Technology

Have you guys heard of this? It looks awesome.



An open platform phone.   It's like a PC.

I think concept-wise it's great, intel and nvidia and other parts manufacturers would probably support this similar to the desktop market.

Samsung set out an over-the-air (well, over the wi-fi) update today so I finally have Android Lollipop on my phone. I've been playing around with it since the download finished. I have some experience with the OS already from the tablets we sell at work but it really is slick and a notable improvement over KitKat. I did reinstall the Google Now search bar on my homescreen though, which had previously been there automatically, just for convenience, though I usually don't put a lot of apps on my main screen (phone or desktop).

Doing a bit more playing around, there are a few things about Lollipop that threw me off, but despite my being tired one has to expect a learning curve with new devices/OSes.  I'm not really a fan of the new default mode in Chrome where tabs appear in the task manager alongside apps.  It's an interesting idea, but there's less control over tabs and to do anything, even just close one, you have to press and hold the center button (I have an older Android handset; I know newer ones have a different button to pull up multitasking options) which takes longer and is less convenient than the tab button in the Chrome toolbar.  Fortunately this was easy to disable, though.

Unfortunately, the update completely gimped the default alarm clock app on my phone.  I'm not sure if it's a Google or a Samsung app, but it came pre-installed, so I can't delete it now that it's unusable.  Trying to open it gives an error message before immediately shutting down.  The only thing that still works about the app is that it faithfully keeps playing whatever repeating alarms were programmed in, with no ability to alter them or stop them from repeating daily/weekly.  This is a tremendous pain in the ass and I have not been able to find any troubleshooting advice short of performing a factory reset, which I don't want to do but might end up having to. There had better be a patch for this quick.