Wednesday, 15 March 2017

Nationalistic Smartphones


Well, the Brexit vote appears to have released the nationalism genie from the bottle, and it will be impossible to put the stopper back in. The EU is falling apart, the UK is falling apart and I hear Old Sodbury is declaring unilateral independence. Cameron should have limited the referendum to the individual nations, and if just one voted to remain, then the lot should have remained. The group is more important, and stronger, than the individual. 

Spent most of yesterday in a mild panic. The random rebooting of my Galaxy S7 Edge became intolerable over the weekend and so I resolved to return the damned thing. However, the Vodafone shop offered to merely send it off to Samsung and give me a temporary phone. Given the problem is random and (I  think) aligned to the battery level, that would not have resulted in a solution and the phone being handed back after a week. So, I did yet another factory reset, but managed to screw it up by finger poking, resulting in an FRP lock which made the phone useless.


Eventually managed to discover that if I re-flashed the firmware I could overcome the issue. Found the latest relevant firmware, flashed it and discovered I'd downloaded Android Nougat by mistake. No problem - it's the latest pre-release version, so I'm ahead of the curve and it might just have cured the random rebooting.

Can't see any obvious benefits over Marchmallow, however, and there are a few bugs with the standard keyboard when logging into Apps, but I use the Swiftkey keyboard anyway, so not an issue. Rooting isn't recommended yet, so I'll leave that for the time being.


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