Thursday, March 26, 2015

The Posts Are Marching On

OK, so that's a lousy, punishing title. And a lousy, punishing opening sentence, too. Stop me if you don't want any more punishment. (In case I've lost you, I'm playing on the word pun in the first two sentences, and punning on the fact that this is a March post in the title. Sorry about all that.)

So, I don't really have anything to write about, but it's about time for another post based on my recent one per month frequency. I suppose I could talk about walking, which I'm trying to do on a regular basis, but that's probably boring. I could mention my song entry into the Indi.com original songwriting competition, but that's probably boring, too (but go vote, every twelve hours, if you don't mind!).

So, what to talk about? How about Android? I have a couple of android phones, but they're starting to annoy me. One is an LG Lucid 2 (that I'm actually using right now to write this blog post), the other is a Motorola Droid RAZR m. The lucid has a decent battery, but was just flaky in other areas, and kind of slow. The RAZR m has battery that's starting to lack, and seems to get bogged down and has issues with running the GPS and Bluetooth simultaneously, or something, as it would frequently lose GPS signal while I was out walking (OK, so I'm talking about walking inadvertently!). Incidentally, I use Endomondo to track my walking, which has improved from about twenty minutes per mile when I started to about fifteen per mile these days. I'm on Verizon, so phone selection is kind of short- I really wish T-Mobile worked in my area, and I'd buy a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact, but it won't work on Verizon. I'm really liking the smaller form factor of the lucid and RAZR m, but they don't have the RAM and horsepower that I'd like.

So, I figured maybe a custom ROM would help, like CyanogenMod. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find CM for the lucid; I did manage to find XPerion (which I'm running now), which helps some, as it removed the bloatware that Verizon installs by default, so that helps. But it's still a slightly older version of Android. CM is available for the RAZR m, but unfortunately the RAZR has the most recent Motorola update on it, so I can't seem to root it or unlock the boot loader to install the custom ROMs. In other words, it's stuck with the bloated manufacturer version. I really like the feel of the RAZR, nice and compact, and it has slightly better specs (other than the battery) than the lucid, so I wish I could load CyanogenMod on it, especially since they have a 5 version of android available, but no luck.

Anyone have any thoughts on unlocking the RAZR, or newer versions of android in custom ROMs for the lucid?