Phone upgrade or I Hate Change

[indigo_rose99]

I find computer and phone upgrades very traumatic.I spend a LOT of time on the computer and phone. I have to think that what I want in a computer and phone is so different from what the market is bringing out... It must be because I do not spend my phone and computer time the way other people do. 

The change from Palm Treo to Droid 2 several years ago was very very painful. It took me almost a month of full time work to transfer the critical information. In many ways I hated the Droid 2 for the ways it was utterly unlike the Palm.

Reasons I hated the droid and missed the Palm:

• Copy/paste. Copy and paste on the palm was easy and simple from any application. I could copy notes to email to addressbook... Simple as breathing. Copying ANYTHING on the droid was painful at best, and often utterly impossible. I found that my habit of copying critical email information to my calendar was impossible on the phone. I couldn't copy recipes from email or web pages to a notes page... And my packing list? My habit was to checkmark the packed items and copy/paste unpacked items to the top. Copy/paste on the palm. On the droid? Painful to the point that sorting with unpacked items at the top became impossible and thus my packing the past two years has forgotten some critical items.
• Integration of my key apps. Calendar/todo/notes simply not integrated on the droid. And part of that could be the difficulty copying and pasting between them.
• I miss the Palm stylus. My finger is huge compared to the droid screen, and often I simply cannot select or point to the tiny item I am trying to click on.
• Confidentiality. I hate the fact that the only way i could go to Droid was to put my calendar on the cloud. I don't trust anyone and would STRONGLY prefer that my personal and professional information not be out there. In the transition to droid, I went to a tremendous amount of trouble to ensure that my notes and addressbook are NOT on the cloud.

Things I really liked about the droid:

• Lots of memory.
• I adore the Sleep app. Nothing quite so geeky as tracking my sleep and showing other statisticians.
• When I finally found a book reader that meets my expectations (Moon+Reader, scrolls and has TTS), I ADORE it. I actually like it better than the similar ones on the Palm. They did not have TTS.
• The hard keyboard was often a necessity when trying to insert text. The arrow keys were my favorite. Trying to compensate for the lack of stylus. Hard keyboard was also handy for cases where the dictionary on the droid insisted that I actually wanted an entirely different set of words...
• I felt that the droid did a much better job (than Palm) of integrating maps/phone/search/calender together. Often from one screen it was possible to click on a address and have it pop up the option to map/navigate to that address. That was nice.

And now we are in the present. T and I get phone and laptops together (saves jealousy, and means all our accessories work everywhere). T's droid keyboard has been breaking down. He has been shopping for a new phone for several months. 

What I wanted:

• hard keyboard
• replacable battery
• long battery life
• better copy/paste
• minimum pain transitioning my data
• confidentiality. No data to the cloud.
• no change on my earpieces or power cables

What I do not care about:

• size of phone
• pretty screen
• camera anything
• memory
• speed
• twitter anything
• facebook anything
• 4G
• touch interface

T has been prepping me for this phone change for about three months. The challenge has been waiting for a phone that meets my minimum requirements. No easy task. "Because my wife is so flexible and open-minded," he says.

On Thursday we transferred from Droid 2s to Samsung Galaxy Note 2s. Yes, I have traded the hard keyboard for a stylus. So far the copy/paste is no worse and perhaps a bit better (partly a newer version of android, partly the stylus). The major part of the transition took less than 5 hours. 

I am not horrified or resentful so far... I still miss the Palm, but I do not miss the Droid 2 so far.  

Comments

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Yes, I will confirm that what you want in a computer is very different from what the market is bringing out. Modern mini computers are all about other people's data: maps, the internet, stuff like that. But what you want in a computer is to save and manipulate your own data.

I had the same problem: my first was a Revo, also no longer in existence. I had loads of databases (of my own data), things like grocery prices at multiple stores, things I was in the market for, list of things I already had in collections I was building, lists of measurements for things like my air filter size.

Apparently most Americans do not care about compiling their own data much. Just contact information? And so that's why no one cares about making copy/paste work. Stinks.

[indigo-rose99.livejournal.com]

Yes! You are totally right! I want to save/manipulate MY data, which is clearly more important and of more value than other people's data! I have not looked at it that way. No wonder other people have started simply googling everything instead of valuing the internal search.

One of the things I didn't mention about the droid2 is that the internal search sucks. On the Palm I could do a search for keywords and find what hotel I stayed at in Nashville 5 years ago and why I liked them. But Droid puts all calendar entries beyond a month on the cloud. Such a search is painful at best, and impossible at worst. If I do the search on the droid, it tries to download years of data local to the droid. At first I thought this was a great idea, then discovered that it made the droid so slow as to utterly nonfunctional. Same search on the computer google calendar? It will only show entries for the past month, but it will note that there were actually 416 hits. But I cannot scroll through all of them. 20 minutes of fiddling, I can go back in time and see SOME of them. Clearly it would have been faster to simply google hotels in Nashville. *grind teeth*

On the same note, I have been unimpressed with android apps set up to record lists. Why should they create an app for my data if no one (but me) will use it?!

I do NOT understand what other people do with their phones. Weird.