This is the state of tech journalism. Samsung hit with lawsuit for crazy amounts of smartphone bloatware
Samsung phones have been bogged down with bloatware for as long as they’ve been around, but a Chinese consumer protection group is doing more than just complaining about it by suing Samsung and another Chinese vendor, Oppo, for loading their phones with literally dozens of pre-installed apps that are impossible to delete.
Samsung beat out all of its biggest competitors in 2015, including arch-rival Apple, which didn’t even come close. The Cupertino company now sits in 21st place in the technology industry rankings, but fell from 57th place overall last year, out of the top 100 companies in 2015.
I don’t really care about the rah-rah element around tech companies at this point, but I have always viewed Samsung as a bad joke, given that they skirt the legal edges of aping competitor products and software and present themselves with a generally ham-fisted “me too” approach to their business.
What I find surprising is that tech “news” sites can dump these dissonant messages to readers as a form of random idea soup. Reading about research like this doesn’t provide useful information. Meanwhile, RSS readers and Twitter feeds fill with time-wasting garbage, and this is largely why I’ve been brutally culling sites like this out of my feed reader lately. Filed under technology.
Making the Apple Watch Useful
As the weeks go on, I am reaching an interesting place with the Apple Watch. Here’s an update.
Glances
One of the ways I have made it more useful is by winnowing out the number of Glances. Right now I use four. I keep a few at the tail end of the available selections, but I rarely use them. Here is my current rotation.
They are all well-designed and, although three of them are slow to refresh (it is hardly their fault since they are hobbled third-party apps, but I still find it annoying for now), the information they provide is something that I regularly use my phone for, and they serve a useful purpose on the watch.
Fantastical’s “day map” timeline is a really nice view of your day at a glance (ha!), and Flexibits has wisely added the ability to toggle what gets sent over to the watch. I find it very well thought out. By turning off reminders, I don’t see them cluttering up my list of meetings and appointments. I don’t go to my watch to check off a reminder; I just want to see what’s happening next, and anything beyond that is clutter.
PCalc’s Glance is something I originally thought was a throwaway feature, but after using it for a week, it makes a lot of sense. It shows you the last two numbers you calculated (from the Watch and the iPhone) – that is all. While it may sound too sparse to be useful, having your last calculation result available with a flick of the wrist is really excellent thinking. It saves some short-term memory registers in my aging brain, and if I need to get to the calculator, a quick tap will take me there. Very smart.
I have been a huge fan of DarkSky’s hyperlocal weather and still use it on my phone (and I still have it installed on my Apple Watch), but WeatherUnderground’s Apple Watch Glance is my current favorite. It is a well-thought-out Glance with the high temp/low temp/current conditions for your immediate location, with the current temperature and an abbreviated hourly forecast at the bottom. Clean and informative.
ETA is an app that will give you an estimated time of arrival for locations of your choice. The latest version gives you traffic conditions (for what it determines are your likely road choices). The Glance will display the last-viewed ETA, which is exactly what you want when you tilt your wrist.
While I do use the Watch for Activity Monitoring and the motivational stuff, the iPhone app has more information, and I usually check my progress when I have a quiet moment (thus, it seems more suited to the iPhone to me).
Watch Faces
I only have three watch faces in my list, and they all suit a particular purpose. Utility faces an orange second hand for the weekend
Utility faces a green second hand for work
Simple face with nothing but an analog time and date number
