Hmm, I have just the wrong era of car, which has bluetooth voice, but not bluetooth audio. With my cable above the bluetooth will continue to connect to the car for voice, but use the cable for audio. With this option I’d need both audio and voice to go through the bluetooth receiver.
That said, the bluetooth voice audio quality of my car isn’t that great either, so maybe this is a good idea. Thanks, will consider after I test my cable.
What’s the sweet spot these days on inexpensive but decently powerful android phones? I’ve promised a phone to my daughter for her birthday next month and since it’s her first phone I suspect it will get lost/damaged inside a year. Thus I don’t want a $400+ phone, but rather something closer to $150-$300 that I can just use with cricket or similar.
When I was looking into phones for my technophobe mum, the Moto G5 seemed to be the best reviewed budget phone.
That’s the one I’ve got and I’m pretty happy with it. Obviously the flagship expensive phones have much nicer screens, are waterproof etc. but this serves my needs well.
I finally subscribed for a mobile phone and am tethering my iPad and iPod using an old experia.
I still have occasionnaly to input stuff, mainly credentials, in the Android phone, and I am using Gboard, like I am on iOS. But I can’t help but notice all my touches are a bit off.
Paying attention to it, I noticed my fingers are pointing toward the key I intend to touch, not strictly on it (i.e, when I intend to press “R”, my finger is covering parts of the “E” key).
I can get by that just fine on iOS, who seems to magically guess what I am trying to do and I have hardly any input issue there. But on the Android device, I can’t get by and most of my inputs are slightly off. I tried looking for settings but couldn’t find any that would let me calibrate the input to work the way I am used to. Is there any way? Is it the fault of my cheap Sony phone? This whole thing makes things so difficult for me.
As a side note, I am a lefty.
I’ve had this issue whenever I switch models - from iOS to Android, or within Android. I think the only way to avoid it is pay the iPhone tax consistently. Takes a few days to acclimate.
Ah well, since I will still use my iToys mainly, I won’t ever adjust I guess.
Thank you, I know now where it is coming from, at least!
Get Swiftkey IMO. Much better than Gboard (which isn’t awful by any means, it’s just not as good as Swiftkey).
I haven’t tried Swiftkey since about 2 years ago, but back then I was really surprised by how much worse it was compared to Gboard for my particular usecase. Gboard mostly is unobtrusive. It never puts the words in for you, but it does autocorrect once you’re done with a word. Then you hit back once, and it goes back to your original word. I forgot what Swiftkey did, but for me, I was constantly fighting it. It kept changing my words to ones I didn’t want to use.
I was so relieved to back to Gboard. Gboard saved me a ton of time in comparison.
My SwiftKey recently forgot almost all of the vocabulary it had learned from me out of the blue and typing is now absolutely miserable.
Probably sold it to the Zuck.
I use gboard’s Google search functionality so much I can barely imagine being without it.
It does for me – typing “br” brings up my personal address as a suggestion, and typing “bs” brings up my work address.
My 18-month-old Nexus 5X died a sudden and complete death this morning. Glad I didn’t pay $5/mo for Fi’s “replacement” coverage, as I’d have paid $90 for the coverage and word is they are out of refurbs to send out and are instead offering ~$50 for dead 5Xs.
I am aware of a couple of reasonable choices in the ~$200-250 range:
Fi is selling the Moto X4 for $250 (actually 250 for two phones, but I only need one - guess I could stash a 2nd and use it when the other dies in 18 months…).
Or the Moto G5+ at ~$200.
Other contenders I should investigate?
We just had a 5X die also on Fi and apparently LG is going to repair it for free. I need to get on the phone and bitch until they send us a shipping label though, which they said they would but did not appear on the email.
Interesting. How old was your 5X, and did you get that ‘promise’ from Fi by calling their support?
Something like 16 months and yeah
I use Bixby on my Note 8 for controlling the phone and Google for everything else.
Split screen for me is nice when day-trading stocks if I am not at a desktop with ToS.
Getting a 5X repaired is useless. They have a fundamental design defect, and will just die. There was even a recent US class-action settlement on these + a bunch of other LG phones from the same time that had the same problem. Some units will last for 3 months, some for 18. But the repaired ones will break just the same.
So I would very strongly recommend against using a repaired 5X for anything. (But by all means get it repaired anyway just to stick it to LG; it’s disgraceful that they just continued selling these phones for like a year after it become obvious that they were all defective).
I went with the Nokia 7 plus. Like the Moto x4 it’s an Android One phone (i.e. vanilla Android, guaranteed updates, and just a couple of preinstalled pieces of manufacturer crapware). But it’s faster, has a much larger battery, and has really good build quality.
Yeah - I’d much rather have some chunk of my money back than a repaired 5x. Given the lag time to get it repaired, I would need another phone anyway. I might give the repaired 5x to my kid, while telling him to be sure to hang on to his older phone as a back-up. If the 5x gives him a year, then that’s about when we’d be thinking about a new phone for the kid anyway.
The Nokia 7 plus does not seem to be available in the US yet.