It being a quiet afternoon, I decided to fire up the Quattro Samsung Galaxy S2. Amazingly, there was still about 15% battery in it (I connected the charger). It identified 38 updates and I let those run. About half way in, it started throwing up “Unable to install … insufficient storage” messages. This was for apps which had previously installed and updated happily. That’s how far things have moved on and how apps have got fatter and expected far more resources.
A bit of digging reminded me that the phone is a 16gb job, but only has a bit less than 2gb for apps. That may be down to the OS, which is Android 4.1.2 (there as an update, but it was small and merely for stability). Effectively, though, that makes the device pretty much unusable in current conditions. I remember it as being impossibly slow last time I ran it, but it seems to have improved and would now be at least partly practical, as long as you only want a few apps. I went through and uninstalled everything that was even marginally peripheral (that included both BBC iPlayers and the associated Media Player). After doing that, Firefox condescended to update, which it had previously refused to do.
And the moral of this tale? Life has moved on. Low-resource devices won’t cut it any longer as apps deliver more features and richer content. A slow connection is a hindrance as well as apps place more demands on that and some simply time out if they can’t download a large amount of data pretty quickly. Was this a surprise? Not really, if I’m honest, and I’m probably more impressed that the thing works at all.
