Samsung: day eight

Following earlier report, I think I have now got contacts and calendar more or less under control.

I think I have correctly signed into my Samsung account, created last year for the new television. Just have to remember not to sign out of it, as the book suggests that this will result in deletion of contacts and calendar, copy with Google notwithstanding.

I need more practise with the curious press and sweep motion with the finger needed to answer the telephone, not usually managing to get the phone out of my pocket in time to get the motion right. I suppose the idea is that one does not answer the thing by mistake, but that was not a problem with the old phone.

A lot more chit-chat from Samsung and others on the new phone, whereas the old phone did not bother me much at all. But I suppose, in fairness, that there is a lot more going on on the new phone. There is more to say.

The 160 page manual is more by way of a catalogue of all the features of the new phone, rather than a proper explanation of how they are organised or how to use them. The section on themes, for example, snapped in its entirety above, is brief to the point of vanishing. But I have learned that what I see is a Samsung wrap-around called One UI of the base Android operating system. UI for user interface. Which might lead one to expect our new television to look much the same as my new phone - at least in the way that is organised - but I have not got that far yet.

But they are similarly tacky around the edges, both in the sense that the design is untidy and that the execution seems to be unreliable, unpredictable. Where part of untidy is having too many widgets and not using the same widget to do the same thing in a consistent way. Much more than was the case with the old Microsoft phone.

So far I have failed to dig up a decent manual, although there are plenty of YouTube offerings. The problem there being that I find (the often amateur) video presentation far too tiresome: what I want is a proper book in which I can turn the pages at my own pace, without being subjected to a lot of unwanted  clutter and chatter.

Thinking again of Microsoft, there are plenty of manuals out there, but they are mostly pretty thin on basic architectural concepts. So I never got to the bottom of the storage arrangements for snaps on the telephone, let alone OneDrive more generally. Which I find frustrating. Nevertheless, a Samsung equivalent of reference 1 - which I still make occasional use of - for One UI would be a start.

And, most important, I remain uneasy about all the permissions that I have given along the way. Leaving me with the feeling that there is far more integration than I am comfortable with. Far too much risk.

So the new phone does the job, which is what one would expect given the number of such devices that Samsung sell, more than 50 million a year worldwide according to reference 2, but as far as I am concerned, the switch from Microsoft is very much work in progress. Probably a good thing that I did not leave making the switch back to the main stream any longer, tiresome though it may be. Who knows what it would have been like when I am ten years older...

PS 1: Waterstones Epsom had nothing, but the library could manage reference 3. Which I have found quite helpful, despite not being particularly directed at my new phone and despite the irritating title. Knowledge and skill building continues. My home page improves. Even if my mother would have been even more irritated by the subtitle 'Learning made easy': as a teacher she had suffered many waves of educational fashion intended to do just that, which she regarded as nonsense. Her line was that if you wanted to learn you had to work, you had to exercise the brain, and it was not helpful to pretend otherwise. I associate to a story about physical training to the effect that if it doesn't hurt you are not improving. Just coasting along in your comfort zone is not good enough!

PS 2: over afternoon tea, perused references 5 and 6, another unlikely story according to some scientists. Usable fusion energy without the donuts favoured by most of the other entrants in this particular race. More a dumb bell, snapped above. Another point of difference being that it is pulsed. I continue to be impressed by the way that the very rich in the US will put serious money into this sort of thing - even if that includes space travel, not to my mind a good use of scarce resources, at least not for the time being.

PS 3: after which, at a more prosaic level, I discovered that a carpenter's oil stone (fine) was a slow way to clean the washer acquired somewhere on my circuit. No doubt BH could have got something white, creamy and abrasive out of her cleaning cupboard which would have done better. But for the moment, just added to the collection as it now is.

References

Reference 1: The comprehensive, official resource for Microsoft Office 2000: Volume 5: Visual Basic for Applications and Shared Libraries Reference - Microsoft Press - 1999.

Reference 2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299144/samsung-smartphone-shipments-worldwide/.

Reference 3: Android Phones and Tablets for dummies - Dan Gookin - 2018.

Reference 4: This startup says its first fusion plant is five years away. Experts doubt it.

Reference 5: Helion, backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, has already lined up Microsoft as its first customer - James Temple, MIT Technlogy Review - 2023.

Reference 6: https://www.helionenergy.com/.

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