They just do not see past the initial screen
Whenever I listen to a radio show or podcast and one of these self-proclaimed experts offers a comment about a synapptic phone all I want to do is groan as they always seem to have a downer on this application that has won so many awards within the blind community. The comments they make always seem to revolve around stating it to be a very basic phone and only suitable for beginners or those people who are scared of technology, and a new attack seems to be that you can only use the applications that are built in to the synapptic application. Neither of these assertions are true and if these so-called experts took some time looking into a synapptic phone and not just discarding it they would find out that there is a lot more to it than initially meets the eye, or fingertips.
Strictly speaking there is no such thing as a synapptic phone but I will continue to use that terminology to make this article run smoother. Synapptic is an application and can be installed on any android phone within a certain specification, this specification can be checked on the synapptic website as it is probably subject to change on each release of the software. Knowing this fact rubbishes both of the claims I noted above because if you have a synapptic phone you can set it to start in either android or synapptic mode and you have access to all of the applications available to your phone on the Google playstore.
When you are using your phone in synapptic mode you have access to the playstore and also access to any applications that have been downloaded from the playstore without having to go into android mode and it also seamlessly takes the synapptic reader part of the application to voice any of these extra applications.
What happens with these self-proclaimed experts is that they turn on an android phone loaded with synapptic and are faced with five or six pages of menus and so this will also happen to new users of the synapptic application. This tends to put people off the software immediately because there is a lot of scrolling up and down to find the tool they want to use. This can be easily avoided by using a feature in the phone’s settings called customisation. You may even be able to avoid having to do this yourself if you ask the company or organisation supplying you with the software to do it for you but it is a simple process anyway and nothing to be frightened about. All you have to do is open the settings menu, open customisation, open menu layout choose grid layout. You can then return to the main menu page and you will find all the major options laid out in icons on the first page rather than having to scroll down a number of pages to find out what’s available. On selecting, for example, entertainments you will then find options to select Internet radio, UK TV, BBC iPlayer etc.. This is a far quicker way of navigating the synapptic software. It is possible from this layout to remove and add icons depending on how much you expect to use certain applications and this is also within the customisation option which you will now find on the settings. An example of this feature would be, under social media you only ever use YouTube so to avoid having to select social media and then YouTube you could remove the social media button and replace it with the YouTube button but to explain the way to do this at this juncture could be very confusing so if you do decide to customise the main menu page of your synapptic device I suggest you take guidance during the one-hour tutorial you are offered when you first receive the synaptic software or make use of the help file which is accessible from every page of the device. If you are wondering whether you can add applications that you have downloaded from the play store to this menu the answer is yes you can.
Give Synapptic a Try
From this little introduction to what is possible, and also the misapprehensions, of the synapptic application I hope you will regard it in a different light. It is possible to download a 15 day trial version from their website if you want to have a good look at the software.
One final comment from me is that the synapptic software is easy-to-use, and some could say very basic, but the whole point of technology is to make life easier. If you want proof of this just look at how technology has changed your life in other ways such as food preparation, communication, and home entertainment so why shouldn’t developers of software applications want to make life easier as well.
