Above: The cover of Keron Mc Leish’s book, Android Aftercare.

BitDepth#1140 for April 12, 2018

A new book by Keron Mc Leish, owner of Droid Island, a local mobile device store based in Curepe with a focus on Android mobile phones, is now available on Amazon as a Kindle Select book.

Mr Droid Island, as he prefers to be known professionally, is better known for a series of videos on his well-populated YouTube channel.

He’s recently raised that game with a miniseries of videos produced in collaboration with Huawei and partnered with Devon X Scott of T3CHSmash that are, according to their titles, MasterClasses in using Android devices.

His newest MasterClass videos feature excellent production values and introduce several local personalities who make significant and productive use of their Android smartphones.

According to his description of this particular video outreach, “In this day in age, nobody buys smartphones based off commercials or brand ambassadors.”

“When new tech comes out, we all run to our favorite [sic] tech reviewers to hear their thoughts and get an informed decision on whether we should buy. We are the fusion between tech reviewer and retailer.”

His newest project, a slim 33 page ebook titled Android Aftercare, is big on branding, positioning his hip logo front and centre and above the fold, as we say in newspaper lingo, but at US$3 it’s a bit thin on content given both its price and ambitions.

Asked about his reasons for producing the book, Mc Leish responded: “It is my mission to help bridge the knowledge gap of mobile technology here in the Caribbean to where the rest of the world is.”

“Coming from Canada, there are a lot of companies are who investing in Mobile education and we do not have that focus yet here in Trinidad.”

“I picked the topics because they are usually the first things we would teach our clients back in Canada that would purchase a smartphone, plus I took into consideration a lot of the issues people would contact me about and gave tips on how to prevent or rectify those issues.”

The assured confidence of Mc Leish’s presence on his popular website and in his videos falters on the dry green and white pages of this booklet.

”Most people get these devices for the cameras, the capabilities or maybe just the style,“ he writes in his two page introduction, ”but don’t know how to maintain them.“

In Android Aftercare, Mc Leish promises that ”This book will help you [to] develop good habits, learn how to maintain your phone and recognise when things are just out of your control.“

The information that’s in Android Aftercare is useful, as far as it goes.

It is sensible to activate the Find my Device for an Android phone if only to remotely wipe secure information off it and his chapter on battery care is dead accurate.

It is also sensible to clear top level RAM by moving apps to a fast MicroSD card on all except the best-specified Android phones.

Yet the booklet doesn’t mention the first order of business for remedying smartphone issues, restarting the device in question, which goes a long way toward smoothing out hiccups on these pocket computers.

Mc Leish suggests Cleanmaster as an app for tidying the software side of things on Android, but neglects to provide a link to the specific app he means.

This is important because the Google Play Store is a bit of a wild, wild, west when it comes to app names and developer poaching.

A search for Cleanmaster turns up more than a dozen apps with that word in it from no less than five different developers.

Even if his preferred Cleanmaster app turns out to be the best of the lot, I tend to cast a squinty eye at Android apps that scan for files that haven’t been used recently and offers to dump them.

Your best experience with such software will always be with tools that show you what they are going to delete and give you the option of choosing what to get rid of.

Android Aftercare is designed and formatted to be a quick, easy read on a mobile device. You’ll get through the entire booklet in roughly the time it takes to view one of the author’s shorter videos.

In this, he is almost certainly correct about his target audience’s preference for the pithy and direct.

Most of his readers won’t be troubled by the loose writing and copy editing errors either, so it would be niggling to fixate on those.

The digital book is also available from the Droid Island website for TT$20.