Phone/watch dilemma solved (at least temporarily)

Looks like I can give my phone/watch dilemma a little rest now that I got the Pebble Steel I ordered from a discount I noticed on eu.getpebble.com. The watch arrived today:

Yes, it's compatible with both my iPhone 6 and Nexus 5

The watch is actually a little bit smaller than my LG G Watch, but that's not a problem as there's no touchscreen on this one.

It'll remain to be seen how I like this one in the long run, but at least I can now get notifications from my iPhone to my wrist and now that I'm not tied to my Android phone in order to have my watch work, I can just set up call transfer and a text message forward Tasker rule on my Nexus 5 and carry just my iPhone with me. Happy times.

Oh, I also got a Catalyst case for my iPhone, so now I need only waterproof Bluetooth headphones and I'm all ready for the "summer" we've had this far.

New Nexus Gear

In the last few days I've got myself some new (at least to me) Nexus gear. What comes to my Nexus 5 with the broken screen, I didn't end up shelling 150€ for replacing the screen but bought a secondhand Nexus 5 for 160€ instead. Granted there's the downside that the replacement N5 has only 16GB of storage while my old one had 32GB, but I think I can live with that since I can bring also the old one along if I need to carry e.g. some extra movies. This option also gave me a backup/testing device as the old one is still usable despite the cracked screen. I'm planning to install the Android M preview on it to check if I can replicate the reports I've read about quite impressive battery life gains.

The other newcomer is a Nexus Player. As you might have noticed, Google recently updated the YouTube Data API, which in turn broke several YouTube clients. My 2nd generation Apple TV was among the affected devices and it's become quite obvious that it won't be getting an update (the 3rd generation one did, however). As also WWDC went by without the rumored Apple TV update, I decided to stop waiting and get myself something I could watch YouTube on and possibly also get a native Plex app so that I could dump my PlexConnect hack.

After I got my Nexus Player up and running I could see that decent YouTube experience was back (I do have also a Chromecast, but my wife wasn't too fond of the idea of having to use her phone for controlling the thing), but the Plex experience was a step or two back compared to PlexConnect even though I was running an official Plex app now. The app looks OK and all that, but finding my content is unnecessarily hard as it doesn't provide an option to browse by folder. This combined with a crappy search (that doesn't seem to reach e.g. episode description in the Summary field) makes finding a correct episode unnecessarily hard. You'd think a native official app would provide a superior user experience compared to a content replacement hack, but unfortunately that's not the case. I hope the Plex folks wake up and make the Android TV version usable.

Looks like Windows Phone isn't completely dead yet

Seems like I've missed the announcement Shifty Jelly made back in April: http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2015/04/29/pocket-casts-for-windows-phone/

This means that there's now a good podcast app that can sync between iOS, Android, AND Windows Phone, so I can strike one issue from my "why I can't use a Windows Phone" list. Actually, with this app available I could take my Lumia 620 with me when I go for a walk in a weather where rain is quite likely. The phone itself has an IP54 cover on it and it gets additional "protection" from the fact that it's so old and cheap that I don't really give a crap should it get wet and die.

Pocket Casts coming to Windows Phone together with 1Password finally having an Alpha for a more full-featured app than their previous 1Password Reader from the WP7 days shows that maybe the platform isn't completely dead yet. Let's see how things shape up with Windows 10 once they get the phone version a lot more stable than the current preview.

Then they just need to tackle smartwatches, some way to avoid typing in the passcode all the time (with iOS I have Touch ID and with Android there's my Android Wear as a trusted device), have Bluetooth actually work, peripheral support, etc. But this announcement is still a step forward.

Apple Watch - I Would if I Could

So it looks like Finland didn't make it to the second wave of the Apple Watch launch: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/04/apple-watch-seven-more-countries-june-26/

This is rather unfortunate for me as my LG G Watch is getting really picky about charging so the day when it won't charge at all might not be that far away. In the previous post I was thinking about getting an Apple Watch as also my Nexus 5 is in need of a repair while I do have a fully functional iPhone 6, but it looks like Finland won't be getting the Apple Watch anytime soon, so I may have to spend some money on a new Android Wear device and either repair my Nexus 5 or get a different Android phone with a better camera. For after all, with the G Watch I've gotten used to wearing a smartwatch so going possibly months without one doesn't sound like an enticing idea.

Then there's also this one: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/03/redesigned-apple-tv-not-ready-for-wwdc-debut/

Some time ago YouTube stopped working on my second generation Apple TV as Google updated the protocol and the 2nd gen Apple TV didn't receive a software update to fix that issue. As WWDC was quite close, I decided to wait for the rumored new Apple TV with a possible App Store (and a Plex app to go with that). However, now it looks like the new Apple TV is still at least a couple of months away, and if the Apple Watch is any kind of a measure, I don't think we'll have it in Finland in 2015 anyway. I've been thinking about getting a Nexus Player, and if WWDC does indeed go by without any information about the new Apple TV, I'll just go and get one.

Tim & co may not like my next purchases, but that shouldn't be a surprise when considering how poorly Finland has been served lately.