Normally I don’t say good things about wireless phones because I work in the industry, I read lots of science fiction, and I know what’s possible now – so the typical smart phone underwhelms me more often than not.
Not so the new Androids – I have the Samsung Galaxy S4, and it lives up to my expectations. I use it to track my walks just to start with – not only does it count my steps for my 10k daily goal, it also maps my walks via GPS and measures the miles I’ve hiked. During the walk or just anytime for that matter, I can measure my pulse with the camera. I can also play tunes from it while I walk, but mostly I use my Ipod touch for that — I still have this notion that phone battery needs to be conserved for calling, even though the battery in the S4 holds up fine all day long even with all of the features turned on.
I’m also able to keep all those bar code cards stored in it for grocery check outs, I can use it at near field credit card stations, my library card is also in it, along with my email, my calendar, and all my social apps. I tapped my wife’s phone to mine to pick up the video she took of Devin, and I can just speak to my phone to command it.
Searching with voice, or typing with voice is also easy, so that feature has come a long way since inception. (I used to work with text to speech and speech to text for Deaf Relay centers – a long time ago the single user version took special hardware from IBM and most of a PC’s horsepower, while the industrial versions used banks of servers with specialized cards for interactive voice response units.)
The browsers, cameras, streaming video, and other features work just fine so I can honestly and wholeheartedly recommend this phone to all my friends – no reservations. I like it so much I had to give it a name … Randroid.
