So, it’s been about two and a half weeks since I broke down and did an early upgrade on my phone, landing myself with a very slick — and now orange-be-cased — Samsung Galaxy Note. The early infatuation-crush is still lingering, but I can sense the practicality and predictability that comes with any long-term tech relationship starting to settle into a comfortable rhythm. As such, I thought I would make some notes on my Note, and share some of the interesting, clever little tricks I’ve discovered and adapted to fulfill my functionality potential with this particular device.

1. On Watching Vids…

We’ve been with Netflix for about a year and a half now, and we are quite happy with the service. It didn’t take much to get the app up and running on my account and over our home wifi. Perhaps it is simply an temproary bias, but having a six-inch screen with headphoned-audio has been awesome for the last week or so. While our televsion has been tuned by Karin to pretty much permanently show the Olympics coverage, I’ve been plugged into something more my speed and style — namely old scifi and sitcoms on Netflix — without being excessively obvious or obtrusive. One ear for the show, and one for being more social.

2. On Reading Audio Books…

I’ve subscribed to Audible for about three years now, so it almost goes without saying that I have a fairly epic audiobook collection. On of the first apps I installed was the Audible app, a self-contained player that tracks my listening and manages my audiobooks. I was impressed using this on past phones, iPhone included, but the Android version has two advantages, (1) in the form of a widget that lets me control my listening without actually re-loading the app, and (2) in that the player controls are actually usable with human-sized fingers (because I can’t even begin to tell you how frustrating Apple’s audio control scheme is for an audiobook, where one off-pixel click can flick you back to the start of a six-hour track when you were only trying to pause and leave you struggling in frustration to remember where you’d last heard, scrubbing through said track while walking down a busy street.)

3. On Consuming Podcasts…

I’m a bit of a fickle podcast listener, and one of the things that I never did get settled to my satisfaction was the automation of podcast retrieval on my previous phones. The thing is, in order for podcasting to be a truly seamless medium, the cast should be a single click away: in that I simply mean, if I need to think about downloading it before I download it, then fine — but I’ll probably give it a miss if only because by the time I realize I want to listen to it I’m off in no-wifi land and I’m not going to eat up a double-digit percentage of my meager mobile data limit on a podcast file. I’ve been using a (paid-for) app for a couple weeks called Beyond Pod. It not only lets me subscribe to podcasts right inside the device, but I’ve refined the download schedule so that it only downloads when I’m on wifi, plugged in, and at night. This means most every morning I wake up with fresh casts. Very cool.

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