Chapter 8 – Android OS on Modern Hardware

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This is a series of blog posts documenting my switch from iPhone to Android. To read the whole exciting saga, click here.

I’ve traded in my Motorola Atrix 4G for a Samsung Galaxy S4 Active. The Atrix 4G is a 4 year-old Android phone with an interesting design that included a dual-core CPU, fingerprint reader, a “webtop” app that let you use it docked like a desktop PC and media center, and a laptop shell that used the phone to drive a keyboard and screen in an ultrabook laptop form factor.

While I liked the form factor (smaller than an iPhone 5, although a bit thicker) and liked the flexibility of being able to load other launchers and the variety of apps available on multiple app stores. I missed a couple of applications that weren’t supported — the Atrix 4G ran Android OS 2.3, a far cry from the current state of the OS.

The Samsung is running Android 4.4.2 on modern hardware – a quad core CPU, HD display. While I still have a soft spot for the Atrix, I’m going to try this out and see how the newer OSes compare. Already in the first few hours of playing with it, a handful of apps installed that wouldn’t work on the Atrix, and while I haven’t found the VIP notification capability on iOS, I can pick separate alert tones for incoming emails from selected contacts.

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