I woke up today and decided to have a relaxing day off from work – I didn’t want to go for a walk because I’ve gotten sun burnt a few times and unfortunately I didn’t have any sunscreen which is something that need to get sorted out. I walked down to my local bakery and had eggs bene with a side of mushrooms and a bowl of mochaccino on the side. I took my time as I read some news on my phone – I like to catch up on the news in the morning from the usual sources such as Radio NZ, Reuters, Bloomberg, Business Desk and NBR. It is always important to get news from a variety of sources because sometimes there are parts of a story that maybe glossed over by one website but in another website they go into further detail because the writer believes the audience maybe interested in exploring into detail a particular issue.
After brunch I then jumped onto the next bus into town where I went for a walk around at the stores, I stopped in at Noel Leeming to see what the S26 Ultra is like and I was in luck because One UI 9 was ready to be installed so I rebooted the phone so I could get to see what it was like. There wasn’t any visual changes when compared to One UI 8.5 but I did notice it was more snappy and responsive. As I’ve noted in the past, we’re at peak smartphone so it is a matter of the vendors are focused on refinement and making use of AI to improve the experience but I don’t see anything radical nor do I expect anything radical given that smartphones are a mature product. The kernel of One UI 9.0 is on the 6.12 LTS however it is rock solid and the performance is great – it’ll be interesting to see how things develop going forward.
After having a look around I picked up a few items from New World then caught the bus up to mum’s place where I updated her computers and enjoyed fish pie for dinner. We had a chat and caught up with what had been happening during the week – my sister got another dog, mum has been seeing how my brothers who kids are growing up quickly with the oldest getting ready to head off to school. Mum also prepared some curried egg salad – something I used to be able to buy at the store but only just recently they’ve stopped selling it at the local Pak ‘n Save so I’m unsure what the story is – maybe the manufacturer discontinued the line? oh well, I guess I’ll wait and see whether it suddenly appears.
One thing I do have to complain about is the sad state of affairs when it comes to iOS 27.0.1 and the buggy experience I’ve had with Reddit and other apps running on my iPhone 17 Pro Max. With the Reddit app I would find that the user interface elements would suddenly go a dark grey as if it were in dark mode then I would find that the whole app would suddenly freeze which would require me to do a forced quit. I have also noticed that they keyboard and screen has gotten worse – 26.x series wasn’t the best but I had high hopes that 27.x would fix the issues – for example, normally you can tap on the cursor then drag the cursor to where you want it in the text but nothing happens, I would then double tap on a word which normally should auto select the whole word but nothing happens. Then there is the keyboard itself – the lag and inaccuracy which makes the experience worse than when I was using a Samsung Ultra S26. The strange thing is that in the case of macOS things are pretty robust so I guess we’re going to have to wait and find out what 27.2 fixes up and the future improvements planned for the future.
