Another new toy

It must be the time of year where I get a bit gadget happy, because I didn't stop at the Blu Ray player I wrote about in my last post; I also have a shiny new phone. But this isn't a product review – there's really no point, since what I've got isn't exactly new on the market; it's a Samsung Galaxy SII, which came out early last year.

Some context will probably help explain why I didn't go for, say, the more recent Samsung model (the Galaxy SIII): to be perfectly honest, I'm not that much of a smart phone user – I really only got the predecessor of this one (an LG Optimus One) because the one before it, a distinctly non-smart Nokia, died on me. And when I looked at replacements, there wasn't a huge difference in price between a smart phones and the regular kind – so, I thought I might as well get a smart phone.

Not at I utilised too many of its 'smart' aspects; all I really used it for was Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps and Angry Birds with the vast majority of gadgets, widgets, apps and doodads¹ going unused.

Which means that in many ways I didn't really need an even newer, fancier phone; not, at least in terms of what the advances in technology a new phone would have – weight, screen size, processor speed, memory and so forth. But, as little as I used my LG, it still had a few annoying tendencies: on those rare occasions I did need to talk on it, reception was always poor and the sound glitchy. The sensor for the SD card was also buggy, and it would frequently think I'd taken it out when I hadn't. You couldn't make calls by entering the number directly; you could only call from the contact list – if you wanted to call a number that wasn't on the list you'd have to enter it, save it and then call.

So, with the combination of all of that and my contract being nearly up, I thought I might as well get a new one; something I probably wouldn't have bothered to do if I was entirely happy with it. Because I don't actually use my phone all that much – well, as a phone at least; I do use it every day as an alarm clock – I didn't see much point in getting anything other than something on one of the cheaper plans, which left me with a choice of either the Samsung or one of the HTCs, but when I saw that the Samsung had a much bigger memory (16GB) than the HTC, my decision was made.

And I've got to say I'm pretty happy; it's huge (in comparison) – what I didn't bother to look at when checking the specs was the size of the damn thing, since it came as a shock how big it is. It's also much faster, much lighter and much thinner. Most significant, though, is the resolution; the picture quality is amazing – things look better/clearer on my phone than they do on the netbook I'm writing this on.

Thus far I've only had one issue with it – apart from the rather annoying process of transferring data from the old phone to the new one; I'd always thought Androids were designed to make that sort of thing easy, but it was more than a little frustrating given that I had to download software upgrades to my old phone and an interface for my pc – and that's that it sometimes turns itself off for no reason that I can determine. But while that's a little strange, it's not a deal-breaker.

So, I'm pretty happy with my choice and how it's worked out. Oh, and I've actually bothered to set up a wallpaper (something I didn't do before); here's what the screen looks like now - reflecting my love of the Dumb Ways to Die video:

¹This may be the first time I've ever used that word. I'm still not sure about it.