Silicon Shecky

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Android ICS and the Razr

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A couple of weeks ago, Verizon pushed ICS down to my Razr. I had been look forward to the upgrade for a while, but was it everything one wants?

The biggest problem with the Android OS is Google puts out a new version right about the time the Upgrades to the prior version come out. That being said, I finally got the ICS upgrade on my Droid Razr. With all the talk and positive things I had heard about ICS, I was excited.

The upgrade process was mostly painless, except for the notification coming at 4am on a work day. Once completed, I started looking for changes. First thing though was letting a number of my applications update. One of the biggest changes there was the Google+ app. The widget for it now showed actual posts, which makes my life easier, especially since I tend to forget about Google+ for days at a time (a post for another day).

The first bad thing about ICS I ran into was with my home button right after seeing the Google+ change. On Gingerbread, if you hit the home button once, it brought you to your home screen, and this hasn’t changed. Hitting the home button from your home screen on ICS does nothing, compared to Gingerbread which zoomed out and shows you all 5 screens so you could jump to a specific screen and not have to scroll to the far ones. This feature removal is a definite down side, although understandable since ICS is designed for devices without the  4 buttons below the actual screen.

The new set of customizable on screen quick start buttons is decent. the have put a nice App button there to bring you to the full application listing also. To add items to a home screen was completely different. You actually have to go into your main app list and hold touch on the itme. Apps that have widgets should show a widget app in the App screens also.

There are 2 big annoyances with ICS though. First is battery life, which already was limited on the Razr, has dropped even more. The second was after the upgrade, all the personalization I had done for ringtones, notifications etc, were gone. I wondered for a couple days why I was not vibrating when I got a new text message, until I figure this out.

Overall ICS has some good and bad. At this point in time, Android really reminds me of Microsoft and Windows. So many different configurations and hardware, the main company can’t keep up with it all, and the OEMs don’t care about keeping things current for their users. Instead they want you to buy new all the time.

Beware the Patent Trolls…

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So here we are, a society that considers itself civilized. A society that has tons of issues. A society that loves clogging up the court system with litigation. You get litigation if you buy coffee at McDonald’s and spill it on yourself, if you are a 4 year old who hit an older lady while riding your bicycle, and especially if you try to make anything in the technology field.

I look at the lawsuits being brought out recently. Apple Sues Motorola, Motorola sues Apple, Microsoft sues Motorola, some company that bought a software patent sues major websites, and so on, and so on. Heck I’m waiting to see who is going to sue whom over what next.

With all the big companies suing each other, its no wonder that you don’t have much technological advancement anymore. You get repackaged versions of older ideas that work better cause of faster processing power. No real innovation, and this is I feel is due to 2 things. Patent trolling, and lack of entrepreneurial spirit.

Seriously, who wants to try to build new things when you can just keep making money off what you already have, and who wants to try to start up a new company, when virtually every method of doing anything is patented, and thereby a potential death by litigation for a small company.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is a good reason to have patents, just like copyrights. The issue is the length of time they last for. At some point you need to reduce that amount of time back to something more normal, just so that we can innovate and move forward.  Of course, that is just my opinion.