This one will be longer than usual.
★ November 30
- When You Should Give Your Android Phone a Factory Reset
Ryan Whitwam:
In an ideal world, your Android phone would run like a dream forever. This being real life, we can’t always expect that sort of robust performance out of our devices. Things can happen that slow your phone and damage the experience. Maybe you install a lot of apps, and some of them are acting a little mischievous, or maybe something has just gone wrong deep down in the system where you have little chance of fixing it. At times like this, you could agonize over tweaks and possible fixes, or you could spend time uninstalling different combinations of apps. But maybe wiping the phone clean and starting over is the best overall option sometimes.
I am not going to crack any jokes about this. I am not going to crack any jokes about this. I am not going to crack any jokes about this.
Let's have fun, shall we? Here's something I found published a day after ✪ found this: Troubleshoot your Apple iPad. Let's read a few passages from that tome. Let's begin with the opening paragraphs.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time with an iPad will know that -- like all computers -- it sometimes doesn't do what it's supposed to do. It could be a frozen screen, a system that overheats or a refusal to recharge. The result is the same: You have to figure out what's wrong with it and how to get it back on the straight and narrow.
And what is one of the options present for troubleshooting a problematic iPad? Page 3:
One of the most useful things about the iPad software is that whenever it syncs with its host computer, the entire system is backed up. If the system is acting weird, try returning to the last synchronized data.
Plug the iPad's USB cable into the host computer, and the iTunes software should automatically start. Click on the iPad on the left side of the computer's screen and then select the Summary tab.
After clicking on the Restore icon, you're ready to reload your iPad with data. Use "Restore from the last backup" so that all your music, videos and apps will return during your next synchronization.
If that doesn't work, click on "Set up as new iPad" to start from scratch -- although you will lose anything you've done or bought since your iPad came from the store.
The whole process will take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour, but you'll notice that the app icons are now arranged alphabetically (rather than in the order they were installed).
If I didn't know better, that step sounds suspiciously similar to the troubleshooting step that ✪ found humorous. And of course, while that article was for the iPad, there are many similar articles for the iPhone. That said, this is a curious example of the magical thinking too many Mac partisans have: Apple products are somehow immune to the issues that computers — or any complex devices have. Trust me, iPhones and iPads do slow down and sometimes go wonky for hard to figure reasons.
Also, the iPad/iPhone has been heralded as the future of computing because it removes complexity, even though it just moves it elsewhere. Lack of access of a file system is praised because managing files is complicated. That complexity is gone! No, it just moved to managing the applications itself, and jury-rigging various ways to extract those files from the iPad to share with the outside world. The abstractions just leak out elsewhere.
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