I have noticed some quirks on several pieces of hardware that I own. So I thought I’d post them. I will start with my Dash Express GPS for my car.
My Dash Express has a few minor quarks that I’ve noticed. If I have it running on battery power regardless if it has a lock on GPS satellites to know its coordinates on the globe when it is plugged into the car it will stop attempting to route me to my requested destination. I’ve also noticed that it assumes whatever direction you are traveling in is always forward, not a major issue but it can be confusing if you just backed out of a parking stall & you forgot about this feature.
I have also noticed that when you do not have Internet on it as all Dash Express GPS units should now be, if you let it turn off on its own when it looses an outside power source it will have the wrong time most likely. The solution to this issue is when it asks you to “shut down” you tell it no & then go into settings & select the option “turn off and power down device”, then hit “ok”. It will take longer to boot back up, but if you want it to switch between day & night mode automatically it is the only way to do it, that I have seen or figured out.
On to my old LG Glance phone, which to my knowledge was only available on Verizon wireless. They decided it was a great idea to make a phone that can take pictures, but it can only share them by sending text messages to more capable phones. This causes several issues that I can think of. One is the pictures have to be relatively small to send as a text so they may be at a lower resolution then when you took the picture. Two if you don’t have a texting plan the text part costs 20¢ which can add up quickly, also they seem to think that this is competitive when Net10 only charges at most 5¢ for a text message. Third as it has a media attachment unless you have a data plan you get to pay an additional 60¢ for sending the picture. So you have to pay 80¢ for every picture you take that you want to get off of the phone & I have yet to find an easy & free way to get them off that phone. That’s right you can’t even use Bluetooth to send the picture to another Bluetooth enabled device. For sending media texts I’d expect Net10 to be cheaper as the data costs are 10¢ per minute you are online.
Talking about cell phones reminds me of my old Motorola C130 had a feature that I loved & I haven’t seen in any phone I’ve owned since, is that I could schedule it to turn off & back on at certain times of the day. This was really important for a period in my life when I was working graveyards & I’d have friends & family trying to call me during the day when I was trying to sleep. It is also the last phone I’ve owned that had a sensible set of keys to unlock the phone. I liked needing to press two keys that were far away from each other to unlock the phone. I liked this because it never was unblocked accidentally, while my LG Glance would not only unlock but the default configuration would have it trying to connect to the Internet frequently which was annoying as I didn’t want a data plan with that phone.
For the issue of not being able to schedule the phone turning off & on the best solution I could find was to either remember to turn the phone off everyday, or give everyone my Google voice number & tell them they can reach me at that number. I did that mainly because I can get voicemail for free with a transcribed version available & I can also tell Google to not ring certain phones at certain times of the day. It isn’t perfect as I currently can only tell Google Voice on weekdays & weekends for my schedule. Since I don’t work Monday through Friday their current offering lacks some of the features I want.