What I was looking for when I found my old Handspring Visor, was my old Samsung Galaxy Sii, which was my day to day phone until a couple of years ago when I upgraded to an S5.
The reason I went looking for my old Sii was quite complex. If you're a regular reader of this blog you'll recall that we bought a pay as you go SIM from Telstra, the dominant mobile phone provider in our area, to complement our contract based regular phones as Virgin doesn't play quite so well (or at all in our case) in rural Victoria.
Originally we had the Telstra SIM in an old Nokia phone because of the Nokia's superb battery life, but I switched it across to my old Samsung due to the spate of power outages we've been having recently - none very dramatic, an hour at most, but given the serious outages they've been having in South Australia, it's been a worry.
Now our local powerline operator is a company called AusNet and they have a really helpful outages page on which you can check the cause and the estimated time to fix, but for this you need an internet connected device.
Well, if our Virgin phones had been reliable we'd just have used them, or created an ad hoc temporary hotspot to get online, but as they're not reliable we needed to press my old Android phone into service, especially as Telstra have quite a fast bit of private network into the town.
So what's it like winding back a couple of generations?
Physically the main difference is the phone's smaller, with a smaller screen making onscreen typing more of the old fashioned hunt and peck (in fact remarkably like using my old Visor) than the smoother experience on a newer phone.
The camera is not as sharp - no surprises there, but strangely, that's about it. Battery life's about the same, Applications, while they're older versions are more or less the same in use, and while one is Android 6.x and the other 4.x, there's very little difference in the user experience, suggesting we've more or less reached a plateau in UX as far as Android is concerned.
Basically, both make calls, connect to wifi and the internet, and both need a daily recharge - they are effectively indistinguishable in use ...
The reason I went looking for my old Sii was quite complex. If you're a regular reader of this blog you'll recall that we bought a pay as you go SIM from Telstra, the dominant mobile phone provider in our area, to complement our contract based regular phones as Virgin doesn't play quite so well (or at all in our case) in rural Victoria.
Originally we had the Telstra SIM in an old Nokia phone because of the Nokia's superb battery life, but I switched it across to my old Samsung due to the spate of power outages we've been having recently - none very dramatic, an hour at most, but given the serious outages they've been having in South Australia, it's been a worry.
Now our local powerline operator is a company called AusNet and they have a really helpful outages page on which you can check the cause and the estimated time to fix, but for this you need an internet connected device.
Well, if our Virgin phones had been reliable we'd just have used them, or created an ad hoc temporary hotspot to get online, but as they're not reliable we needed to press my old Android phone into service, especially as Telstra have quite a fast bit of private network into the town.
So what's it like winding back a couple of generations?
Physically the main difference is the phone's smaller, with a smaller screen making onscreen typing more of the old fashioned hunt and peck (in fact remarkably like using my old Visor) than the smoother experience on a newer phone.
The camera is not as sharp - no surprises there, but strangely, that's about it. Battery life's about the same, Applications, while they're older versions are more or less the same in use, and while one is Android 6.x and the other 4.x, there's very little difference in the user experience, suggesting we've more or less reached a plateau in UX as far as Android is concerned.
Basically, both make calls, connect to wifi and the internet, and both need a daily recharge - they are effectively indistinguishable in use ...
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