1) I'm an iOS person. I know nothing about Android.
2) I think it would be interesting to play with some apps on Android.
3) I have no particular interest in making a phone call on it. WiFi/Bluetooth is good enough.
4) Second hand from eBay is also more than good enough.
Help? I don't know what criteria I should be applying to get something I can stick some apps on (like NFC, location awareness, needs a basic camera, that kind of thing).
I'm imagining something slow and clunky but usable for about £50. Pie in the sky?
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The choice of phone will have a dramatic effect on the experience. This is the big difference between Android and iOS in my opinion in that the plethora of hardware out there very much impacts how much you get out of it as a user.
For example, I use a Galaxy S3. It is as slick, responsive, stable and generally nice to use as an iPhone.
My father-in-law has a Galaxy Ace. Every time I have this misfortune to have to interact with it, the lag, freezing and general gutlessness of the UI gives me the urge to inflict severe and irreparable damage on it.
Had the latter been my only experience of Android, I would have dismissed the whole environment as a joke.
Also, if you want NFC, you'll need to buy something relatively modern as this generally only started appearing on the "big" manufacturers models in 2012.
Last edited by: DP on Thu 5 Sep 13 at 12:04
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>> My father-in-law has a Galaxy Ace. Every time I have this misfortune to have to
>> interact with it, the lag, freezing and general gutlessness of the UI gives me the
>> urge to inflict severe and irreparable damage on it.
>>
>> Had the latter been my only experience of Android, I would have dismissed the whole
>> environment as a joke.
>>
As I said in another thread I sidewaysgraded from a HTC Wildfire S to a Samsung Galaxy Ace, the Wildfire kept running out of RAM and Gmail stopped working when it did. The Ace is indeed a pile of barely usable crap. The basic HTC is a much much better device than the basic Samsung. The Samsung looks prettier though ;-)
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What do you intend using NFC for? Because you'll need something for it to 'read'/interact with. I've had NFC on two phones now and not used it apart from playing with it when I still had both phones. Actually I also tried reading the biometric data from my passport with it with an app. Not a lot of use because you needed to enter passport info to unlock the biometric data. In theory you can read RFID tags too but I had no success with that for some reason.
As said above, only top end phones from say 2012 would have had NFC. If you really need it on a play phone then you're looking at something like an HTC One X, Samsung Galaxy S3, etc.
Some new Android phones on Pay-as-you-go (without NFC) might be worth checking out like:
www.carphonewarehouse.com/mobiles/mobile-phones/HUAWEI_Y300?colourCode=WHITE
Maybe install a new launcher.... or even see if there's a version of Cyanogenmod for any phone you get so it can run Android 4.2 or even 4.3.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Thu 5 Sep 13 at 12:14
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>> 3) I have no particular interest in making a phone call on it. WiFi/Bluetooth is good enough.
My son got a basic 60 quid 7" Android tablet last xmas. Does everything my Galaxy S3 does, albeit slowly.
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NFC was for playing with some RFID tags. Some kind of "stick a tag on various items, get in the car, phone that is sitting in there reads tags, sees wallet but no keys and tells me so" type of shenanigans. Just to see if it works rather than actually Being Useful.
Alternatively I could do that with my Pi I suppose and abandon the phone NFC bit. Sounds like it would open up my choices if I did that.
Words like "Cyanogenmod", "4.2 or even 4.3", "basic HTC" and "£60 tablet" are what I wanted as a lead in.
Thanks.
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>> 2) I think it would be interesting to play with some apps on Android.
It wouldn't, really.
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I use Samsung Galaxy Ace. Its hardware spec is not the best but it works fine as a sub £100 Android phone.
android phone performance depends a lot on "maintenance". You need to install appropriate apps and keep an eye on internal storage space.
It is similar to old cars. To get best performance out of them, you need to tune them often :-)
Last edited by: movilogo on Thu 5 Sep 13 at 20:50
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Android phone or tablet performance is fine as long as you have the hardware to run it properly including sufficient memory and storage :-)
Android uses a Java virtual machine (Dalvik) so there are obviously potential inefficiencies there for starters. The advantage Apple has with iOS on the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch is they control both hardware and software.
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Hypothetical Android phone help - DP
