Springingtiger's Blog

Decisions, decisions! I am due a phone upgrade in December and now some planning is necessary. I had thought of trying for a Galaxy Note 2, however as I have been promised the new Nexus 7 for my birthday, I’m inclined to go with the phone and mini tablet rather than a phablet. I strongly suspect I will get a Samsung Galaxy 4 , sadly the Galaxy 4 Zoom is not on offer. I have thoroughly enjoyed the S2, both my wife and daughters have S3s and they are very good, so I think I’ll stick with Samsung.

Over the next couple of months I shall be reviewing the apps I have on my S2 to see which I will want to continue using and which will go. It may well be that some of the photography apps I use I won’t need on the S4. I am certain I will continue to use both Snapseed and, for more intensive processing, Photo Editor.  Until I have played with the camera I won’t know what else I need but there are some, like Fastburst  Camera which I would pay for if I had two years of a contract ahead of me.

The one app above all I find essential is Google Drive and I use it every day. I draft my blog on Drive before copying and pasting it into WordPress, another app without which I cannot be. I can use Drive from any PC whether, Windows or Linux, I use both. I have the paid for version of CamScanner, it is that good! and it allows my to save my scanned documents, as PDFs straight to Drive. At present I use Polaris Office, but I will review that. I have Evernote and I love it’s functionality, however for quick notes I find myself, increasingly, using Keep, not as many functions but very convenient.

I use my iPod for music, however I do like to watch films on my phone so MX Player is a must, it seems to play anything I ask it, although that’s no stretch as I use Freemake to convert DVDs to S2 format. There are so many apps I’ll have to keep, including IMDB, Cineworld, iPlayer and You Tube, that I suppose my best bet is to start dumping the ones I have hardly used. Realistically I do not need five internet browsers, so I’ll have to decide which ones to keep, but I like trying browsers they are addictive, more so even than Linux distros.

This promises to be an interesting time, however it may prove to be pointless as I’m sure to find new apps to try as quickly as I get rid of the old ones. People complain that Google Play has fewer apps than Apple’s App Store, I say, “Thank God, that’s enough already!” Roll on December!