Holiday Tech Upgrade

I updated my Samsung Galaxy S2 phone by wiping off the Samsung/Sprint OS and installing CyanogenMod 10, an Android 4.1 Jelly Bean open community replacement. Jelly Bean uses some new Google trickery called “Project Butter” that makes everything move much more smoothly and it’s amazing how more fluid they made this new interface feel on this 2-year-old phone. It also adds Google Now, which is a kind of artificial intelligence personal assistant that in the classic kind of Googlicious borderline-creepy way kind of background learns what you do and where you go and reminds you when you look like you’re forgetting to do stuff. It basically does what Apple sells with Siri advertising (and notably fails to do in practice), and it’s actually useful and finally feels like all that PDA lifestyle crap that was oversold in the early 1990s has finally arrived. Finally, I swapped out my 2-year-old battery for a huge double-size monster (that came with a new phone backplate) and now it can run for 15 hours on a single charge.