I have been using a Moto G smart phone for the last year, and I have been very unhappy with it. It has been a total pain since I got it. Whenever it is being charged, the touch screen loses sensitivity and it is nearly impossible to type or scroll. The last few months, it has taken only a few hours for the battery to run down before it needs recharging. And the battery isn’t user replaceable. Then I think I leaned up against something and it put pressure against the phone when it was in my pocket. Now there is a hairline crack across the screen, but it is barely visible and doesn’t affect its usability.
I had a number with Cricket on it, but my other cell number is with T-mobile. So I went to a Cricket store and had them port the T-mobile number to Cricket so I now have both numbers on the same bill, with the same carrier, Cricket. I did have better redundancy, because having 2 different carriers meant if one wasn’t working, the other might be okay. But the T-mobile number had very limited data and only 100 minutes talk time, which was enough for me. Whatever, it costs me $5.00 a month more, and now I get unlimited minutes and texting on both phones. Each phone now gets 2.5 G of data before the speed drops to 3G.
Oh, I lost the ability to use the phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot, but I was told that now Cricket has free Wi-Fi hotspots nationwide. Cricket was bought by at&t and uses their network.
So now I have another Samsung, but instead of an S4, it’s (I’ve never heard of it) a GrandPrime. This has a slightly longer screen than the S4, but it’s not anywhere close to the S6. It has only 8 G of memory, which nowadays is a bare minimum, low end smartphone. But it was cheap, $55 out the door.
I’m using it right now, and I don’t like the ‘enhanced’ keyboard. This autocorrector is horrible! It insists on changing to the wrong word, no matter how many times I correct its error. There is a standard Android keyboard, but I don’t know how to change back to it. I go to the keyboard icon in the upper right corner, and it gives me two choices: this dumb keyboard, or google voice input.
And there are other changes from the version of Android I have on the S4, which is 5.1.1.
I have used several updated versions of Android, and I’ve been disappointed every time a new version is pushed out, without any choice by the user. People are creatures of habit, and once they get used to typing on a ‘customized’ keyboard, it is very detrimental to force them to use an even odder keyboard version. The least they could do is give the users a choice to go back to their earlier keyboard. This is exactly what happened with Windows 8, and people were very angry. Microsoft had to give the users the choice to go back to the classic desktop.
Another complaint I have is that on all versions of both earlier phones I had, I could press the down volume and power buttons at the same time to get a screenshot. Now this doesn’t work on the GrandPrime. It’s very disappointing. I did a search for android screenshot and found an article that said that most Android phones used the down volume and sleep/wake buttons together, like I used to use on my S4 and Moto G. But the article said Samsung phones were different, and used the home and sleep/wake buttons simultaneously, which is not used on my Samsung S4. So I tried the home and sleep/wake buttons, and it took a screenshot. Well, I’ve solved one problem. I’m just hoping the other problems have solutions.
