Weekends don’t count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless. – Bill Watterson
Working people usually look forward to weekends when they can have long sleeps and controlled days. By ‘controlled’, I mean, we can choose what we want to do, except in the occasion of ‘must’ occasions (e.g. birthdays, birthdays and more birthdays). I suppose non-working individuals look forward to weekends too and I don’t mean to not include them in this equation. Although I believe that working people appreciate it all the more because they don’t have to work on these days.
My husband and I try to make our weekends as fun as possible. We would visit a Dutch city which we’ve never visited before or get out of the country for the weekend (last time we were in Brussels). Most of the time, we visit the weekend market in the city center or do some shopping. Now for two weekends in a row, the city center has been full of kiosks for the Nazomeren (After-summer bazaar) and the Vlaardings UitFestival.
This weekend, we’ve been obsessing with androids – mobile phones using the Android OS. It is usually called the Google phone and is easily defined as the competitor of the Iphone. The Iphone currently uses OS X. According to the grapevine however, Iphone is seriously contemplating on using the Android OS in its future models. But it is not just the Gphone and this video from the Android website explains it further:
My five-year old mobile phone is an SE P900 which uses the Symbian OS. I’m still terribly happy with it. Although the battery, even after being replaced, easily becomes empty. So I have been contemplating on replacing it. However, it is not easy to find the perfect replacement. It is still a very good phone after all. Most of the mobile telephones in the market at the moment are either copies, or they just have touchscreens, which I do not like at all because I can’t blindtext (and that’s a skill).
I was mulling over the Nokia E71 with a full QWERTY because I look forward to blogging regularly, until my husband introduced me to the androids. Android is an open source operating system which “brings internet-style innovation and openness to mobile phones”. They are smarter than they look but more and more phones using this OS are becoming accessible in the market. Point the phone to a monument and he will give you a description of it. Smarter than most people! My husband calls it the amalgamation of man and machine.
And that’s only one of the smart things it can do. There are many more. Since it is open source, anybody is encouraged to create an application to be added to the package and to enhance the abilities and capabilities of mobile devices. And don’t we just love open source? It provides for a more competitive market and encourages creativity. It says, “sky is the limit” as oppose to the Iphone which, in my own opinion, only promotes monopoly. Did I say yet that this OS is going to be made available to more and more phones? #
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about.me
Multimedia, multiplatform journalist, writer and communications professional. My passion lies in telling stories, working with words and finding the best platform to communicate information.
Along with collecting and sharing information, I am also particularly interested in beautiful typography, digital tools and technology, photography, historical mysteries, cultural diversity and languages. I love to travel and to see more of the world has been a fixation since I stepped into the vast jungle called journalism.
During my free time, I bead, bake, create wordpress websites or look for a new hobby to obsess myself with. What do you do on your free time?
