Time for a bit of a rant, geek-style.

For about 15 months I’ve used a Samsung Galaxy Note as mobile phone of choice. And truth be told, I’ve hated all bar the first 10 minutes of it. The lack of RAM has made me reconsider what apps I use, favouring Seesmic for combined Facebook+Twitter over separate apps; it still makes it horrendously slow for running anything interactive – as an example, by the time I’d got the thing unlocked and fired-up HDR Camera+, a rainbow had entirely gone! Spontaneity, we do not have it.

What they don’t tell you is that the leverage available when coupling these large screens with tiny thin USB connectors is a recipe for disaster. I’ve bent the pins on more cables than I care to think, trying to wiggle the thing for optimum solid connectivity; just before Christmas last year it finally died and the internal USB connector broke, requiring a repair under warranty – the first time I’ve ever had to send back a phone to be fixed.

Anyway, yesterday evening it threw a hissy-fit and spontaneously discharged the battery all the way down to empty, despite being plugged in (and, given that the wiggly-connector issues seemed to be returning, I made doubly sure that the power icon said charging). I recharged the battery overnight with the phone turned off, and yet this morning it still refused to boot up. It did something like this a while ago, and leaving it overnight was sufficient to reset itself; today, it’s had all day and still isn’t powering on any more.

So this morning I dug out my old HTC Hero, the first Android phone I ever used, and flashed it with CyanogenMod and updated the radio package. After a bit lot of faffing around, hunting and installing SSL root CA certificates to allow it to talk to Google and rebooting, I’m now powered by a custom ROM and sufficiently uptodate that Google Talk has been replaced by Hangouts. Yay, geek-cred!

The Samsung problem might be as simple as a dead battery; however, after the Christmas fiasco I really can’t be bothered trying to fix it any more and will look forward to getting something better later in the year.

Unfortunately it means a few changes on this blog; the camera is down from 8 megapixels to 5MPel and I won’t be shooting with HDR Camera+ or processing images on the phone with Aviary any more. Still, it does work for capturing the odd image and I can achieve some suitably strange processing effects on the notebook with darktable if I want.

Meanwhile I’m back getting my communication and maps on the go again. And the Hero is living up to its name.