatively few apps you get all of the standard Android features and it doesn't gobble up the memory on the phone.

I thought the solution would be a Galaxy J2, which while offering 8 GB of RAM has filled a lot of the extra space with useless Samsung apps that can't be uninstalled. And in fact some of these apps are stuff like the Phone and Messaging apps which have terrible usability features that you can't fix in any way. Because Samsung is another huge greed driven corporation whose agenda is to drive everyone towards the high priced Galaxy S premium phones which give you the nice customisations I am sure and all the extra features but frankly the prices people have to pay is ludicrous, up there with Iphones for sure. Who wants to pay that much for a phone when you can have a tablet with a much larger screen?

The biggest hassle with the J2 is that Samsung decided they wouldn't put the standard Priority Notifications feature into their low-end phones. Instead they replaced it with a one size fits all feature called Do Not Disturb. Both of these systems are intended to do the same thing, put the phone onto silent when you don't want to be disturbed. But Priority Notifications has a timer that you can turn it on for say 2 hours and then it automatically turns off so if you are in a meeting, and this is crucial, it will put your phone back to normal after that time elapses. Samsung's DND feature only has one predetermined timed schedule possible, there is no ability to turn it on "on the fly" casually without mucking about with a whole lot of settings. So there have been many occasions when I have missed calls because I put the phone on silent and then forgot to put it back on after a meeting or something.

Apart from that I also find the phone has problems detecting when it should stop trying to connect to Wi-fi because I am no longer at home, and has to be restarted quite often because it has dropped internet connectivity. An expensive lesson I have learned, with successive Microsoft and Samsung phones, as well as Canon cameras, is that big corporate agendas see the main purpose of the lower end of the product range as free advertising to push people up to the higher and more profitable end of the market. On the other hand, those old phones do make great media players. My old Lumia, which only had a few months use as a phone and is still in top condition, is now a Bluetooth capable media player which makes it very useful around the house with one portable Bluetooth speaker I got recently and the ancient sound system in the lounge with a Logitech bluetooth receiver.

The other thing is Samsung dragging the chain with updates because Marshmallow should be available for this phone but there is no sign of it and in a lot of cases there is extreme irresponsibility since security updates are not being pushed out by vendors. MS has also dragged out or abandoned older Lumia owners as there is no sign of Windows 10 Mobile coming anytime soon.

At the moment I am considering whether to use the Moto E again or go for a new Moto G Play which is $299 (unlocked), the problem is you can't get a cheaper locked phone as Vodafone don't carry Motorola but at least you do get those options of running the standard Android instead of the Samsung proprietary and stripped implementation of the UI, with 16 GB of memory which is massive (I am already getting "out of memory" errors on the J2 when app upgrades are needed) and won't be clogged up with useless Samsung apps.

I think the lesson for all of us is we have to be that much more vigilant about being locked in to proprietary hardware with the limitations for software in these days. Thankfully I already had that instinct long ago with PCs which has saved me when it came to the point Windows was no longer a palatable offering from MS and apart from the HP tablet (which could probably run Linux) I haven't got any computer hardware that restricts software/UI choices. Of course the Samsung Android tablet I have is a locked-in platform but it is wholly different as I mostly use it with third party apps and it is not a phone. So it is an acceptable compromise provided Samsung keep up to date with security updates for Android 6.

Linux So Far [2]

Obviously a bugbear of any platform is that the software you want to run isn't always available for the platform and these days it is not unusual to have several computers running multiple platforms if you are a power user. I have had to maintain at least one Windows computer since I switched to Linux, but there is no way I would ever go back to solely Windows because there is so much good software available for Linux now that I have discovered it. Because there are technical limitations with virtualisation, having a physical computer box running Windows is essential rather than a VM, or the other way around.

As a result of identifying the preference to downsize the household to three computers instead of the five that it had up until very recently, it has been determined that the Intel DB75EN is the best hardware to be running the Windows computer on, rather than AMD E350 and this also enables one computer to be eliminated in the household. Recently also I have removed the second computer from the living room as longer term the expectation is a single small form factor HTPC will be the sole requirement there.

The DB75EN will be running Windows 8.1 indefinitely and will have the scanner and camera software installed as well as an Android emulator to enable it to be used with Instagram, and at this stage the Windows versions of Kodi and VLC will be installed along with a media library. It can also run Cobian Backup for all the backups that I do. I will be looking at which computer can run video editing software. After testing BlueStacks Android Emulator, I found it was difficult to use on my PC (which is a pretty powerful beast with 12 GB of RAM), so I uninstalled it and put Leapdroid on it, which has been much more useful with Instagram. However there have still been problems with all Instagram functionality being available so as far as I am concerned the use of the Android emulator to post Instagram content is severely limited and I will be going back to my original plan to buy an Android tablet instead.

The number of screens will be changed to two for each computer (the main PC had three up until this point, but there is no real need for the third one), and two of those screens will have a resolution of 1920x1080, the other two will be 1680x1050. The Xubuntu PC has the two screens side by side in landscape mode as usual; the Windows PC has the screens stacked vertically, with the lower screen at 1680x1050 being in a portrait orientation, and the upper screen at 1920x1080 being in the usual landscape orientation. The orientation of the lower screen works better in some situations such as editing documents or viewing Instagram content in a web browser because of the way some of these apps are optimised for vertical form factors such as a typical smart phone. With the second screen on this computer horizontal I have a choice of both form factors depending on need.

UPDATE: Well there have been problems with Kodi or VLC on Windows when playing Matroska format video files which are what I can produce with AviDemux when splitting DVD video files into tracks (can't save MP4). Basically at a certain point of playback (this varies for each video but is always the same location for a particular clip) the video would stop momentarily and then resume itself a few seconds later, the sound also skipped. After trying lots of tweaks I decided I could just install Kodi onto my main PC and reconnect the TV to it as a third screen (since it has a quad head video card). So Kodi works better on Linux without giving these problems. So now I have one computer with three screens and one computer with one screen and that is how it is going to stay for now.

Samsung vs Motorola, Galaxy J2 vs Moto E

At the weekend I bought my first Samsung phone, a Galaxy J2. I mainly got it because I needed 8 GB of memory instead of 4 GB, so as to be able to install more apps. So I have been able to put on Twitter which I was really after at the time, all the Facebook apps, and a few more besides.

The issues with buying a Samsung phone or the Galaxy J2 to date are as follows:

• The amount of memory used by the system is higher than stock Android. So while adding 4 GB of memory should theoretically give you 4 GB more than what the Moto E makes available, that isn't the case. I went from about 2.2 GB left for apps to about 4.2 GB, so the extra Samsung software and built-in apps that you can't remove (or even disable) swallow up another 2 GB on top of Android and what the Motorola apps in the Moto E used.
• Things like priority timers aren't available even though they are part of regular Android. On the Moto E when you press the volume controls you get offered the ability to set the priority to a lower level and have it restored to full level after a certain period of time. All the J2 has on it is buttons to make it vibrate or silent and turn on DND mode. There is no timer as there was on either the Moto E or various Nokia feature phones I used to own years ago. There is just the DND timer which you set at night to turn off emails and texts so you can get some sleep.
• Some of the Samsung apps are not very good. I thought the email app seemed to be quite useful, until it started draining my battery. Its power usage is very high through using a lot of resources. Switching to Gmail, as I used on the Moto E, saw a huge drop in power consumption for the phone and that is how it will stay for now. 

The phone itself appears to be quite well designed, but as far as I can tell accessory shells are not available which is somewhat disappointing. There are the usual range of clip on covers, but as I only want to replace the back cover for something more personalised, that doesn't seem to be an option for this phone model.

Overall I am quite pleased with the phone once these beginning issues are resolved. I am up for question as to whether Samsung will release Android 6 for this phone. There is a 2016 update of the J2 due for release soon and it will come with 6, while from looking at leaks on the internet it looks like Marshmallow is due to be released for the 2015 J2 sometime later this year.

Once I changed all my emails over to Gmail and therefore stopped the built in email app from working the gain in battery life was immediate and huge. The system now uses 50% less juice in a day so the battery will last twice as long. Google doesn't state what the sync frequency is for Gmail accounts but it seems to work quite well with messages popping up almost as soon as they come in. I had thought of using the Outlook app to separate personal and work accounts as I did when I had the Moto E but the design of the current Outlook for Android app is really off putting. MS has decided to hide the technical settings such as account security and sync frequency completely away from the user. It means I can't be confident my Vodafone account is using secure transmissions at all and neither do I have a choice of how often messages are synced or how far back they go. MS is getting really patronising like this in the design of their apps and operating systems where they are focusing on chopping out settings and hiding them from the user interface so this is hardly a surprise.

I am overall very pleased with the design of the phone and how well it is working. Samsung haven't skimped on the design of this phone as much as I expected; it is quite classy compared to the Moto E although a different coloured back would be nice. Overall I tend to think a lot more highly of it than the reviewers who are slating Samsung for turning out a pile of phones that all look and feel the same.

Windows / Android

Well the Windows 7 computer has been set up and is doing a great job of running Windows 7 instead of 10. Of course MS will try to phase out Win 7 support as soon as they can so when that happens I will have to try to work out what I am going to do with it because of my very strong feelings about subsequent versions. I may be pushed onto 8 or 8.1 but it may well be the case that the support for these versions doesn't last a whole lot longer. I also support on a voluntary basis a Win7 computer next door so I am not sure how well this computer can transition to Win10 or later in the future. A big issue for that computer is that it has Intel Skylake architecture, which while being a great advance on its predecessor for speed and so forth, only has support from MS on Win7 for a limited period. MS naturally wants to push everyone using such a late architecture onto 10. But then there are the other issues with 10 that make it less suitable for a projection computer for example. At least on Win7 Enterprise you don't get the annoying "Install Windows 10" popups and enticements that people have been scammed with by MS on other editions of 7. People in the IT industry I know or work with seem to get asked quite often how to uninstall Windows 10 because they have been tricked into installing it without awareness of its differences.

In the phone area I am about to purchase my second Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy J2. The main thing I am attempting to achieve is to get a phone that has more than 4 GB of onboard storage. In Android there are many apps, particularly the built in Google/Android ones, that can only install into the onboard storage. Since the Moto E running Lollipop can only make 2.2 GB available for installs, it has filled up all this space long since leaving me with only a few extra apps I can use and I run into problems every time I get an app upgrade or want to add some new app. Ideally of course 16 GB would guarantee no more problems ever but there is a big leap in price to 16 GB, the only models I can see are the Galaxy A3 at $549 which is way too dear. In other words I should have thought that the extra cost of the Galaxy J5 over the J2 would have brought more memory whereas in actuality Samsung has decided the extra $100 is to be expended on a bigger screen and 13 megapixel camera. It will be interesting to be buying a phone that has a front camera for the first time and the most annoying limitation of the Moto E phone has been its fixed focus which has often resulted in blurry photos. I have elected to buy the phone outright and not be locked into a contract for two years to pay for it as well as keeping the special terms of my current contract (a big data allowance) which was a one off special and is not currently available in general although in a practical sense there are similar plans at similar or slightly cheaper prices considering the amount of talk time and data I actually use on it.

Using Android

Well after a few days of setting things up and testing (with a prepay account) I have finally switched my phone to my regular on account plan. I have a couple of coloured backs on order for it too, although they are difficult to get in NZ; fortunately it doesn't cost too much to have Amazon post one across to NZ. 

The built in email app works fine with Exchange, and the Gmail app works fine with Gmail, and the Outlook app from Microsoft works fine with Live accounts. The advantage of using the Outlook app instead of setting up my Live account from my Windows phone as IMAP, is that it immediately brought down my address book from Windows Phone, which includes all the phone numbers I previously had stored. However it doesn't look like the app can access IMAP accounts which means I will have to use the Gmail app; fortunately it isn't as messy to use multiple email apps as it is on a PC because their notifications are all integrated into the notification centre that comes up on the lock screen and when you pull down from the top. 

Live tiles are all the rage in Windows Phone of course, but they are limited, and the notification centre in Android is probably just as good overall, although I will miss having the visible calendar that showed everything by default, and will have to make sure I keep up with what is in my calendars by some means. I am guessing the Outlook app should be able to do calendar notifications.

The biggest issue for any Android user is apps that will only work in the phone's internal memory, which is most of them. You can disable many of the built-in apps that you don't use and free up some space, or a small number of apps can be moved to the SD card. The problem is that an old trick of using the Android Device Bridge application running on a PC to force move apps to the SD card is not possible in the latest versions of Android (this is running 5.1, which it was easily updated to soon after I started using it). So Google is not making it easy for people with lower priced phones to make the best use of the onboard memory as a lot of apps will not be installable. For me I am just OK with using the Chrome browser to view Facebook and Trademe and some other sites.

My first Android phone

So I bought a Motorola Moto E on special (end of line) from the Warehouse. This is the 2014 model, seen above with the Lumia 520 on the left and the Lumia 635 in the middle. The screen just happens to be the same size as the Lumia 635 despite the latter's larger package. This morning I let the phone update itself to Android 5.1. It is interesting for being a dual SIM phone and has a sticker on the outside of the box mentioning 2 Degrees, but is in fact a retail model so is not locked and didn't come with a SIM.

Buying an Android phone is about getting access to a lot more apps that won't be available on Windows phone for a long time because of the dismally small market share that Windows Mobile has. (That is the new name for the platform since Windows 10 by the way) Even though Windows Mobile 10 is going to let Android apps run on it, I still think there is merit for me to own an Android phone.

I will have a look at making it my main phone, but that depends on whether it can work with the work email which is on a Microsoft Exchange server. The main reason as of now is to be able to load my e-Bible onto it, as that is a Adobe Digital Editions DRM protected EPub, and I couldn't find a suitable app for the Lumia.

Well eventually I did get my NIV Study Edition loaded onto it, after looking at a few different options. The main issue has been finding an app that will work with Adobe Digital Editions specifically. It turns out the only suitable one is Aldiko Book Reader. While ebooks.com from whom I purchased the e-book have their own reader app, I have found both on Windows and now Android that this app is very poorly designed with unhelpful error messages and being unable to either download the e-book or import it from the SD card. More than likely the ebooks app is not authorised to work with Adobe DRM.

Out of several reader apps, Vitalsource Bookshelf is the most disappointing. I understand that the objective of it is to produce an exact replication of a page layout and that therefore it is unable to reflow text to suit the reading device. This limitation prevents it being used on small screen devices such as phones. At least with Kindle or Aldiko the text can reflow to work on a screen. So the idea I could have some of my textbooks with me anywhere on the phone just ain't gonna happen unfortunately. Maybe I start thinking about an Android tablet sometime,