Problems with android

The biggest but not the best,

 

Android has become a pioneer in mobile operating system. It is the most widely used mobile operating system today. But that doesn't mean that it is the best, different people have different taste and preferences. Undoubtedly android is the most flexible and open mobile operating system in the world but this openness leads to some critical drawbacks with the os. As we know that every coin has two sides, it applies here also. Following are the biggest problems with android:

• Due to the openness of the os android os is the most prone to security issues like malwares, spyware etc.
• Most of the devices never gets the latest updates whereas ios devices gets regular updates. This is due to the number of devices on which android is running.
• Advertisements, the most annoying problem with android. Although we cannot blame google entirely for this problem as they earn money from those ads. But the situation gets worse when you are doing a task and suddenly a popup window appears out of nowhere on your screen. Windows mobile and ios are way too ahead on this thing.
• Play store is full of impure apps. The google play store is the fastest growing digital store but some apps are full of ads and doesn't serves any purpose. For instance I saw a lockscreen app in which there are ads on the lock also, come-on who the hell gonna use a lock screen with ads. Some apps on play store are made by rookies which are full of bugs on any device.
• Apps are less refined, this is not a big factor when you are used to but it really is a big thing when it comes to head to head comparison. Just like the Facebook app on android, although it's very ok on android but when you use the ios version of that app then you will definitely feel the real difference of premium quality and more features. Also the developers always release their apps on ios first not on android.
• Tablet support on android is good and still improving but it's a comparison when it comes to a head to head with the ipad , no matter how long and strong the spec sheet of your android tablet is. In the end you'll definitely feel more tablet support on ios rather than android., working in landscape mode creates desktop like experience on some apps on ipad which is very superior than android.
• Lack of proper digital store on android, although there are some but comparatively with ios it's nothing. Google has its own music and video store but the supreme itunes store is way ahead. And syncing between ios and itunes is just one click.
• For some users android is very complex, it's due to the toolbox of settings whereas in ios it's way too simple.

Things to remember before buying an android phone.

Don't make mistake which others make on buying smartphones,

Although the android phones comes with different specifications, including top end snapdragon chips to low end Broadcom chips. But the combination between the hardware and the software is a different aspect. Take a small manufacturer like lava for instance they provide high end specifications with more ram and high processor clock speeds under a very small price but the entire story gets changed when it comes to their software development program, it’s a complete mess. The small manufacturer like lava never provides any software updates and their user interface is full of lags and glitches. They provide lot of bloat ware apps to earn money from the sponsor developers, that’s the reason why you see rubbish games and apps on their handset all the time. The story doesn't end here the battery optimization with the os with worse and the optimization with the apps is also very partial. Sometimes famous apps doesn't work on these devices with high specifications even they match the minimum specifications sheet. So the point is that why you should spend your hard earned money on cheap phones with higher specifications. There are plenty of tire 1 manufacturers which provides decent specifications on a lower price point (Motorola, The android devices, Asus, etc). Although at the first sight on the specifications sheet it may not be soothing to you but when you really get your hands on the actual device you’ll see the actual difference. Whenever you are buying an android device try to avoid the manufacturer who provides their custom skins and bloat ware as they can cause additional battery drain and higher Ram consumption. When android was introduced google always wanted to make it clean and simple experience to the user but some manufacturer took it the next level and made their own user interface which made the phones slow, there is a common misconception that android phones are laggy. The answer is the adulteration between android. Take a Motorola G for instance and take a phone with higher specifications and custom UI now run the apps one by one on both the devices simultaneously It is guaranteed that Motorola G will trump the other phone with a vast difference that’s the power of Google itself. Also the answer to the question “why android phones are laggy” is that what android phones are can’t do. Compete the android eco system with the windows Eco system for instance , you can get too many alternatives of a single app in android but in windows I doubt that you’ll get even what you’re searching for.

Things to check before purchasing an android device:

1.       Always check the android version on the device, it is not a good choice to get a device with an older version of the OS.

2.       Check that if the company assures future updates for that particular device.

3.       Always remember to check the available RAM on the device before installing any application. No how much Ram the device has always remember to check the free Ram available on the device. If the device has 1 gigabyte of ram then there should be at least 400 megabytes ram available on the device before installing any application on, similarly if the device has 2 gigabytes of Ram then at least 1.2 gigabytes should be free on it.

4.       If you are checking the camera performance of the device then do remember to check the quality on a low lighted place first. And please don’t just go with the mega pixel counts. Check the size of the camera sensor on the camera panel.

5.       Do remember to check the battery capacity before buying a phone, And don’t go for too extraordinary digits like 5000mah on a 5inch screen device as it takes much longer time to charge such a huge battery. If want to carry extra battery life then buy a power bank they are cheap and very useful. Also the phones with huge battery weighs heavier than the usual phones. Buy a phone with average digits like 2100mah to 3000mah (That’s for a 5inch device). You can also look for a device with quick charge technology.

6.       Never buy outdated devices which are 2 year old. They may cost lower but they are not equipped with the latest technologies. As with time to time technology also gets improved, yesterday which was the latest today it’s the usual thing.

7.       Try to buy a phone with removable battery. As removable back gives you the option to swap the battery out and replace it with another one. Although this may not be useful fact for all but do consider it.

8.       Do some research about that device you want to buy. Ask someone who’s having the device to give a user review, you can also check websites like E-commerce websites to check the user reviews don’t just rely on big websites (they might be sponsored by the manufacturer to promote it).

9.       Try to buy a phone without any custom skin or bloat ware, get stuck with mother google if you want a lag free experience on the smartphone.

10.   Slimmer phones have become a gimmick on the global market today. But I’m telling you honestly that slim phone may look very attractive but there are certain drawback with them. First the slimness of the device may cost you in the reduction of the size of the battery, secondly the slimness may become uncomfortable on the hands as mostly all the slim phones comes with angular design which may become a point of uncomfortableness on your palm. Try to buy a phone with a slimness around 7 to 8mm or try to buy a phone with rounded corners and rounded back.     

Telephone

The modern mean of communication,

Alexandar Graham Bell

A rotary phone

We live in an invisible jungle of communication. Even right now ten million people could be talking to each other at any one time, their voices are travelling over you/ under you and even sometimes right through the middle of you and all that because of the telephone. It is astonishing to think that I really wanted to and if had the right numbers with in a moment I could be talking by telephone to pretty well anyone on just about any part of the planet. Today we take this communication on demand very much for granted. For most people the thought of being without one telephone is worse than the thought of being without trousers. The high-tech dream of getting messages fly through the air has not come easily. Earlier pigeons have been carrying messages for hundreds of years as latest the First World War winged messengers were routinely to carry sensitive notes across enemy lines. Brave military pigeons were even decorated I think why? They are fantastically unreliable. What was needed was system where you didn’t actually have to carry anything Beckons, smoke signals even drumming was tried, anything to stop the skies becoming choked with all those unreliable birds. You see most early forms of communications used something you could see something which is visible like fire but by the end of the eighteenth century people began to realize that things would be better if they use something invisible ELECTRICITY. People have known about electricity for hundreds of years but it wasn’t until the eighteenth century when they began to realize its potential for communication. Electricity can go around corners, it can cover vast distances and it’s very fast it goes about nearly the speed of light. Samuel Morse was the first person who really worked on it. Morse was a man with a tragic interest in speeding up communications. Like most great inventions Morse’s breakthrough was staggeringly simple why not? He thought use bursts of electricity to signify the letters of the alphabet. The dots and dashes which makes up the Morse code were born. He finally came up with the electronic telegraph. Samuel Morse’s telegraph signaled the start of the signaled the start of the race for the telephone electronic communication have begun the pigeon had been replaced with an electronic courier which almost travel at speed of light the nineteenth century had changed forever. The telegraph really did changed the world it meant that the newspapers could run next day report from around the globe it was revolutionary information super highway, It was the nineteenth century cool thing. People even met and got married on It the daily telegraph was so cool to reflect its radical, new, confident technological approach. But soon the trouble came it was the telegraph itself. The copper used in it could only carry one message at a time and there were just too many wires the telegraph has been a victim of its own success something needed to be done. Alexander Graham bell was the one who came out with the next big thing. Once he thinking that surely you can send more than a simple dot and dash on the copper wire. He was convinced that the answer to the telegraph problem lay in sound not speaking not the telephone just sound is the way of making Morse code more efficient. His idea meant turning sound vibrations into electrical signals but he couldn’t. The trouble was that Bell was in a race thousands of miles away in Ohio Man called Elisha gray and he has worked out how you can transmit sound through a piece of copper wire whereas Bell still had no idea about electrifying speech. Bell may have hit on the idea for a telephone but over at Ohio Elisha grey was about to work out how to actually build one. And so in January 1874 Elisha gray had the basis what we now know as the telephone. Grey began for search for a microphone for his project and soon he captured a great idea of capturing speech vibrations in a liquid it was a brilliant and crucial breakthrough his drawing about the idea showed that a telephone system would work. After drafting the entire idea he sent to the US patent office. Grey had done what he had done routinely but this time the patent application changed his life forever. Back in Boston then Bell was still unable to get his telephone system to work but he still sent his faulty idea as proposal kind of “Wouldn’t it be brilliant if we had telephone?” So on Valentine’s Day 1876 couriers from both men (Elisha and Graham bell) arrived at the patent office. It was Bell’s men who arrived at first to present Bell’s idea and presented it to an examiner just two hours later Gray courier carrying the crucial diagram presented the bundle of patent applications to the same man. The race for the invention that would change the world came down to a photo finish. Yes that may be a coincidence two men, from different sides of the continent appearing at the same day, same office and in the front of same examiner with the same idea. But what happened next doesn’t appear to be a coincidence so what happened how did Gray’s idea end up with bell patent application. Both application arrived in hands of one man at same day.  That man later admitted in life that it was he who sold Elisha Gray’s idea to Bell’s lawyers so instead of Gray it was who was granted the lucrative patent for the telephone. At that time no one realized what had happened but Bell leapt into the lead armed with his new ideas the breakthroughs just kept on coming. When Elisha heard of Bell’s success he accepted defeat gracefully but as he learnt about the design the truth became horribly clear Grey had invented the telephone but Bell had taken it right under his nose. So after that we know that Bell is the sole inventor of the telephone but he’s wasn’t. In recent years the story of who invented the phone has taken another unexpected turn it was Antonio Meucci was invented it in Cuba even twenty years before Bell even set foot in America. More than a hundred years later on 12 June 2002 after some heavy pressure from the Italians the US congress passed a new resolution declaring Meucci not Bell as the inventor of the telephone. So after 40 years of legacy things were about to change again now its global telephony using satellite. It sounded like piffle but in 1962 British two technician build a dish which could receive telephone calls from America via space with no wires. Over a decade hundreds of communication satellites has been sent up to outer space and millions upon millions miles of cable has been buried in the earth below. With every part linking together operating and syncing the large, vast web of communication has now become the biggest machine in the world. Instant global communication is in full swing. Now days pop groups makes more money from ringtones than the albums, Kids spend more on mobile than chocolate, people today feel lonely without their phones and I suppose if I’m honest that it is incredible that someone today can reach me at the same number where ever I am in the world.

The computer

Computer the fundamental unit of life,

A portion of Babbage's Difference engine.

The ancient Greek-designed Antikythera mechanism, dating between 150 to 100 BC, is the world's oldest analog computer.

Intertec Superbrain

Modern airplanes wouldn’t be able to fly without it, no it’s not a jet engine. It’s given us mobiles phones, compact discs and space travel. Without it money would effectively ceased to exist, Western society would collapse. So a big thumbs up for the revolutionary device the computer. Just about every area of our lives today is been touched by the silicon hand of the microprocessor. Computers keep us warm, they cook up food, they play our music, and even they protect us from harm in so many ways that a better faster us. On the other hand though the computers are bad tempered, petulant, they live in a permanent state. To make matters worse the computers have become so much more than glorifying typewriters. They are robots, cars, designers and pilots apparently computers now have intelligence they have become so bright that they can even chop vegetables. Computers then have certainly changed the world. Today computers are quite simply everywhere they are on your desk, on your lap, in your palm, they makes your washing machine work , they can play a cd, they are on your wrist watches, in short just about anything which uses electricity today will have a microprocessor a computer. But do remember in 1999 NASA’s mars climate orbiter was programmed by using both metric and imperial units. So after ten long months getting to mars the system got confused by inches here and centimeters there, the hundred and twenty million dollars space program got clouded somewhere else so that you see computer maybe great at doing Maths quickly they even appear to be clever but they are not you know they are daft as brushes and the reason why they are so stupid is that they blindly carry out human mistakes perfectly and uncritically. This stupidity should scare us to death but it doesn’t what scare us is something else, For years we have told that one day we’ll build a computerized emotionless cyborg that absolutely will not stop but is this really the future? Can we ever expect to be walking with robots in the towns? Yes Honda has it’s ASIMO but it’s not really that functional. For anything approaching that kind of world domination that governor Schwarzenegger deals in computers that robots would require at least a modicum of intelligence and this is what scares us. Very credible scientists out there are pushing AI as the next big thing. Even it wouldn’t be wrong to predict that one day computers will have minds of their own. There’s no doubt that the computer has changed our world out of all recognitions in an incredibly short period of time and it seems major developments still to come pretty soon they say the computers will become truly benevolent pandering to your dreams and fantasy. Or let’s say what they say because these are people who promised that people will be wearing a bakery foil suit by the year two thousand and will live on the diet of pills they said that the moon will be colonized within 2020. So if you forgive me if I remain a little bit skeptical about the claims being made for the future of the computer. Apart from something else I’m sure that I don't want voice recognition everywhere or a laptop saying hello Shayan in an American accent every morning and I definitely don’t want anything computer inserting in me. 

Smartphones

 

The 21st century miracle.

Google's android.

Apple's ios

In the early 2000s the mobile phones were only known for simple calling and texting, and yeah that’s what they were seriously meant for. But today the possibilities are getting endless it’s not just a bar meant for calling and texting it’s getting far more complex with the legendary microprocessors and operating systems. With the launch of mighty iphone on 2007 the mobile market got changed rapidly. It brought the downfall of companies like Nokia and Blackberry which dominated the global market for a decade and created new possibilities for small manufactures to stand up with new concepts. In the beginning of the smartphone era the Apple iphone dominated the entire market till 2010, Apple was the first to make a digital app store for mobiles and they were the first to create a successful touchscreen eco system for the users. But after 2010 there was bang in smartphone market although Android was there since 2008 with its cupcake and doughnut but the biggest game changer was the Samsung galaxy series, Samsung launched a big series of smartphone lineup which suited everybody’s pocket. Now anyone can get a smartphone with paying a fraction of iphone’s price. The number of smartphone users grew very rapidly that no one ever imagined. With time new and more powerful devices came into existence first into dual core processing into quad core and then the octacore, the size of the RAM also got increased since then. But companies like Nokia and Blackberry lost their market share very rapidly because there were still stuck with Symbian and proprietary Os. During Q3 of 2012 all app developers realized that android has also got the same potential like ios do. Today every app developer releases his apps first on the major platforms ios and android. Google has benefited a lot from the sales of android devices as it sells ads to us. Today the android platform has got so affordable that you can buy a new functional android device from 2500 indian rupees (roughly 41USD). So those who can’t get a flagship device also have the access to android. Although there are more players on the smartphone market rather than android; Ios (the most dominant), Windows phone, Firefox os, Ubuntu, Blackberry Os, Bada but android is the most widely used mobile operating system (ios giving the toughest competition to android), this is just because of the flexibility of android. The problem with the other manufactures is that they have their own proprietary OS ( like Blackberry OS, Symbian, Firefox os, ios) but in android things are little different you can get an android device from a cheap manufacturer like Lava to a high end world class manufacturer like Vertu that is the difference with android. It is the strongest point of android and the weakest also as different manufactures provides different kind of adulterations like Custom skins ( Samsung’s Touchwiz, Sony’s Timescape, HTC’s sense) and lot of bloat ware apps. Although Apple’s Ios , I would say still is one of the most securest and reliable Os of the smartphone market but things are changing. Who thought that android will such a big player in the market? With the introduction of smartphones now people can do the things which were only possible in Pc , just like working with office documents, playing pc games of 2000s , video editing, image editing, etc etc. The possibilities are endless with the rising age of technology.