Jeez, that's an insane list.
A smartphone is pointless without apps though. The Coke Freestyle app has earned me $50 in amazon credit alone, Coke gives $1 per refill even when the cost of said refill is half that. Nevermind all the other reward programs out there.
That said, I mention the official Coca-Cola Freestyle app because it spams GPS location requests, HTC's boost app will usually terminate it after logging between 3,000-5,000 GPS location requests sent by it within a 2 day period. Coke can afford to pay people to use its machines, but can't afford an actual app development team I guess.
drfish wrote:I still don't understand the hate for Win8/8.1. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have Win10 instead, but who spends enough time in the start menu that it mattered? It's not like there wasn't a normal taskbar and desktop. Since Win7, my start menu access has looked like this, hit Windows key -> type a few letters of the thing I need to launch -> hit Enter. That's it, I couldn't care less what it looked like, because I barely bother to look at it. Thanks to Win+X I could get to the important system bits super-fast too.
I did the same thing on Win 7 and loved it for that. You try that on Win 8 and instead of bringing up control panels it brings up the half-assed metro setting panels instead, which either didn't offer the settings the full control panel app does, or obfuscated them under layers you had to click past. Didn't want Win 8 to auto-install updates? You could only enable the "download but wait to install" option if you manually navigated menus to the original windows update control panel, not the metro one. Rinse and repeat that with practically any settings panel. Power config was especially bad as there would be ~5 search results found (most of them additional results intentionally added for new users) and none of them would lead to the original Power Options panel. Type that on Win 10 and you still don't go directly there, you have to click "more options" on the first panel, when Windows 7 would have taken you directly there. Regular Win 7 interactions that take seconds to complete took either 3x longer or 3x the clicks on the successor OS, and even after learning the new UI the same tasks still took longer. That was and always will be my beef with it.