*warning – seriously geeky blog-post below. If tech is not your bag, read this post instead, it’s much more amusing than what’s written below!
So, last week my super smart smartphone announced that a shiny new software update was available. Exciting times I thought. I was expecting big things. I always do with software updates… And I’m always hugely disappointed! Especially when the software you already have is working beautifully. But when that shiny new software is dangled in front of you, the old software is instantly ditched. Well it is with me anyway. Maybe I’ll be wiser next time (I doubt it though).
I’ve had my lovely Galaxy S5 for just under a year now, with Android ‘kit-kat’ running happily and smoothly. No problems at all. I like kit-kats. You know exactly where you stand with a kit-kat. Solid, reliable, a little boring perhaps, but hugely dependable. Alas nothing lasts forever and Google has now moved on to pastures new. We’re now in the colourful world of the lollipop, and they are a different ball-game entirely. Who knows what you’re going to get with a lollipop? The possibilities are endless!!! Solid, reliable and dependable is not a lollipop and never will be. A lollipop is exciting, it’s varied, charismatic and it’s colourful. As soon as Google wafted a lollipop towards me, my trusty kit-kat was discarded in the blink of an eye. An eye, that is, that takes roughly 4½ hours to blink 🙄
Lollipops, it turns out, need a lot more room than a kit-kat. So it was only after deleting, uploading & moving a few thousand files that I was finally ready to receive my new lollipop. I then rebooted my mobile and eagerly waited for the fireworks to burst forth and the ground to shake. Let’s see what this mighty lollipop can do…
Mess with my phone, that’s what it can do. Be rather intrusive, rather presumptuous, and be sadly lacking in a few rather essential features. Initial impressions of Google’s mighty lollipop were far from favourable. My lock-screen was now filled with large app notifications. Every app on my phone apparently had something important to tell me, and there they all were in large boxes on my lock-screen. Kit-kat used to whisper quietly and flash a little blue light for me. A gentle little nudge or prompt that something had happened. Not so for the big brash lollipop. If a Facebook nobody has dropped a biscuit into their tea, it was clearly lollipop’s duty to shout this very loudly. And why, now, are all of my apps sending me stuff. This never happened with kit-kat. Kit-kat would politely ask me what I wanted to be notified of. Know-it-all lollipop just assumes and tells you everything, whether you like it or not. I’m now slowly trawling through my many apps and individually switching the app notifications off 🙄 The other thing that lollipop has plonked onto my lock-screen is a big red telephone symbol. OK I thought, a quick link to the phone dialler, could be useful. But no, this is a quick link to the ’emergency dialler’, a feature that I’ve used not once in all my years using a mobile! I’m still in the process of trying to remove this (if at all possible).
Another lollipop annoyance highlighted itself a few days later. Upon entering a rather long meeting, I scrolling down my quick-settings to pop my phone onto silent. Vibrate was there, ‘sound’ was there, but no ‘silent’. For three hours my phone hummed and rattled in my coat pocket. Having researched this, apparently big brash loud lollipop deems ‘silent mode’ an unnecessary feature. The only way around this stupid error is to access settings, sounds, vibrate, and to reduce the vibrate intensity to zero. Compared to kit-kat; scroll down, select ‘silent’. I’ve lost personalised notification sounds, that I’m struggling to replace. Apps are failing to open or just crash after a few seconds.
Oh to have my beloved kit-kat back… Which of course you can’t. There’s simply no going back in the Willy Wonka world of Google confectionary software. We’ve had cup-cakes, jelly beans, donuts, gingerbread and countless other creations from Google Towers over the years. Each new software promises to be bigger, better and more flavoursome than the last. I’ve had them all, I’ve tasted the lot. Any grandkids I may have will probably learn about Android cup-cake in history books. I remember it well and I remember the eager excitement when Froyo (whatever that is?) arrived on my shite Motorola. Nothing major changed. The Froyo (what the hell is a Froyo?) tasted much the same as the cup-cake. And that story continues. Lollipop has stormed into the room shouting ‘look at me, look what I can do.’ In time, lollipop will slink out of the room and Willy Google Wonka will need to tweak his recipe slightly, just as he did with all of his other creations. Lollipop 0.1 will then make a less elaborate and brash entrance and people will be a little bit more accepting. A big brash lollipop is tolerable for a few licks, but after that it gets a little annoying. Kit-kat messed around with its flavours a few years ago, but people soon returned to the trusty original after the novelty had warn off. The sooner lollipop calms down the better in my book. It’s currently tasting rather sour…
Can people please remind me of this post when Android Wonka Bar 6.0 gets released…
