Yesterday's discovery's were both good
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Good #1:
This is meaningless feel good stuff (to me). I was on Lenovo support when I saw an option to choose your device - Lenovo or Motorola. I had forgotten that Lenovo had bought Motorola, from HTC I think. I have always been a big Motorola fan ever since Google bought it. They then released the MotoG phone with their own o/s - pure stock Android. It was an amazing phone at the time, cheap and unless you had money to burn, undoubtedly the most sensible android phone to buy. Then Google decided to get out of hardware and outsourced manufacturing to HTC. I was pleased as I was an early adopter and bought one of the very first smartphones which was made by HTC and ran Windows Mobile. It was an exciting time - iphones did not exist and there were just a few people who started to write simple programs which ran on this phone and shared them on a forum. I immediately saw the potential and would spend hours tinkering with my new phone and wrote a boat log book utility myself. It was like going back to the days of the Commodore Pet and typing in long programs in Basic from the PCW mag if anyone remembers. All very exciting and obviously the people at Apple were watching as after a while they released the first I-phone and our type of programs & utilities they named Apps. I remained a loyal HTC/Windows Mobile user until I could not resist the advantages of Google's concept of syncing cross platform and moved to Android. It was a major tactical error by Microsoft, as soon as they heard that Google were making Android completely free to hardware makers they should have responded. They were so dominant in the pc market they could have muscled into mobile too. As it was they spent a fortune developing Windows Mobile and were first to market and then sat back and watched Google and Apple take it all away !
So, years later I was a bit sad when I heard Lenovo had bought Motorola as I thought it would be the end of this bit of history and the availability of stock android. I was still using my original Moto G when earlier this year my wife bought a Lenovo made Moto G5 plus. It turned out to be another great phone, Lenovo had been faithful to HTC's light touch philosophy.
Then I bought my Mavic Pro a few months ago I asked on here if my Moto G would be powerful enough to run Go4. Someone said it might be but was I happy to trust an old phone with $1,000 of new hardware. I read that post early in the morning on the day we were driving north to Scotland on holiday which was going to be my first chance to fly the Mavic. My wife agreed to quickly call in to Carphone Warehouse on our local retail park on the way to the motorway. We wanted to get an early start to the 6 hour drive north so she was not so happy when the manager was 15 minutes late opening up. He arrived and after another frustrating wait while the safe opened itself I walked out with a Moto G6 plus which they sell exclusively
. Usually I prefer to drive on the motorway but that day I was happy to sit as a passenger and play with my new phone, the first for 5 years. It is a great phone imo. It runs Oreo 8.1 and seems very fast. For a budget phone the specs seem good although I am out of the loop on phones - 4 gigs ram and 2.2GHz octa-core processor. The camera is so-so, in fact it has 2 cameras on the back which do some gimmicky things. I would prefer just one better quality camera but it is ok for documentary type use - I have a dSLR if I want good quality. If you are looking for a new phone it is worth considering and if you live in the UK it is definitely worth paying the extra £50 for the 'plus' model which is only available though Carphone Warehouse as I said. You get a bigger screen, more memory and faster processor.
So I am pleased that I chose a Lenovo tablet for these sentimental reasons even though I had forgotten about the Motorola connection when I made the decision !
Good 2:
In brief (!), to save anyone with only a casual interest having to read further, not only did my new SD card work, I was also given two options when I put it in. To treat it as a normal removable card or format it and have it become an extension of the main memory so apps and photos/data could use it. This sounds really good because even if you store photos and stuff on the cloud it would be easy to fill up the inbuilt 16 gigs with apps. The only downside is it becomes part of the tablet and won't work on anything else - you are given the option of converting it back to a normal card whenever you want. I have never seen this option before despite it being part of Android since 6.0 Marshmallow. Not all manufacturers implement it - it is not on my Motorola phone. I am not 100‰ sure about it because cards are slower than a memory chip and despite being solid state they wear out. Although they last for 10k R/W cycles, which would be forever if you were saving/loading photos & movies, maybe having an app on it might mean near constant activity when you are using that app - I have no idea. However it is a nice feeling having a tablet with 144 gigs of contiguous memory
Here is a paste of a posting I made to the Lenovo users group giving a more detailed version of what happened when I put the card in .....
The new Samsung Evo+ 128 gig card has arrived. I did a deep format using Windows as advised. Turned off tablet - put card in - turned on tablet and waited 5 minutes. It appeared in the notification bar and I was given to the option to use it as a portable card or format it to use only in the tablet where it could be used for apps and photos. I chose to leave it in the tablet and it formatted it. The only issue was it warned that it appeared to be slow and I should consider getting a faster card. There are not many that are faster than an Evo+ so there might be an issue there although I think it will probably settle down. Quite pleased and if I do get any problems I will come back and update here.
Update #1 The card is in and working but does have some issues in this dedicated mode imo
* Settings/Storage shows it as present and you are given the option to reformat it as a removable card that can be read by other devices.
* The File Manager app that comes preinstalled on the tablet cannot see it and just reports the 16GB memory status. I have never had a file manager on any Android device before and have always had to download one from the Playstore. This one is $hit so i am going to delete it but it is a nice thought
* FX File Expolrer only reports the 16GB as local storage but does show the card in Storage Tools/Mount Eject
* ES File Explorer also only reports the 16GB as local storage and does not show the card anywhere.
I normally use FX but am surprised about ES as that is usually pretty good. Both apps are the free versions. FX is a better app anyway as it is ad free.
It is too early to decide how robust the card is. I will have to wait until the inbuilt 16GB is full and then I will find out. Got the feeling that it will work ok.
