Troublesome Android

My youngest daughter has a low-cost pink Samsung Android phone. You know, not worth getting a several hundred euros phone for a nine-year-old whose need for a new phone was that the less than two years old Nokia was practically falling apart and the screen all scratched and such. Obviously, you can't expect the best of a low-cost phone, but I would've expected a little bit better than what I was dealing with today.

The problem was that my daughter had had several games on the phone, but wanted a new one. The phone told her that there was not enough memory to install it. So she deleted all games except for the three she likes most. But did it help? Nope. She still could not install a single game on her phone anymore. So, she turned to her mother. That would be me, of course.

First thing I did was to move the remaining three games to her spacious external memory card and deleted all cache data from all of her apps. Did not help. So I googled a bit and tried installing a memory cleaner app on the phone - which didn't give any problems, to my surprise. But still, no luck with the game.

I googled a bit more and found some insturctions to move practiaclly all apps to the memory card by installing some SDKs and development tools and such stuff on my laptop and on that phone and running this and that console and rooting the phone and whatnot! "Haha, you're the geek girl, the Android-hacker, go for it! You just press all the buttons at the same time, say google backwords and type root on the screen with your nose," my boyfriend snickered when I sighed in exasperation and announced that I am definately NOT going to be messing (my girl's phone) with that kind of hacking.

What I did decide to do was to install Samsung Kies on my laptop and try to fix the problem with that. The first issue being an upgrade for the Android version of the phone so that it might allow more versatile options with apps. For in the course of troubleshooting I had checked the OS running on that phone and was super-surprised to find out that my daughter's basically brand new phone (Christmas present) was running Gingerbread! 2.3.6! I mean, that's the same OS my 1st generation Galaxy Tab is running!

But, it was dêja vú. Windows phone all over again. No updates available. So apparently that phone model is kinda old and doesn't support newer Android versions. No Ice Cream Sandwiches or Jellybeans to my girl's phone. Fine. Didn't go all geeky with that either, trying to manually force a newer version on it.

Instead, I logged into the Google Play store in the browser, searched for the game and clicked install. Magically, it worked. The phone didn't break in tears, cry over spilled memory or anything. It simply installed the game. Poof.

I don't understand the memory system of Android at all. I don't really like Android. But unfortunately, while iPhone is too expensive and WinPhone doesn't get the games, Android it is for the kids.