Participant Observations - 7/10/17 - New Phone!!

So this week my new phone finally arrived. It's a Nokia 6 with 32GB of storage, with an additional 64GB of storage added with a micro SD card.

I've given myself 6 weeks to become fully proficient in using it - the architecture is Android, where as I've been using iPhones since 2010.

UPDATE 19/10/17

There are considerable differences, but the most obvious benefit is the overall improved performance and usability of the phone. The screen is almost twice the size as the iPhone 6, and this makes watching sport on the phone obviously far more enjoyable.

The apps are good, but I'm still floundering around with some of the settings for apps and the phone in general. I clearly have an Apple bias, but the functionality is not quite as clear as the iPhone, but again the unit has forced me - challenged in some respects - to engage and learn how the new phone works. There are some apps on iPhone that aren't on Android, but this is not a real disappointment with many comparable apps on the Google Play Store.

For example, I'm becoming aware that this new phone will not act like a storage device for songs like the iPhone did - streaming music will become much more common. This has it's drawback - everytime I take a photo, the phone wants to save it to the Cloud, where as the iPhone would only save it locally and then save it to the cloud if you requested it to. To that end, I have found the file storage a little bit frustrating with the new phone. With the iPone, every photo was saved to the camera, and easy to find there - there were no second, or third directories. With the new phone, there is a multiude of places the files can bse saved - the camera, downloads, the cloud, separate photos folders, and so on. This requires more time to be spent on file maintenance than I would like.

I'm still woking out how to personalise the phone, in terms of displays and backgrounds, but genreally i like the touch and feel of the unit, and of course I bought a case and screen cover for it almost immediately.

I am also basically consigned to the fact that Google will now have complete access to, and surveillance of, every part of my life that is connected to my phone in any way. I stopped short of using my fingerprint as a sign-in device however!! Haha. The screen unlock feature of pattern recognition is different - I'm not sure if I love it - your finger leaves a trace on the screen when you unlock it that a potential thief could see and replicate to unlock the phone - a PIN number does not have the same design flaw.

But on the whole, the new phone has made me somewhat critical of the iPhone - even though there isn't a great difference between the two, I am no longer a staunch advocate for Apple, and am happy to entertain alternatives.

Ok, so I will update this post in a few more weeks...