My BlindShell Classic 3 is here!

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My BlindShell Classic 3 arrived last Friday (November 22nd, 2024, Although the migration system isn’t available yet to move my data from my Classic 2 to my Classic 3 phone, I decided to set it up as far as I could go with what I had available to me now just to “Check It out!”

One of the first things I noticed is the slightly rubbery feeling the phone has which I really liked. Having lost my Classic 2 twice in ride sharing vehicles because of how slick and slippery the Classic 2 is. At least the Classic 3 won’t so easily slip ‘n’ slide out of my pockets any more!

I ran across two glitches very early in my try out, fortunately neither one prevented me from using my Classic 3. The first was that my S O S button on the back of the phone doesn’t appear to do anything at all! At this point I don’t know if this is a hardware or software failure, not that it matters, what matters is that right now I do not have a working S O S button. And the other glitch I noticed that every alarm, notification, and ringtone sound, I add to the phone by storing sound files in their appropriate folders shows up in the selection lists twice, the first time they show up the menu entry tells you that the sound is invalid and thus unplayable, but the second time the melody shows up it works as expected.

Something else I noticed that some apps have been moved from the app catalog to the 3rd party app catalog, apps like Aira, Be My eyes, ScriptTalk Mobile, etc. And I noticed that some apps will have to be added later, like both Amazon apps.

One of the things I hope they’ll do is to have a BlindShell section that we can nominate apps for that work well within the BlindShell system. That would be a big help to those of us who’d rather not be guinea pigs.

Hopefully others will post their thoughts and impressions of the new Classic 3 phone here as I have.

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you probably need to go into the contacts menu and assign a contact to the S>O.S button. just like you do a quick dial buttons. regarding the few aps that have been moved to the 3rd party app section, I’m assuming apps like aira, be my eyes, script talk, amazon alexa, and and others that used to be in the blindshell ap catelog, they must be the actual apps now, and not a specialized tweeked version of those apps, like the way it used to be on the classic2. if you haven’t heard the shellphone show, you should check it out in the podcast player. michael badcock does it, and I’ve added a few episodes as well. it’s mainly on the blindshell classic2, but most of the conceppts still will apply to the clasic3 shell phone. yep.

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Update: Both of those glitches were just that, after I reset my phone to start setting it up for real, both glitches were gone! I’ll take it! Too bad all the glitches I run into aren’t so easy to solve!

And now I learn why the migration and backup utilities weren’t showing up anywhere, it turns out the microSD card isn’t as optional as the manual would have you believe, after adding a 64 GB microSD card to my Classic 3, the migration menu entry magically appeared out of nowhere! Too bad it’s still AWOL on the Classic 2.

So far? I like my Classic 3 phone!

If there is any downside to the phone it is the total lack of any way to browse the Aurora catalog.