My First Smart Phone

For most of the past eleven years I only ever owned one mobile phone. It was a Nokia 6230i. Unfortunately it was a few weeks ago that I noticed that its battery was running down faster and faster. I concluded that it was about time I got a new phone. Unfortunately, I liked none of the standard mobile phones that my carrier sells. It seemed as if they were all cheap looking flip phones. Indeed, my sister had bought one for $89 and it didn't even have a camera. I then decided I would have to get a smart phone. I went ahead and got a Samsung Galaxy J3. It has sufficient memory and storage for my purposes. More importantly it was affordable.

Despite being one of the more inexpensive Samsung Galaxy phones, I have to say that I am impressed with the J3. It is much faster than my Amazon Kindle Fire (which sometimes seems to move as slow as molasses). It also came with some useful apps. Gallery is exactly what it sounds like. It is a photo viewing app with some capacity for editing. Optimize is an app that shuts down unnecessary apps that are running. It also came with Accuweather, which is my weather app of choice on my Amazon Fire.  It came with several Google apps, although I can say with some certainty I will never use Google Photos or Duo. I would have rather had Google+ and Hangouts instead.  Of course, I installed Google+ and Instagram right away, as well as some of my other favourite apps. I installed Facebook so I could easily upload photos taken with the phone, but not Messenger (I don't even have Messenger installed on my Amazon Kindle Fire).  Here I must note that Facebook has never been one of my favourite apps.

One cool thing about this new phone is that since both my TV and my phone are Samsungs, I can mirror things from my phone to the TV. This could come in useful if I ever want to stream anything to the television set or if I want to look at photos on the phone on a bigger screen.

I have to say that I am impressed with the Samsung Galaxy J3's camera. It is not necessarily anything incredible. It does have some trouble in low light as many digital cameras do, but it is superior to my old Nokia's camera and the Kindle Fire's as well. I can take photos much faster than with the two older devices. And it has a flash, which is something I have had on none of my other devices other than the digital camera. At any rate, the photos I have taken with it look much better than the photos I took with the old phone or the Kindle.

Of course, I do have one complaint about the Samsung Galaxy J3. There seems to be no way to turn off badge notifications for specific apps. Many apps, such as Twitter, allow you to turn them off. Unfortunately, Facebook does not. I am hoping either Facebook will do an update where they will allow one to shut down badge notifications or that there will be an Android update that allows one to do so.

Anyway, so far I have primarily used my new phone for phone calls, texting, and Instagram. I have played around with some other apps (such as Gallery and Prisma). I don't think I'll ever be one of those people addicted to his smart phone, but I must admit it is mice to have one.