I Made A Huge Mistake

So after all of my soap boxing about Apple I got another Android Phone. I didn’t get any Android Phone. I got a skinned Android Phone that beat out the iPhone in sales this quarter. Even though I said I would never buy another skinned Android phone again. I did. I couldn’t resist. Reviewers even after months of use claimed the Galaxy S7 Edge was the bees knees of phones. I bought into the hype and decided to blow a T-Mobile Jump on the phone and boy did I make a mistake. I should have followed my own advice on never trusting tech reviewers.

The hardware is a good, but the edge screen is stupid in daily use. I can’t tell you how many times I accidentally press something with my palm. Waterproofing is cool but who wants to risk a $800 phone in the water. I’ll take it in the shower with me but when it comes to being submerged for a while I’m not taking that risk. While those are minor gripes the big issue here is the operating system.

Let me get this out of the way. Touchwiz is like buying a Windows laptop from Bestbuy. You get all types of crap apps you can’t remove. And guess what those crap apps are running on your phone whether you like it or not.  I can’t even replace Touchwiz which you can do with Android because it will void my warranty. Which is total bullshit. The specs on this phone is amazing and guess what. The phone is slow. Launching apps, opening up websites (multiple browsers) and even unlocking the device takes too long. My 2013 Nexus 7 (tablet) is faster than this phone. I still have to manage background apps in Android. I don’t care what Google says the amount of apps in the background still matter and you still in 2016 have to close background apps in Android. I blame it on Java. There isn’t a single Java app that I use that works great. I’ve had to restart my phone daily. I’m not using or doing anything crazy. Here is what I do on a daily basis. Twitter, Feedly, a few text messages, a few phone calls, maybe Instagram, take some photos, a few News apps and email. Sometimes I play a game. Yeah nothing crazy. Scrolling anything in Android isn’t smooth. If you don’t know what the Android jitters are it’s basically where if you scroll slow on any list have it be Twitter or email the screen appears to get stuck on something for a fraction of a millisecond. This has always been an issue on skinned Android phones and frankly it drives me crazy.

In idle this phone is using 70% of the available ram. This is a 4gb of ram phone and most of it is being used on God knows what. I’ve micro managed the hell out of this phone and I’m still getting random crashes, force freezes and super super slow page load in any browser on this phone. I’ve reset it 3 times to no avail.

Will my issues effect the average user? No. I’ve spoken to a few people that have the phone and they love it, but as for me Android still has a ways to go.

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Android