Do you need to buy a premium device for a premium experience?

I bought a mid range device when I bought the Motorola Z2 Play a few years back. I since sold that phone but I also just recently bought the Motorola Z Power phone. That is a mid range device with a lower price point. Both phones have decent hardware in them, can do lots of great things for taking photos and have great play back for sound and video. But what are they missing from a premium device like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+? Well basically, a stylus... maybe some performance improvements for playing graphic intense games on the phone.. maybe a touch more battery life thanks to Samsung's power management system. Both screens look vibrant with lots of color. Pictures look great on the screen on both phones and both take excellent pictures.

So why the Higher price tag for the Samsung? Well the Note 10 Plus is rated P68 for water resistance which means you could submerge it in fresh water for some time and retrieve it, dry it out and the phone will still function. As I found out this is not the case when it comes to salt water... anything goes if it goes in salt water. But the Motorola phone is not rated for water resistance like that so it only will be protected against splashes like from rain. Also the Motorola does not have NFC so no contactless payments from the phone. Plus you cannot wireless charge the Motorola. That is not a deal breaker for me. I rarely use wireless charging. I'm still not thrilled with it and feel like it's better for the battery to always charge with a cable. The motorola does have some things the Samsung does not, like an audio jack for headphones. You can use any headphones for that phone without needing a dongle to connect them in like you would with the samsung which is sans audio jack. One personal thing I like more on the Motorola is the fingerprint button on the back, it works 100 percent of the time! Samsung has the in glass fingerprint unit and it works but its 60/40 if it will read the print correctly. I hope they improve that design on future phones. Mid range inexpensive phones can offer great features but there are always trade offs that you have to look at when choosing a lower end device. But there are a wide variety of mid range devices that are affordable and will offer a user a great phone experience.

How many phones is too many? UPDATED

Do you love cell phones? Do you have more than 2 of them? For “backups”… sound familiar? Don’t worry you’re in safe company. I have said the same thing. I am currently up to 4 cell phones unless you count the dead flip phone that I have no charger for…? Ok 5… The flip phone is an LG Dare? I forget the name of that one. I also have an LG G7 ThinQ from 2 years ago. It is still a great phone and is being updated to Android 10 OS very soon according to the Android news feeds. It’s the lightest of the 3 phones and has the best night vision for taking night shots. They always come out so bright on this phone and the other phones have trouble with night shots.
My daily driver of a phone is the Samsung Note 10 Plus. It has become one of the best phones I ever used. The size is perfect in my hand and not hard for 1 or 2 handed uses. The battery life gets me through a day and a half even if I am using the phone heavily. The camera takes amazing photos and I have not even really used the video feature yet. OH and the screen looks amazing. I currently still have the original screen protector from Samsung on the phone. But soon I will be putting on a Zagg screen protector. Just as soon as I watch the video more to make sure I can install it right.
UPDATE: Took off the stock screen protector and installed 2 from a company that does glass protectors applied with UV glue. I do not recommend these types. If the phone gets cold at all from air conditioning the glue will give and you will be prone to potential damage. I also have the HTC U11 phone. This older droid was just updated to Android 9 which was shocking as most of HTC phone staff moved to Google. This phone is STILL getting updates. I turned it on to check on the battery for this article and there is a software update pushing through. This phone is the shortest of all the phones but also the fattest. It is slightly uncomfortable to use single handed. This was before they went “bezel free” so there is 2 bezels at the top and bottom of the phone. But this phone sounds amazing for music. It was enhanced for audio both from the speakers and for when you plug a set of headphones in.
The last phone I have is a Motorola G Power. I just purchased this phone for 250 bucks. It’s unlocked for any carrier and it has a huge battery in it. I used it for one day just trying to sign into everything and get setup and I was about 6 hours of screen time in. The battery still lasted for another day after that! The phone does not have NFC built in and it does not do Wireless charging. But the phone is a great cheap phone to get and store in a drawer in case someone needs a phone in a hurry. Moto has some great actions they setup to make the phone easier to use. Make a chopping motion with your wrist and the flashlight comes on. Twist your wrist and the camera comes on. The phone is ringing on the table and you’re in a meeting, flip it over screen down, the phone shuts up till you pick it back up.
I am working to set these phones up so I can switch back and forth at a moment’s notice. If the Samsung suddenly develops a hardware issue and has to be sent in to replace, I want to be able to take the sim out pop it into either the Moto or the LG and continue working. Most of my stuff is setup in the cloud for backup and syncing. The last thing I did not have in a cloud backup was my text messages and I thought it wasn’t a big deal but more and more text messages are being used in business and starting to become items of record. So I stopped using the default Text program on the phones and moved to Google’s messaging program. This way all my stuff is backed up to Google’s cloud and when I sign into a different phone it can sync all the messages up and I won’t miss anything. I was getting close to the limit of Google’s free 15GB of storage. So I opted to pay for the 100Gb of space on Google’s Cloud. This way the phones can be backed up to the cloud as well and its one less thing I need to worry about. This is a whole other topic but I also have a Microsoft One Drive cloud with over 100 GB of space on it that I don’t pay for. I am not for one or the other, I use whatever works best for my needs. So that’s all my phones. What do you have in your collection? Leave me a comment and let me know. Apple products welcome too… there is no better one here, its whatever works for best you. Which should be the goal of all technology.

Samsung smart switch makes moving to a new Samsung very easy

So I have had the pink line for about a few months now and it is getting worse on my s7edge. It has started causing the top right corner of the screen to not respond to touch . So i decided to get an s7 to use so Samsung can fix the pink line if possible. I have not heard back from Samsung yet about fixing the pink line but that is a story for another day. I dread having to switch phones as the process has not been as easy as Apple makes it. Their iCloud works well and makes moving to a different device very easy. Well Samsung has a program that is very similar called the smart switch. It works with any device and will make switching very easy to get to a new Samsung device.

The transfer can happen 3 ways, via Wireless from one device to the other, with a usb transfer cable, or connecting the devices to a pc or mac.

The Smart switch will let you choose your items you want to sync like your contacts, photos, and text messages. It even keeps most of your settings the same. I cannot speak if that works across platforms but switching from one Samsung to the other kept all the settings. I had my icons right where I liked them and all the apps opened and worked with no issues. You do need to sign back into each app and reauthorize if you have a 2 factor authentication setup. But all your data comes right over and its very easy to get back up and running in no time with very little hassle. I did have to readjust my sound settings so I figured it was time to pick some different ring tones for messages and alerts and calls. The program works well it is very easy to download and install and very easy to follow the steps. It was pretty fast too as it flew over the wifi and I have a good amount of photos on the device's storage. It took less than an hour to get everything moved over. It may have even been about 30 minutes.
It is a great app to use and if your going to move to a Samsung I highly recommend getting this app. I will probably have to use it one more time once I get my s7edge fixed. I will update about that later on once I find out what the status of getting it fixed is. I hope to just be able to get it swapped out but I am not looking forward to getting a refurb if that is what they offer me. I know I will not pay for the repair as it is not caused by use its a defect in the phone. I really hope Samsung does a better job with their s8 line than the issues that plagued the s7 line as well as the Note 7 debacle. If you are getting a new Samsung just make sure to use the Smart Switch app to move to the new device seamlessly.

This age of instant response can make for missing a moment alone.

Your getting out of bed trying to remember what important things you have to do today and you get "Bling" "Blong" Your cell phone chirps that someone has sent you a text. You respond then start to think again, I need to make sure I go to... "Bling Blong" Again the response comes in what feels like milliseconds and you couldn't even finish your small thought about going to the market! Later in the day you have been dealing with 5 emergencies from every department and then you found out you need to leave early to go to your house on your lunch break to deal with something and you just want to close your eyes and gather your thoughts for a second...Ahh..."Bling Blong" . It never ends. This instant response with technology has made us lose some of our razor sharp focus we once had. They say multitasking is bad and does not work. Well it used to before you had this instant response device working. You could start a project and finish it without an instant interruption that started and had five responses or further questions before you even got to pick up the phone to look at it! It has caused people to have less patience as well when it comes to waiting for answers. Everyone thinks you should be able to text the response back no matter where you are or what you are doing. This is not the case and you may need to let people know in advance. You have to block off time where you may even turn your phone to airplane mode or off to not hear those messages. Tell all you important friends and family you are doing this to focus on something important. Even if its for a work out and meditation. Does not matter. That is your time to get things done that need to be done. Those texts will have to wait. And for business, set the same ground rules. Let your co workers know, If you have something quick fire off a text but if it requires more than 3 responses, send an email or call about it so the message is clear. Let your clients and customers know, I do not do business by text message. You can give me a text to ask if Im in the office or can I call you? But anything else must be in written or verbal form via an email or phone call. Set the precedence right from the beginning and you can gently remind them if they forget later and do it. And if you get coupons or offers via text message think about them do you really need them? If you do, you just have to hope they are not at 2 in the morning!
It really is hard to try to focus for a long time when you keep getting some kind of alert from an electronic device. Even as I write this now, I had 5 text messages come through and my tablet had 3 alerts from apps come through. So my train of thought stopped a few times and I had to try to pick up where I left off. So if you have tablets you may have to put them in airport mode or at least disable all alerts that are not needed or are duplicated by your cell phone. Try to start small, start with 20 minutes maybe in the early morning. Put your devices to airplane then just close your eyes breath deep and think about something that relaxes you. Don't think about work or anything else you have to do, just think of something relaxing like an image of the sunrise at your favorite beach, or the feel of the breeze as you sit in your screened porch. Just make sure to take some time to your self for your thoughts. The more you do this the more you will be able to focus better and you will feel sharper and sometimes feel less overwhelmed at larger projects. Put on some of your favorite music and just listen to it for some time to your self. If your phone goes off while your in the middle of juggling three tasks at work that are small, don't answer or look at it until you get at least 2 of them done. Then take a quick moment to look at the text. Or if you feel better not worrying about it then don't look at it until you got all three tasks done.
They say we reached the age of instant communication. Well I would like to go back 3 steps where I don't have to respond in an instant and I can get things done without hearing sounds in my head, "BLING BLONG" .

Samsung S7 Edge One day something Pink appeared

I was fortunate enough to be given a samsung Galaxy S7 Edge by my company to test drive. My motorola was older and had old software that was not being updated, and the battery started to really go downhill. So I swapped my SIM card and started using the Samsung. What a wonderful phone! Bright beautiful screen as Samsung is known for the best displays. My battery life lasted a day and a half almost (a little less if I was really hitting the phone hard) and the phone never hesitated or got stuck. The phone worked as a phone should work and I finally thought I found THE perfect phone. All the apps ran great and did not eat up a bunch of memory, the camera took some of the best pictures just as nice as my Motorola Droid Turbo pictures used to come out. The phone came with a Commuter Otter case and was in perfect condition. That was 6 months ago, then one day something showed up on the display. An uninvited pink line showed up on the right side and ran down the entire length of the display. I was horrified, I did not drop the phone, it ran in a case all the time, how could this happen what did I do?
I locked my phone and placed it on my desk next to me where it sat unused for a few hours as I was at work and busy with help desk issues. Lunch time came around, I had to run some errands so i grabbed the phone and went to the car. I took the phone out and unlocked it ready to connect the AUX cable to steam some music while driving, wait a minute... where is that pink line? Its gone! What the heck??? I locked the phone a few times and unlocked it wondering what was going on. Then put it out of my mind and went about the rest of my day. The phone was used more the rest of the day and the pink line was gone. I started to chalk it up to maybe it needed a reboot and so I rebooted it that evening back at home. The next day I woke up and unplugged my phone from the charger. I had to check for some emails and so I unlocked the phone and HELLO!! "Hello my name is pinky mcliney and Ill be your riding shot gun on the right side of your phone..." So there it is again. I was mystified I figured I must have done something to cause this and I wasn't sure what, I became convinced that I just had to go through the company warranty and get the phone repaired or replaced and I had a feeling that I may have a denied claim if they said well you dropped it and caused that. I was not looking forward to switching back to my old phone as it now felt outdated and slow. And I was really looking forward to getting the Android 7.0 Nougat on this Samsung to see what it would do.
Fast forward a week goes by and Pinky (the pink line) shows up a few times on and off, I found if I touched the upper right part of the screen it sometimes went away and stayed away for a long time. I did not go to warranty yet, I decided to live with it and I would go to support if it got worse. But then I was looking up stories for my blog and came across a post that said the same issue with the pink line. It was a story about people having the pink lines,
http://wccftech.com/galaxy-s7-edge-display-pink-line/

I was elated sort of, I didn't cause this? Is it a manufacture defect? Apparently so. I read more and more looking at people's comments waiting to see a long list of people who sent the phone back and got a replacement with no hassle. I did not find that. Instead there were a couple like that, but then others who said they were charged for the repair or told a high cost to replace. Then there were more reports of the pink line, ON THE REPLACEMENT DEVICES PEOPLE RECEIVED! So this is a bigger issue than I first thought. Guess what, my phone is still with me. I'm waiting on doing anything about pinky. The rest of the phone works still just as good as it first did 6 months ago. Even the battery is still holding up. My co worker who heads our mobile administration asked me the other day about the phone and if I wanted to get a warranty claim going, I told him no, and told him the stories and the news I found through my research. He agreed that was the best course of action, keep a wait and see stance to find out if Samsung was going to officially acknowledge the defect. So far they have not said anything and there is still an issue and people are not getting answers when they speak to Samsung outside the normal canned tech support responses.
I am a fan of Samsung, I have some of their televisions, I have the washer and dryer (yes it was the washer that had the off balance defect) I have almost all Samsung monitors for all of my computers as well as some of my family's computers. I tell everyone the best screens for a computer are from Samsung. But the company is starting to become a worry to me and my ability to recommend them to everyone is becoming less and less. They did fix the washer quickly, I had a warranty visit from a tech and a new bigger S screw was installed to keep the unit from breaking apart. But that issue along with the pink line issue, along with the Note 7 Battery issue and even some reports about bad TV software glitches has made it harder to trust that Samsung is doing QA well enough and will be able to make great products again that don't have defects. I watched the Galaxy S8 unboxed event. I heard the vow made by the Samsung Executive to get better at this and learn from the Note 7. I watched the video about how they are testing batteries and saw the stress test they run. It makes me feel a little better about Samsung. But this issue with the pink line needs to be addressed. Tell your customers if you can fix it. Tell us you at least have an engineer looking at it. Work with customers on a case by case basis if needed and try to fix or replace the phone. If you cannot fix the issue then at least have some kind of upgrade for the customers. Even if not a full replace to a new device if the customers device is a little older, then just provide the customers with some kind of better discount on a new phone. The Note 7 was a safety issue, the washing machine was a safety issue. This does not appear to cause the phone to become unsafe to use but it is a huge defect and makes the using of the phone more cumbersome it aggravates the user when it should not have to.
In a way it IS a safety issue...to the Safety of Samsung and their future sales and loyal customers. Samsung if you do not acknowledge this or look into it for your customers, they are going to turn away in droves. It will make your customers pause before they buy that beautiful new S8 and S8+ you came out with. Even corporate customers who love the Samsung devices, will edit their policies and tell their sales reps, "Show me all the Android devices but take Samsung out of the search" I think if this pink line is at least discussed by Samsung and acknowledged it will help. if you tell us it will take time to fix but you are looking at it, it will help us feel like you really care. Don't be a company that just bets on your name and won't take the time to listen to your customers. Help us get rid of the pink line AKA"Pinky Mcliney"

Cell phones being released as fast as bowling balls!

Samsung is trying to launch a lot of new cell phones at a clip of one per week!

This is like when bowling balls Manufactures do the same thing. They will release a new bowling ball in a span of a week or two. It gets a little difficult to try to keep up with that much change!

HTC DNA Phone

I recently saw the ad from Verizon showing the new droid phone that was being released soon, the HTC DNA. Well it was only 2 weeks after that, with much soul searching I decided to retire my trusty Iphone 4 and upgrade to a new droid. I had my heart set on the Samsung Galaxy 3 but then when I saw the DNA I started doing research on it. After much research I decided that the DNA would be my next phone. I wanted to go and test it though before I bought it and make sure it was not too big. It is a huge 5 inch phone with a massive screen and a beautiful picture. All of the reviews said do not worry about the size, it is still small for being such a large phone. So after I got a chance to stop to a store and play with the phone and try it out, I was sold on it.

My wife came home from work and we went right to the Verizon phone to order us up some new phones. She got her Samsung galaxy 3 in white and I got my shiny new Droid DNA phone. Her phone is a nice phone too. I love how it feels so thin and lightweight but does not feel like it was made cheaply. Samsung displays are some of the best around when looking at a computer all day, and the display on her phone was no different. I will review that phone more in depth when I can get a day with it and pry it out of her fingers!

The DNA phone came in some neat packaging that was dark and black and really cool looking. I got Verizon to transfer all my contacts from my iPhone, which I should not have done as the backup of contacts was not updated like what i had on my iphone. Triplicate entries galore! The phone came and had about a half charge on the battery. Which was a good indication of things to come. I got the phone at 4 o'clock and used it heavily right up till I went to bed at 10 pm. And just as I was laying in bed it was telling me that it was time to charge.

My first experience of the pure speed this phone had was at a supermarket. I had 3 bars and it was on the 4g network and it dawned on me that I needed to get an app for my work. I wanted to hear a good dance DJ on sound cloud as well. So I went into Google play and chose sound cloud from the list of apps. The app to download was 14MB in size. I was curious how log it would take with only half of the network signal available to me. I hit download and it only took 10 seconds for the app to download and be ready for me to work with! That was impressive to me as I came from an I phone 4 with 3g speeds. When I got home, I could not really test the 4g more as we live in an area that has poor coverage and sometimes its a miracle to get 3g coverage. So I connected it to Wi Fi and downloaded all my needed apps.

All the apps I tested ran smoothly with no issues. The only one that gives me an issue so far is Facebook. When you go to share a picture that is in your timeline, it will come up and you can put a wording to the post, but when you hit publish post. It says finished then says loading and never moves from there until you force quit the app and start it again. Your post does show up but you won't know that until you exit out and come back in. This issue came up on my phone, my wife's phone and her co worker's phone. All are droid phones and all are different models and one is on a different network. Needless to say, I reported that bug to Facebook and I hope they will get a fix out for it. It is not a big deal to me as I have plenty of other ways to use Facebook should the need arise.

My phone will last all day and a charger is not needed unless I am doing some intense activity with the phone like streaming music all day or running the display for a very long time. The biggest draw in the phones battery life is that big beautiful screen. For my work around a 2nd charger will be ordered and I will keep my car charger handy for long trips.

A lot of the reviews I have studied have talked about the phones inability to add storage space and that it only has 16gb of space available to the user. If your coming from the basic iPhone like i was this is not an issue. I can get at least 200 songs on the phone plus my apps and still have a little room left over to store some other things if needed. And with today's cloud storage offerings, you should have space somewhere to put your data so you can shuffle it around to the phone if needed. Would a 32GB version be better? Sure, and I am positive that the engineers are already working that up right now. But for me 16GB is fine. I don't really want to store a lot of music on this phone anyway. I want to have more of a balance and get some reading material on there and try all the different apps that I did not have available to me with the iPhone world. I mean c'mon, with that huge screen, who wouldn't want to curl up with that phone and read some classic novels, or catch up on the latest issue of Maximum PC?

The phone is of course very deeply entrenched into the Google arena. If you have a g mail account and have looked through Google's pages, you know you have email storage and some other apps open to you. I got a g mail account almost 4 years ago and at that same time started using their Chrome browser. It has been a great choice for me as I can store all of my bookmarks on Chrome and they all follow me wherever I go and on which ever device I fire up. It is so nice to not have to download a separate app to play you tube videos! And while Im on the go, there is a blogger app to run on the phone should I be crazy enough to want to thumb type that much for a quick blog post!
The swype input method is cool and I am getting better with it everyday. I try to use that more so I get better at it and it is easier to do at times then pecking with the old trusty thumbs!

This phone was a wonderful choice and is right now the fastest droid out there. I would say its the biggest but Samsung has the Note II which is 6.5 inches and as a hybrid tablet phone (Phablet)? Thone? It is bigger than this phone. I am giving this phone a recommendation of buy and would not be afraid to tell my family to get the phone. I will post more updates as I use the phone more and update if facebook gets their app working again.