More on Phones.

For some reason I've managed to go from having a phone that wasn't my own to owning two phones in the space of a week.  I found lying around on the grass, an iphone 4 and while its hardly cutting edge, talking it over with the guys at work (who showed us how to do stuff) it seems that its still pretty good and also gives me a crucial snapshot into the Apple way of doing things.

Stuff I like so far is that whoever owned it before had the decency to get it unlocked to any network and this is how it should be for all phones, not dependent on one carrier.  Also its pretty intuitive on how to do stuff, with a big physical button to go exit programs and that, and after a bit of a struggle got myself an "app store"  login.  Finally the little tray that your sim card sits in and is accessible with a pin, is part of the overall good design work Apple stuff generally has.

Then the downsides kick in, you have to partner up a credit / debit card if you want to download anything.  I haven't found a way for it just to accept iTunes vouchers only and decline the rest or just install whatever the apple equivalent of APKs are, at least Google let you install stuff from other sources which is pretty cool.  If they let you divest all payment to iTunes cards only it would to be honest, cut out some of the horror stories of paying thousands for items in F2P bollocks like Candy Crush.

Even worse, some stuff are of course verboten on Apples draconian walled garden.  Doing a search for emulation stuff brought up a few links to a few other app stores like Cydia and another one which seems to be just for Emulation stuff.  Largely its those dodgy Movie HD type streaming stuff, anything torrent related and emulation, especially if it allows you to supply your own roms.

Finally you don't get any SD card support so you can't expand storage from what your phone has.  There are ways around this of course such as using Dropbox or any other online file locker to keep hold of content.  Plus as its synced to your PC, it cuts out Apple's horrific iTunes software (less so on mac).  Also battery life is of course appalling with it literally ticking down every minute you're on line so certain games that rely on a server connection are pretty much out.