I had to send my phone to a repair shop to get the battery replaced, and so in the meantime I'm using a BlackBerry priv my mom gave me that was already basically used up. It's been an interesting experience, because the phone is almost 10 years old, and there's a few things that I had to get over in order to be able to just use basic functionality. Out of the box Google Play store is so old it doesn't even try to update. I had to download an APK off of a dodgy website. Then I ended up having a huge challenge trying to get Google Play services working, I actually had to go into the process list and disable all of the Play services processes in order to update or the phone would crash in the middle of updating. Once all that was done though, though it took a dog's age I finally got your basic updates installed including finally being able to use YouTube which is my primary use of a smartphone these days.
The next thing that came up was opening the web browser. Apparently Chrome for arm 32 hasn't been updated for 2 years? As a result, the moment that I hop onto fbxl social it complains about the certificates. I tried a few options, but in the end although it's not my favorite browser, I went with Firefox which I'm writing this post on.
I joked around this morning that I would get this phone ready to use on a day-to-day basis just in time for me to pick up my original phone, and I'm about to go pick up my original phone LOL. Oh well, at least it's up to date enough now that I should be able to use it if I need to in an emergency.
Oh yeah, blackberry loves just replacing everything, so they had their own keyboard and their own launcher, both of which I'm not too fond of. Put gboard on for the keyboard and open launcher which works wonderfully as my launcher. One thing I do have to hand to blackberry is they are totally chill about you disabling almost all the apps on the phone. All that being said, my experience with this phone has made me fully understand exactly why they don't really make a lot of phones anymore. Let's ignore for the fact the reality that I'm trying to put ancient software onto an ancient phone, the thing gets hotter than the demon core.
The next thing that came up was opening the web browser. Apparently Chrome for arm 32 hasn't been updated for 2 years? As a result, the moment that I hop onto fbxl social it complains about the certificates. I tried a few options, but in the end although it's not my favorite browser, I went with Firefox which I'm writing this post on.
I joked around this morning that I would get this phone ready to use on a day-to-day basis just in time for me to pick up my original phone, and I'm about to go pick up my original phone LOL. Oh well, at least it's up to date enough now that I should be able to use it if I need to in an emergency.
Oh yeah, blackberry loves just replacing everything, so they had their own keyboard and their own launcher, both of which I'm not too fond of. Put gboard on for the keyboard and open launcher which works wonderfully as my launcher. One thing I do have to hand to blackberry is they are totally chill about you disabling almost all the apps on the phone. All that being said, my experience with this phone has made me fully understand exactly why they don't really make a lot of phones anymore. Let's ignore for the fact the reality that I'm trying to put ancient software onto an ancient phone, the thing gets hotter than the demon core.
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It's certainly not running any of the OSes blackberry produced, but I think it'd be even more impressive if you could do damn near anything with even a blackberry 10 device.