Learning about Cryptocurrencies in the last week

Hi Everyone,
A little background i completed a Bachelor of Design in Multimedia from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) a few years ago, however strayed from the field for personal reasons until a few weeks ago when i started investigating bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Let me tell you i have looked down the rabbit hole, and holy shit am i excited!

I am still learning and and experimenting with the software and apps involved with cryptocurrencies, so please forgive my ignorance.

Where did i start?

I guess i started by looking into Bitcoin, i read about bitcoin on reddit, which seems to have a bit of a mixed community, alot of opinions on their are complete trash yet others quite insightful. As with any forum you need to form your own opinion and not just blindly follow random peoples advice.

Once i gathered a minuscule understanding of bitcoin from reading lots of manuals and watching lots of videos, i decided to buy some bitcoins.

I used localbitcoins.com and deposited $50AUD into some random guys bank account and thankfully he transferred me some bitcoins into the electrum wallet i had installed on my computer and phone, also taking his fee for the transaction. First transaction complete Woohoo!!!!

Now i want to mess around and try transferring the bitcoins around a little so make some transactions i sent some coins to my little brother as a test, see if he gets interested in it.

Well now that i had some bitcoins what was i going to do with them?

I ended up downloading a few apps and trying out their software, to date these are the apps i have on my phone:
Google Authenticator - Good for two step authentication
Electrum - One of the wallets i am trying out
Ethereum - A wallet that looks to be from somehwere callet freewallet.org this wallet stores ether of the ETH variety only as i found out to a rookie mistake.
Jaxx - another wallet which can hold BTC or ETH (these guys seem to be anti ETC from what i can see as they have no offer for that or maybe its because it still new )
Uberpay - This one seems to have the most promise as a wallet as it allows me to trade between alot of altcoins and BTC, thus giving me something to do with the bitcoins i have bought, they use shapeshift.io to transfer from one alt coin to another.
Syng - Not sure about this one yet very limited functionality it does say its in beta testing and will crash alot, but it claims to be a mist browser for your android device, now that sounds awesome if it gets up and running, i'm being extra careful with this app as it could be malicious i don't know?

I am keen to try out Ethereum, but i am struggling to figure out how to get it set up and running i tried downloading the browser but it wont sync with the block chain, it might have something to do with the fact it gave me the choice to join the hard fork or not and i chose not to fork. Again not 100% sure.

I have been monitoring the price of bitcoin and other crypto's now and i cant stop thinking about what this could all potentially mean. Obviously it is very early days in this community but there is now a little bit more legitimacy in bitcoin, and hence other crypto's.

Ethereum though is where i believe there is real interesting stuff going on with these smart contracts which i have very limited understanding off but definately want to play around with. Definitely monitoring the upcoming situation with ETH vs ETC very closely, i am not even sure it is a competition (and potentially even planned) at this point, it could just be an elaborate way to show that it is possible for the ethereum chains to exist simultaneously and if not two why not more........