So, has it been a year already?
Indeed. Mine arrived on March 21, so I'm approaching 13 months.
At the very first, I honestly didn't know what to use it for. I think I began using it as a web browser at home, to save a tad on my main phone battery, but also because I tend to search quite a lot, which means I'm typing quite a lot and, thus, a proper keyboard is quite nice to have.
Pretty soon, I installed K9 (now I'm using AirMail), so I could check my work e-mail before getting out of bed in the morning. Yes, I could do that on my main phone, but tapping out even a brief reply on a slippery pane of glass is, for me, just an ugly experience, especially in the morning (I am a chronic insomniac, so I tend be
very sluggish in the morning). I also moved my (manual) sleep tracker to the Gemini, as I found it easier to get a grip on, on the nightstand.
After a while, I decided to install a few critical apps, such that I'd be able just continue using them, if I'd lose or break my main phone. One of those apps (a Swedish e-id) requires a unique phone number per installation, so I had to get a SIM card for the Gemini, and the phone number requirement meant I couldn't just get a data SIM linked to my main phone number, so I took the opportunity to test drive a cheaper operator (which worked fine, so I moved my main phone number there too, and ended up paying about the same amount per month for BOTH phone numbers, as I previously paid for just the one).
With a SIM card in the Gemini, I began carrying it with me, so now I had two phones to carry around, which wasn't optimal. The point was to try and find out whether a Gemini would, on principle, be able to be my only phone. Well, no. The add-on camera is just terrible, and while I am not taking many pictures per day, the ones I do take, needs to be reasonably good. My baseline requirement is to be able to take a picture of a page in a newspaper, and be able the read the articles from the photo. For the Gemini, that fails for anything larger than a small paperback.
I also found it hard be without my S-pen (so, yes, my main phone is a Samsung Note). An Adonit Dash 3 partially alleviated that. It's nowhere near as good as a proper digitizer pen, but I can jot down and solve and equation or two in a pinch (and, yes, I occasionally do). As I got more used to type rather than write, the need for the S-pen waned a bit. Shopping lists and such, are better typed rather than written anyway, and I'm no good at drawing, so nowadays I really only NEED a pen for things that can't be typed, say, a 2D sketch of the 3D shadow of a 4D tesseract, or just a sketch for a small shelf I might build.
The performance of the Gemini is by and large enough for me. Yes, it IS sluggish at times, but there just isn't a CPU fast enough to compensate for bad software, so faster hardware wouldn't really help much, unless the software gets fixed.
As of now, I'm mainly using my main phone for photography, telephony and messages (which is super annoying, knowing I have a proper keyboard in the other pocket, but, well, people tend to text to my main phone number). As soon as the Cosmo comes, I intend to move my main SIM card there, and keep using the Gemini as a spare device, unless someone else would need it more than I do. I hope the camera in the Cosmo is good enough, so I can stop toting my current main phone. Time will tell.
My Gemini typically lives inside the little leather sleeve that's available from Planet and never had any major accidents, until around 05:30 this morning. A narrow bookcase near my bed, somehow fell while I was asleep. It mostly just bumped into another piece of furniture and thus remained mostly upright, but I was hit by a CD-case-sized bit of particleboard and a shoe-box sized speaker came falling from ceiling height, neatly unplugged its cable in the fall, missed my head, bounced once on the bed and, apparently knocked over my Gemini, that was sitting opened on my nightstand, before the speaker came to rest on the floor (with just a minor scratch).
The knock sent the Gemini battery cover and the outer metal, springy part of the hinge flying, and somehow left the Gemini FLAT on the nightstand. As the hinge isn't meant to open a full 180, I presumed it was broken, but it could be coaxed back into its regular range with no apparent damage. The springy metal part was slightly out of shape, but could gently be massaged back to its proper shape, so it seems the Gemini was largely unharmed too. The bookcase is now screwed to the wall.
Well, that kind of sums up my first year.
