Out in the internet there is almost as much bumcum and loyalty to your OS as to footie teams, but I guess all is fair in PCs and Operating Systems .
As an Apple evangelist, then a Linux manipulator loon I moved away from Windows like it was a Betamax cassette. How things change!

My phone for over 2 years, has been equal parts semi smart, and semi stupid. Time for an upgrade. After surfing and searching around and discarding these:

Huewei (too large a leap for me, and price does not jusify lack of performance)

iPhones (too expensive)

JIAYU G3T (sturdy but ugly and too few reviews)

I caved in and got me a Samsung GT-I8750 Ativ S, with Windows 8.

What were some deciding factors and why did I upgrade?

Lets start with the latter. My work has changed a lot recently, and as a teacher/trainer my writing on the board and flip chart has improved, but my handwriting looks like a crab spider has walked across the page, leaving the remains of its bumble bee meal behind it.

So one factor was the need to write quick notes, or dictate them. Since first working with voice recognition software in 2000 it has leapt in development as much as from Do to Te on the music scale. The notes I need to write are for business, my NPO, and also for my creative writing. So a device and App that is with me at all times is just what the publicist ordered.

Creativity is becoming at last more a part of my life. However time constrains it somewhat. So to have a mobile with a half decent camera in my pocket allows me to take a pic, and then go, with my bulkier Pentax DSLR camera, back to the area I stumbled across .

I lumbered into Evernote/pad/webclipper while I was looking for resources for an Academic IT English course at a technical college (Hochschule) I train at . It replaced my xmarks account with more functionality, and is presently not only as an App on my phone, but also on my Mac Mini and my Acer Travelmate. It allows me to not only bookmark, but clip articles, and write notes. This is a multi-tasking dream. I discarded One Note after a few mishaps, and not wanting to have to learn the OS, and another new software. Plus it is far too much trouble to learn one software, when you can integrate an existing App you use, right.

There was a flip side to using the phone, and that was having Bing and Internet Explorer preinstalled. The former I still have to use for searching, even though I am a big fan of the open source Duck Duck go. However as Windows 8 has tiles on the home screen it means I installed a browser with a cute icon called UC browser, that is light weight and reminds me of Midori in that it is pretty light weight .

But the BIG decider was something of a Stewsday flavour, in that the tiles are customisable and have a very nice design to the home screen.

It took me awhile to learn how to integrate my accounts, and get used to the system. But this new flavour of phone has tickled the taste buds of this boy in the toy/candy store.

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