This Is The Droid I Was Looking For

My old phone finally bit the dust, or more accurately, I destroyed it by running it through the wash in my pants pocket. There are some things you can try, to salvage your phone if it gets mildly wet (like putting it in a bowl of rice for a few days to absorb moisture), and I did try them, but to no avail -- the wash/spin cycle is just too extreme an environment. I really didn't like that phone, and I have been looking for an excuse to replace it, but that was a stupid mistake...

 

Fast-forward one week and beaucoup bucks later, and I have a brand new Samsung Galaxy S2. Not the ultimate latest technology, but pretty close, and it seems to be running the latest Android version. Strangely enough, the biggest difference between this phone and my old one (a Samsung Transform), is that this one is not underpowered: they have very similar feature sets, except that the Galaxy has more memory and the CPU is a bit peppier, and so it can actually use those features. (That drove me nuts about my old phone: it had maps, but the GPS was unreliable because the phone had a cheap, weak GPS chip, and though it had features like a front-facing camera, you couldn't use them, for Skype or or whatever, because the phone wasn't powerful enough to run an operating system that could support them. There didn't seem to be any attempts to upgrade the system software/firmware either after a certain point, like maybe Samsung just gave up on the Transform as a bad design.) Anyway, it's up and running, and I have my old apps reinstalled, as well as a few new ones like Skype. I was pretty lucky, the micro-SD card was fine -- photos are automatically backed up to Dropbox, and my music is backed up at home, so all I would have lost was hardware, but still -- and so I'm pretty much back to where I started, except with a better, faster phone, the one my Transform should have been, if it had been built right.

 

One new feature I've come across is that the new phone uses something called MTP, when I try to connect via USB cable to my laptop. This has been a bit frustrating for me so far, since I deliberately run an operating system that is several versions behind the cutting edge (Ubuntu 10.04), and MTP does not seem to be implemented very well -- I can connect the phone, and see some of the files on it, but writing to the phone usually fails. I'm thinking of maybe trying to do a wireless workaround, like network shares, but that seems to have roadblocks of its own, this time on the phone side. There are workarounds for now...