iPhone SE and iOs9

Alas, so came the day that I the Windows girl gave in and got an iPhone. My Lumia 820 - old enough to have the Nokia logo! - was starting to be a rather ancient phone with all sorts of data connection issues constantly. I was long hoping to get a Lumia 950, but when people were telling me how it rebooted itself at least once a day and whatnot, I slowly but surely turned my attention to iPhones. With a sigh.

Today I got a brand new Rose Gold (oh yes, the color is of great significance!) iPhone SE 64GB. Naturally I have been fiddling with it ever since. It is nice and shiny and I like it very much - as my readers know, I'm not a total stranger to iOs, having had the iPad2 for many years already (many enough, that IT is starting to feel ancient and outdated, like, heavily) - but there are some buts. Always.

First of, let it be stated that I still like the WinPhone GUI better. What can I say? I just think it's nicer than the i or Android.

That said, there are things that I absolutely love about my new phone! For one, the camera. Way better than the one in my old Lumia (so ok, the new Lumias have good cameras too). I like that there actually are the apps available, you know. I absolutely love the fingerprint unlock. And, well, new is always new :)

I did have some déjà vu experiences today where it comes to the aggravating iOs issues too. Mainly, photo syncing. iCloud almost works. It almost uploads photos (requires wifi, which is stupid in a country like Finland where phone data is not restricted but e.g. our home internet connection is way slower than my 4g). It almost syncs the photos to the Windows iCloud app. At least it did for the first half an hour. You see where this is going?

I cleaned my Dropbox folders from photos that were just lingering there, old photos from years ago, all of which I already have on my hard drive, and turned on camera uploads to Dropbox. Works. With cellular data too (though not necessarily immediately like the OneDrive photosync... meh...)

One thing I was kinda surprised about is the lack of the 3D touch on the SE. My husband has an iPhone 6s and he had talked about this feature. Not that I actually necessarily was missing it, but I would have expected to have it on this newer (hardware-wize similar) phone.

All in all, so far iPhone SE is getting 4,5 stars from me. I like the light (116g) compact size (even though the screen is smaller than what I was used to with the Lumia 820); there's really nothing not to like. Oh, except that I had to reboot it two or three times today when AppStore wasn't able to download apps. Hmm.

P.S. Since I have a track record of breaking the screens of my phones, I immediately went to the the local Apple Store and bought a protective clear silicone case and glass screen protector.

Agravating Photo Sync

After getting the camera kit for my iPad, I have happily been mostly juggling my photos via the iPad. So convenient to be using a little bit of PhotoShop Express to enhance some pics and creating some nice collages with e.g. PicCollage or InstaCollage and then using them in blogs, uploading to Flickr etc. iPad has all the right apps for all that activity (minus the adding videos to blog posts in Blogsy...).

My active photographing - whether it be with my proper Samsung or my Lumia, which I have been using increasingly lately since it's so readily available in all situations - and fiddling with the photos in different apps for different purposes, results in approx. 10000 photos a year (and this was the case even before the iPad...). Which means that my iPad quite frequently is running out of space and I need to delete some photos - ok, a lot!

But never before copying them to my hard drive, of course. Usually, I have done this via iCloud and my photostream. But the iCloud has a mind of its own, and I cannot control what is in the photostream and what is not and what and when is available on my laptop. And this agravates me big time. At least when it is not doing what I expect it to do.

I have accepted, that it has its own operation queues and my photos are not necessarily available on my laptop immediately (or even almost) after taking them (unlike e.g. the autoupload to OneDrive from my Lumia). Mostly, I can live with that, for be as it may, mostly, the photos have been available at some point. At least on my work laptop. For whatever mysterious reason, the photostream mostly refuses to sync itself on my personal laptop.

A few weeks ago, after having been on sick leave for several weeks, I opened my work laptop to do some of this photo transferring. But the iCloud would not sync. Eventually, I disabled and enabled the whole iCloud sync, and, well, it synced. but not the whole 1000 photos as it should. Now I have 300 photos in my photostream and a couple months missing from both the stream and my hard drive. And iCloud will not sync them - nor the newer photos again...

So, yey, I had two options:
1) connect my iPad to my laptop and fiddle with iTunes or
2) copy photos to Dropbox on iPad and then transfer them from Dropbox to hard disc on laptop

Guess which one I went for? Did I ever mention that I hate iTunes and all the other similar apps that are meant for convenient backupping etc. of the devices, but seem to do whatever they please instead of letting me be in control, and have a confusing UI & UX on top of it? Yeah, I added approx. 800 photos to Dropbox. 670 remaining to be uploaded. We could have a faster wi-fi, you know.

I would be cool to be able to connect the usb hard drive straight to the iPad. And it would be cool to have a working cloud sync. OneDrive offer autoupload of the iPad camera roll nowadays too, did you know that? But it still does not include th camera uploads from my Smasungs to the iPad, and some app-modified pics either. In many ways, the logic of what is in "photos", what in "camera roll", whart in "photostream" and how all of these are linked and cloud synced, is still a total mystery to me on the iPad.

Juggling between SkyDrive and Dropbox

I can't remember anymore how long I've been using either one of them. But, for long. Not quite as long as they've existed, but almost. To me, a MSN Live user, SkyDrive came first. I don't even remeber if it was called that back then, but who cares anyway. When it was available and came to my attention, I started using it. For what exactly, I don't remember either. It wasn't like I could've used it in my phone, and tablets didn't exist (at least not in the sense of today). But, for something.

The most important thing I tried to use it for, was to share photos between me, my mom and my sister. As for my mom, no prob. She had a Live account too. But for my sister? She's a devoted non-Microsoft person, so nope, no Live account, nor was she about to be getting one. And now, my current husband is the same way. So, so much for sharing in SkyDrive.

My sister was the one who then introduced me (and my mother, on the other side of the world) to Dropbox. I was a bit reluctant at first, mainly because it meant creating yet another account, a password to remember and all that jazz. But that proved to be the exact strenght of Dropbox. No strings attached. In order to have an account, you don't need to become a part of a Micrsoft or Apple or Google network. You just use Dropbox. And sync it on which ever devices you like to use it on.

Back then, when I made my Dropbox account and started to familiarize myself with the desktop app, with the Win Explorer folder, and the Adroid app and all, SkyDrive did not offer all that. It all came along a bit later. So SkyDrive sort of got pushed back, as a storage for OneNote notebooks (works better than with Dropbox) and later on the de facto upload location for my Lumia photos. I stored all my stuff in Dropbox, and eventually started to struggle with space, unwilling to get a 100GB plan or something.



Call me dense, call me what you will, but it was only yesterday, that I realized that I actually could just as well utilize SkyDrive for all my own, non-shared data, and leave Dropbox to be the sharing platform. For the Win Explorer folder is there, and it works perfectly with both my Lumia (duh!) and the iPad (don't know about Android, but then again, my Galaxy Tab has been reduced into a Kindle device nowadays) - and I have all of 25GB of storage space there, complimentary to the 'old' users!

Besides I actually like the SkyDrive app for iPad a bit better than the slightly clumsier Dropbox app. The nice thing about the Dropbox app is, though, that it can be password protected.

Irritatingly Disappearing Stuff

It's been a couple months since I last downloaded music from Spotify. I didn't used to be (and will not be for very long) a premium subscriber; I endure the commercials and don't really ever reach the monthly limits of listening to music on Spotify. But I do like to buy music hrom Spotify and listen to it in my car while driving.
So, as said, it's been a couple months since I last downloaded stuff. It would been only a few days, had Spotify not stopped supporting new download purchases. You can't download music even with (new) Premium subscriptions, though there is no notification of that on Spotify web site.

So, no downloading music :/ And living in this country with Teosto-hirmuvalta (Copywrite bureau tyranny), the price of music in Finnish online music stores is double the price and not nearly as plenty. Which may of course be one of the reasons behind this. The other one being pushing people to use the mobile app. But little does that help me with the car stereo system!

But what annoyed me even more, was that I noticed also, that Spotify had wiped out all of my previously downloaded music files in my music library! That is, like, intolerable behavior from a store! I paid for that music! It's like buying a cd that automatically destroys itself after a certain period of time. Unheard of!
Luckily though I had - well, have - all my music backed up on my usb drive. But this seriously infuriated me! What's next? Amazon wiping out all Kindle books from my account, just because? Dropbox or Skydrive being empties just because? Cloud services... Very very scary in many ways.

As is Android. I believe I compared Android to Windows XP in one of my earlier posts. I mean, it is. Though I don't remember even WinXP ever losing icons from the desktop. Whereas a couple nights ago my oldest daughter's Android phone did. It crashed and rebooted itself and whooosh! all her games were gone from the screens. It was bedtime, so I told her I'd take a look at the phone the next day, afraid that the actual apps had disappeared.

Before going to bed myself I googled a bit and noticed that a whole lot of people have had that same problem. And that most probably it was only the icons that had disappeared, not the apps. I found a couple of promising tricks (involving e.g. clearing memory and such), but by the time I was back from work and daughter from school and I told her I could try to fix the phone, the icons had already reappeared magically.
I don't really like Android too much. My Galaxy Tab has been reduced to a Kindle device solely (all the kids have Android phones now, so they don't even play games on the Tab anymore), all syncs disabled so prevent the battery from dying in a day even when I don't even touch the tablet. I hope my Kindle books don't decide to go awol...