Same river, same day.
Apart from that, I have a new tablet. It’s funny, when I first saw the iPad Air 2 at the local Mediamarkt store, I immediately fell in love with it. It’s thin, light, beautiful, and if anything can be brought against it, then it’s that fact that it is an Apple device and I am an Android user.
I have an ancient but still working Samsung Galaxy S2 running Android 4.4.4 via Cyanogen Mod, and as a tablet so far I had a Nexus 7 (2012).
What can I say for an excuse? When you’ve seen the iPad Air 2, the Nexus 7’s speed and screen resolution feel severely lacking. It’s not a real problem, as I said, it’s a feeling and that … makes it worse.
I am in Carinthia now and while you can buy everything at least somewhere in Vienna, in Carinthia you need to order most expensive gadgets. I didn’t want to order though. I wanted it NOW 😄
Why did I even consider changing from Android to iOS, you ask? Well, in three years I have accumulated more than a hundred applications, many of them paid, but the truth is, I actively use only a handful: GMail, Firefox, Feedly, Kindle, SimpleMind, Trello, Maps.Me, an offline Wikipedia, Pocket, FlickFolio, and then a few that I use, but only rarely, like for instance Evernote. With the exception of FlickFolio, a Flickr client app, I get all of them for both systems. The lock-in simply does not exist for me.
And while I was at it, considering a change to iOS, I thought, heck, if I ever replace my smartphone, why shouldn’t I replace it with a shiny new iPhone? Not now, but … sometime … soon?
In the end Mediamarkt blew it by not having anything but the 16 GB version of the iPad Air 2 in stock, and McShark, the local “premium” Apple dealer (in Klagenfurt, 35 kilometers away) blew it by choosing not to answer the phone.
Well, nobody can say I didn’t try. In the end I just went to a local dealer in Villach and bought the 32 GB Nexus 9. It is less beautiful (as an object) than the iPad, it has less memory for almost the same price, but it has GPS (on the iPad only along with the LTE version), runs Android 5.01 “Lollipop”, the fastest and most beautiful Android version so far, with the best multitasking implementation on any tablet. The screen? Beautiful! The speed? Way cool! And everything just works as I am used to it.
My next phone? A Nexus, what else? 😄
The Song of the Day is “Cold Water” by Tom Waits. Hear it on YouTube.