New phone, new laptop - Part One

It's been well over four and half years since my previous phone, a Samsung Galaxy S3, was replaced. Since November 2016, my Huawei P9 Lite has served me extremely well - a much better phone than the Galaxy, which after three years of daily use was on the verge of conking out (battery would run down from 30% to 0% in the space of a bus ride home). The Huawei is now being replaced with a new Samsung, a Galaxy S20, presumably with 17 generations of Galaxy S of advancement over the old S3.  On the same day as I went into the office to pick up the phone, I also took possession of a new laptop, a brand-new Dell - but more about the laptop another time.

I have two issues with the Huawei. One is the the fact that Huawei is so closely connected with the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army that I don't trust it enough to make the most of all of its software. I will not, for example, give the phone permission to help itself to all my Google contacts - something it asks me to do when I want to install software to my laptop that syncs with the phone. Think about it for a moment. If I am openly critical of the Chinese Communist Party on social media, someone in Beijing (or more likely, an algorithm in Beijing) will decide that it wants to snoop on me - and see who all my contacts are. No thanks!

As a result, I could not transfer files or photos from phone (a mere 16GB of memory, so for the past 18 months, it's been about 96% full); as the phone filled up with files, less-well used apps had to go to make space. I started off with four screens of apps - today I have just one and half screens, the rest being automatically deleted by Huawei to free up space. Frustrating! Some of them were deleted because I didn't use them during the pandemic, such as taxi or airline apps; others - even ones I'd paid for! - Huawei bulldozed off my start screen with the enthusiasm of the Party clearing a village to make way for a dam.

The Samsung S20 has 128GB of memory, so no worries there, nor do I have concerns about how data on this phone could be collected and used by Samsung and South Korea's ruling party and armed forces. However, the new phone is keen to play tricks on me. One such trick was to vibrate, light up and when swiped, it informed me that it was 36 hours until my 6am Monday morning alarm. WHAT? I have set no such thing! Another incident: I'm across the tracks in Chynów picking blackcurrants. Suddenly, from my pocket I hear "bu-bu-boom, tick, tick, bu-bu-boom, tick, tick..." It's the intro to David Bowie's Five Years. What's this? Mr Bowie from beyond the grave, telling me, Mr Dembinski, that "We had five years left to cry in/Earth was really dying"? Or was this just an unsolicited ad from YouTube Premium?

There were things about the Huawei that I really liked. One was the health app. This is much more user-friendly than Samsung's health app - I can see not only today's total number of paces and medium- to high-intensity walking, but can look back over yesterday, last week, last month, last year. The Samsung one is low on features. And Huawei products are no longer available on Google's app store (for reasons to do with the Chinese Communist Party). Somewhere in Beijing, an algorithm has detected the fact that since 30 November 2016 (the day I got the P9) a 63-year-old Polish gent has walked 19 million paces, putting him in the Top 1% of active walkers among all users of Huawei products. Comparing the two walking apps, they are both quite accurate - today, according to Samsung, I walked 10,518 paces, and according to Huawei, I walked 10,416 paces, a difference of 0.9%.

In the photo below, you'll see the new laptop and phone (left) and old laptop and phone (right) - and in the bottom right hand corner, my 2011 vintage Nokia that I still use. Incidentally, the Nokia has just 38.8 MEGA bytes of internal memory. I intend to give it up, transferring its SIM card to the Huawei, which will continue to serve for my personal number, albeit in a stripped down mode, data moved to the Samsung where the Chinese security services have no access. The Nokia's SIM card is too big for the P9, so I need to call into a T-Mobile shop to move the card data onto a new card that fits. You can see the Galaxy S20 is longer than the Huawei P9, both are the same width. The primacy of the vertical format has been established.

Getting used to upgraded tech takes time. All the time, I come across things that work differently to the way they did in the old phone. With some I can change settings, with others, it is I that needs to adjust. Still, looking back at my 2016 swap-over from the Galaxy S3 to the Huawei P9 Lite, I can see that things are easier, more intuitive, I have several years more experience with the Android mobile operating system. Looking at the clunkiness of the Nokia operating system, the huge advance that we've seen over the past decade, I am suddenly in awe of the age we live in.

This time last year:
Longevity and Purpose

This time three years ago:
New bus stop for Karczunkowska

This time nine years ago:
Who should pay for railways?
[Interesting stuff about America's advanced electric railway line over the Rockies - built over 100 years ago!]

This time 11 years ago:
Grunwald - the big picture

This time 13 years ago:
"Take me right back to the track, Jack"

This time 14 years ago:
The summer sublime