Wednesday 22 January 2014

The joys of mobile Android computing

I have been an Android user now for about seven months and generally I am very happy with the way that it hss worked out going from iOS to Android. I can do all of the things that I wanted to do with a mobile device that has a bigger screen and just about all of the apps that I need to get things done. The only thing that is a little bit of a problem is the fact that it can be difficult to get upgraded to later versions of the operating software. As the phone is not one of the Google phones such as the Nexus 4 or the Nexus 5, which would be getting the over the air updates in a fairly timely fashion; as I have seen with the way it works with the Nexus 7 that I own. There has been no word from the phone company to let me know that there was any updates available to the Android operating system since I bought the phone. In fact, when I got the phone it was already one version behind the latest that was available. So it has been necessary to root the phone and to upgrade it by getting my hands on other versions of the operating system. Lately I have been using the CyanogenMod versions for the Samsung Galaxy S3 which have nearly got me up-to-date.

Keeping an Android phone up-to-date

Rooting the Android phone wasn't that difficult and once I had done that I was able to run a few applications that allowed me to update the phone. It also allowed me to run one or two other applications that I wouldn't have been able to run with the standard operating system that came with the phone directly from the carrier.

CyanogenMod

Yesterday I heard from a contact on the Google+ social layer that there was a newer version available for the Samsung Galaxy S3 and that it was stable. I had been using an application called ROM Manager to do the operating system updates. I was able to download the necessary file from the proper place and use ROM Manager to do the install. On the first attempt it didn't go very well as it complained about the lack of space to do a backup first. I tried it again but without the backup and this time the new version of Android was installed. For the most part, now it is working although there are a couple of applications that have gone missing in action and the ROM Manager itself has stopped working. I am now thinking of doing a factory reset to completely clean the phone and to start again. The reason I am thinking this is because the phone seems to be rebooting itself too many times. So not as stable as I was informed.

How do I go about resetting an Android phone

Nandroid Manager ROOT Android Apps on Google Play

I can't use that application ROM Manager to put things back as it was, because that is not working any more. I do have another application which has backups called Nandroid Manager and maybe that is the way to go. There is also the CyanogenMod installer that I now have on my Mac and I already have the files necessary to go back to the previous version of Android. That previous version had been working out better, in as much as it wasn't crashing as many times as this new one.

The thing that would be a problem is that I would have to reset up many of the applications that I have already. Messing with with passwords and also some of them have data that I might want to keep. So if I do do some sort of drastic reinstall like that I could be creating quite a lot of work for myself. Another thing that is a little bit of a problem is that many of these applications that I would like to use, are short on information on how to use them. I could easily also be creating more problems by killing my phone completely if I don't fully understand the processes that I need to do. Certainly, it is true to say that I don't fully understand how all of this works as I am not a complete Android nerd. I think I might still be thinking about it for a couple of more days before deciding which way to go with this.

No comments:

Post a Comment