They were shit and always shit, in my totally “I don’t represent my employer” opinion. They tried to get me to dogfood on it as my primary phone and I told my manager, flat out, “Fuck that.” The one and only thing they had going for them, outside of obscurity as a target, is that there was a decent sandbox on the phones. You know Firefox OS for phone is dead and buried at a crossroads, right?
The latter must be new because the last time I ran Android, it was “This app wants to do list of shit here. Do you approve” with a yes and no choice. There wasn’t working granularity and there wasn’t different userspaces where you could box up the app unless you rooted your phone and then installed a bunch of shit. In my experience, a lot of folks root their phones without understanding the full implications (and also pirate android apps) and effectively halfway “pre-pwn” their own devices.
Next to getting your logons and passwords direct, your email account is a treasure trove. It is more than enough access to do password resets (some of which only need the hyperlink in the email or the plaintext temp password) to take over various other accounts. And there is also plenty of material to aid social engineering. Your email matters.
I know someone at work who managed it with a drinking glass, some tape, and a wad of mostly-dried white glue. Thanks to his research and a few practical demonstrations, we’re not allowed to use the fingerprint scanners on work machines – they’re all disabled.
Samsung, but the carrier is who decides when the phone updates Android properly unless I equip it with Cyanogenmod, but I’m reticent to do this because I don’t want to keep track of another custom system in my life. If it weren’t for how I use my phone on the regular, I’d have opted for a dumbphone long ago. There is something to be said for products that just work as intended without asinine infrastructure issues right out of the box. While this latest kerfuffle from Apple doesn’t inspire confidence, the totality of circumstances point to an iOS being the better of two worlds.
Oh yeah, it sucks when a carrier blocks manufacturer updates on a carrier locked phone. if you ever do decide to get another android phone, consider buying an unlocked one. They aren’t tied to a carrier so you can move your plan as you desire and you get your updates straight from the device manufacturer as soon as they are released. No need for a custom system, or waiting on updates from a carrier. You pay more upfront but typically save money over the course of the plan.
Apple has high build quality, and when it works it just works. You’ll likely be happy with an apple device if your needs are fairly standard, if you have any unique requirements I suggest researching them first just in case. Best of luck and I hope you enjoy whatever you get and that it works well for you! Cheers.
Unlocked doesn’t help me get updates faster. Unless I’m willing to root the phone and install a custom ROM, I’m still dependent on my carrier OTA for the updates to my particular carrier flavor of Samsung Note phone. Samsung doesn’t post factory images, and I don’t believe that Verizon can OTA update a T-Mobile phone, but I don’t know.
My family’s Nexus phones have always “just worked” with updates delivered directly from Google as straight android, no stupid telco gimmickry. They’ve proved suitable for the very wide variation of technical knowledge within my family, although battery life sucks if you are a teenage girl running a dozen simultaneous apps at all times. I don’t have a personal cell phone, but I have a Nexus 7 tablet and it “just works”. Battery life is great because I keep it in airplane mode 99% of the time, which is not the way most people use android devices.
My employers recently equipped me with both an iPhone and a Windows phone. I gave back the iPhone after a month or so because the Windows phone delivered more of a “just works” experience - the iPhone required a bunch of iKnowledge that I found tedious. The $50 Nokia windows phone is far easier to learn from a basis of no prior experience and it does everything a phone needs to do. Straight up bang for the buck, windows phones are best; for hackability and adaptability Android is best (but you have to avoid devices running carrier-modified Android); but the iPhone is best if you are already an Apple expert because it lets you leverage your existing mental paradigms.
I’d never get an Android that wasn’t a Nexus. I liked my Nexus 5 a lot. But the 5X seemed underwhelming in the shiny dept and the 6P was too damn big, so back I went to Apple for the first time since the 4. And happy I am with it. I do like how they work, other than their crappy homescreen and notifications. They’re just nice things, like all Apple products.
After my 920 I’d have happily stuck with WP, if Microsoft had bothered to put any effort at all on the industrial design side (or even bothering to release phones, TBH), and there were even a smattering of apps available - I don’t use many, but making do for absolutely everything got old quick.
I’m probably lucky they didn’t release a Surface Phone late last year, I might have got one even though I’d have known it wasn’t a sensible purchase. I really did like the way the 920 worked.
I enjoyed the frequent updates to my Nexus 4. Did not enjoy the sub par camera. I’m loving my Samsung. Now I actually like the photos my phone takes. But each time a new vulnerability comes out I just know I’m getting deeper into a mess neither Samsung nor T-Mobile are in any particular rush to patch, if ever That BS really needs to stop. The carriers, as the last barrier to OTAs, need to be held accountable for the vulnerabilities they refuse to patch.
This is EXACTLY what I did with a stop at the One Plus One along the way (until they decided they weren’t going to play nice with Cyanogenmod in the future or give further updates there) except I had a iPhone 5 after trying and leaving Android on and off over a couple of years. Enjoyed things for a year or so and then wound up buying an iPhone 6 (a month or two before the refresh…).
Since I have an iPad Air for games, books, comics, I already have a shit ton of Apple iOS apps as well. On Tablets, Android is almost unusable since folks often just upscale their phone apps for them (badly).
Samsung does offer direct Android updates, the Samsung Kies tool will update your android device to the latest version of Android for that device.
Did you really buy a unlocked Samsung phone, or did you buy a locked phone and then pay the extra to have your carrier unlock it? If the latter your phone will still be imaged with the carrier specific BS. If the latter you might still try the kies tool and restore the phone.
Yep the google devices get all the updates first as well!
Which apps? I’ve never run across this on my android tablet, ever, and I’ve used a ton of apps.
That BS really needs to stop. The carriers, as the last barrier to OTAs, need to be held accountable for the vulnerabilities they refuse to patch.