MI5

If you're hoping for the Great Airport Mystery to be up, then I'm still going through it.  Proof reading is sort of done, I'm reading through to catch any formatting hazards and typos that may have skipped through the spell check. Next week I swear it'll be done and you'll have a revised PDF to download.

Anyway today's topic, we've been lucky and found a phone and its one obscure motherfucker.  A Xiaomi Mi5 and not MI5, its Chinese, not part of the secret service.

Thought it was one of those demonstration models to begin with and not a real phone but when I switched it on and had a butchers its definitely the real deal.

A decent camera, and the UI on this isn't too awful, its a step down from the Moto G I have as a regular phone and about on a par with an iPhone which I use for work (also found), which it resembles in more ways than one.

I'm not kidding, its as if China decided to make an Android version of the iPhone with a little less of Apples notorious control freakery.  Below is a list of things its cribbed from the fruit company.

Sim slot that opens with a pin: check.

An unexpandable internal storage: check. (64GB so god knows how much Google takes up).

A stupid proprietary software that you have to use to add anything to it. Check and its a lot less cunty than iTunes which should be cast into the Fires of hell.

Edit. A stupid proprietary connector to connect everything with.  Apple Lightning, USB type C.

A User Interface that is closer to Apple than Android. . . erm. . .  pass.

There are some upsides to this though, The phone itself has two sim slots which is crazy, and it feels real nice which is a bonus. The only other thing is that I manage to knack it within a day.

I thought you could just hard reset it and set up with a new user, the trouble with that is that it still requires the old google account, and all its bastard data, to do anything with.  I'm banking on flashing the firmware will fix that otherwise I'm stuck in a boot loop of my own making. And I still don't know if the IMEI number is blocked.

FYI it takes a nano sim or two nano sims if you have different networks.

I don't know if that is part of the android experience or not, I didn't do this to my found Apple as the original guy didn't do much with it and could erase him from existence with ease without going through a hard reset.  Could have left it as it was, but would have had to rely on someone else's google account to download stuff and have no email or phone number of my own.

I guess its just the Gmail account that is the stumbling block here so maybe lineage OS or whatever they are calling Cyanogen Mod  these days, {Edit its Lineage OS}  Otherwise its down to the Indians in the phone shop to check it out.

Edit.  It was the Gmail account, had to look up for FRP bypass and managed to get a guide that worked, phone is unlocked but still has no sim to check if its blocked.