My first Android phone

So I bought a Motorola Moto E on special (end of line) from the Warehouse. This is the 2014 model, seen above with the Lumia 520 on the left and the Lumia 635 in the middle. The screen just happens to be the same size as the Lumia 635 despite the latter’s larger package. This morning I let the phone update itself to Android 5.1. It is interesting for being a dual SIM phone and has a sticker on the outside of the box mentioning 2 Degrees, but is in fact a retail model so is not locked and didn’t come with a SIM.
Buying an Android phone is about getting access to a lot more apps that won’t be available on Windows phone for a long time because of the dismally small market share that Windows Mobile has. (That is the new name for the platform since Windows 10 by the way) Even though Windows Mobile 10 is going to let Android apps run on it, I still think there is merit for me to own an Android phone.
I will have a look at making it my main phone, but that depends on whether it can work with the work email which is on a Microsoft Exchange server. The main reason as of now is to be able to load my e-Bible onto it, as that is a Adobe Digital Editions DRM protected EPub, and I couldn’t find a suitable app for the Lumia.

Well eventually I did get my NIV Study Edition loaded onto it, after looking at a few different options. The main issue has been finding an app that will work with Adobe Digital Editions specifically. It turns out the only suitable one is Aldiko Book Reader. While ebooks.com from whom I purchased the e-book have their own reader app, I have found both on Windows and now Android that this app is very poorly designed with unhelpful error messages and being unable to either download the e-book or import it from the SD card. More than likely the ebooks app is not authorised to work with Adobe DRM.

Out of several reader apps, Vitalsource Bookshelf is the most disappointing. I understand that the objective of it is to produce an exact replication of a page layout and that therefore it is unable to reflow text to suit the reading device. This limitation prevents it being used on small screen devices such as phones. At least with Kindle or Aldiko the text can reflow to work on a screen. So the idea I could have some of my textbooks with me anywhere on the phone just ain’t gonna happen unfortunately. Maybe I start thinking about an Android tablet sometime,


by

Tags: