All Things Android - Apps, Phones, Tablets - Discussion

I am liking the theme. But I don't trust cyanogenmod. Too many hiccups.

 

Define "hiccup". I'm running CM11 on all my Android devices and it's pretty damn rock solid on all of them. The only place you'll run into hiccups is if you're not using the standard CM kernel.

 

Whaddabout on a Nexus 5? Does it run without the annoying issues like no MMS or weird things like that on certain carriers?

BTW: the TW theme description states it's meant for CyanogenMod 11, 10.2, 10.1, 10, 9 & AOKP. What's the CM AOKP? You can flash only the CM kernal and have it work?

 

Nexus 5 is vanilla Android.

 

I know that. But my question was do I need to load it with CyanogenMod to get the TW themer to work?

In the TW theme description, it states it's meant for CyanogenMod 11, 10.2, 10.1, 10, 9 & AOKP. Now does the AOKP mean the CM AOKP or the AOKP kernel already loaded onto the Nexus 5?

C'Mon people, you need to sell me on this!

 

Why would you need to flash CM on a Nexus phone, I'm confused.

 

Never mind. I looked deeper into the theme's description. It says it will work on any AOKP ROM.

And AOKP doesn't mean what I thought it did.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thomassafca.theme.touchwiz.five.free&hl=en

 

MUCH more options.

AOKP is just a kang of CM. Same base frameworks, only with a few modifications. It says it works on every CM version 9 and newer.

 

I don't see why you need more options then what vanilla Android offers..

 

Don't you use an iPhone?


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I do but I had a Nexus 4 before my iPhone 5. When I go back to a SIM carrier, I plan on either a Nexus phone or maybe keep the iPhone, who knows.

 

Yeah, I thought AOKP stood for Android Open Kernel Project. Whereas any device with an untouched kernel could run the theme. But alas, I was wrong.

Back to the old drawing board.

 

I guess I'm purchasing the Z2 sooner than I expected. My Note 2 is kaput, something happened and now I think the power button is stuck, and so it keeps bootlooping. I've tried to hit it hard so it disconnects, and tried to hit the opposite side, tried lifting the button with the knife, but nothing has worked... Thankfully all my photos were in my SD card and I did a backup of my texts some days ago (which is sad, I have many recent ones I'd like to keep...).

 

Sorry to hear about your Note 2. I expect a full write-up of the Z2 when you get it!

 

It was all very sudden as well. I got a pop up that it's shutting down, and it shuts down, and keeps looping. Can't do anything, I don't even have the screwdriver to tear it apart.

I'm still wondering if I should wait until HTC tells me what they have, but Clove UK's deal about the Z2 + headphones + speaker is too good to pass.

 

Sony is in its ascendancy with Android devices as far as I can tell. The Z2 fixes the number one problem with the Z1 (viewing angles), and Sony's skin is remarkably thin compared to other OEMs (the days of a heavy, buggy Sony skin are gone). And with Sony selling its VAIO division, you can be sure they're doubling down on their Xperia division, so expect good build quality and future software updates. After all, Xperia, Playstation, and cameras are all Sony has left, so they're going to be pushing hard on those fronts.

HTC just seems to be in a tailspin, especially with all the infighting and corporate espionage charges and all that. And from what I've read, while the HTC One had great materials and design, the build quality could be very hit-and-miss.

 

I'm getting an HTC One in a couple days switching from a jailbroken 5S. I've looked into it and I'm probably gonna load a rooted Google Play edition ROM. Any suggestions for other ROMS, apps, or tweaks? Thanks!

 

Welp, false alarm... I took the battery off for the night, and it's fine now...?

 

Good, if baffling, result; I had assumed that the physical power switch was stuck, and pulling the battery wouldn't have changed that.

 

What do you guys think about the leaked info on the new HTC One?

If the microSD expandability is really true, I'd actually consider it for my next phone (although I'm not exactly dying to upgrade my GS3 anytime soon). Great move.

Still not liking the large wasted tract of space on either side of the HTC logo though. Makes the device larger in hand than the GS5.

Now that I own both a vanilla (rooted) Nexus 7 2013 and a GS3 with CyanogenMod 11, I can really notice just how much CM has spoiled me in terms of options.

So many useful tweaks, particularly with some of the (IMO) silly decisions with Kit Kat--removing the upload/download arrows in the WiFi and signal strength icons, a configurable quick settings tray, etc, etc.

Built-in Voice+ is great as well, letting me use the built-in texting app for Google Voice texts.

 

I assumed that as well, but I was tired so I just took the battery off so it's not always rebooting during the night, and I woke up and it was fine. Still don't know he exact cause.

 

I love how that kid demonstrated sound quality, old and new, with a ONE SECOND CLIP of SOULJA BOY. *facepalm*

If HTC came to US Cellular (which they haven't recently), I'd be sorely tempted because of the front-facing speakers and the case materials, but I'd be wary because of HTC's reputation for poor software updates and inconsistent build quality.

 

The word 'desperate' comes to mind. Sense 6.0 looks like a cheap knockoff of Windows Phone. I am intrigued on what "5 megapixels, Twin-sensor" camera means exactly? I sure hope it's not another bad attempt at a stereoscopic 3D camera. It is good to see HTC carrying over the aluminum chassis to this model.

How does CyanogenMod run on the newer devices? I was/am seriously considering going and getting a Nexus 5 with T-Mobile and loading it with CyanogenMod in order to load a TW theme. But I haven't dealt with CyanogenMod for several years and the earlier version had annoying issues like bluetooth in-op and no MMS with some carriers, etc.

 

I haven't had any problems with it, except for the stock camera app in CM 11 which sometimes force-closes (granted, CM 11 on GS3 isn't yet a stable release).

CM 11 runs beautifully and gives me much better battery life than Samsung's stock image, by far. I noticed some improvements moving from CM 10.2 to CM 11 as well. Haven't tested Bluetooth in CM 11, but it worked well in CM 10.2.

Overall, I'd say support and stability are very good for the more popular devices, ie. the GS3.

 

Interesting. At least there's no serious hardware or feature deficiencies as were in the earlier days of CyanogenMod. I'm still trying to find out how well it runs on the Nexus 5. No one at XDA seems to have any opinions on the subject.

(But there are a few whom claim to unKNOX the SGS4)

 

I don't see why people would want to flash CM onto a Nexus device, it's very close to vanilla Android. Adunno if the Nexus 5 has that Nexus development kit like the Nexus 4/Galaxy Nexus had, it was literally 5 seconds to unlock the bootloader.

 

We understand that you don't understand.

Still, CM offers MUCH more configuration capabilities, and MUCH MUCH MUCH more options for power users.

As far as CM on Nexus devices, it's pretty much rock solid. Google provides every bit of source to make everything work, unlike other OEMs with proprietary blobs for this and that. Like I said earlier, the only place you'll possibly run into issues with CM on Nexus devices is with custom kernels. With the stock kernel it runs with aplomb. At this point, the only reason to load a custom kernel is to get Faux's sound enhancements. Screens don't need calibration any more, clock speeds are fast enough for anything, and there's no reason to modify RAM caching behaviors.

 

I would only flash CyanogenMod so I could install the Touchwiz theme on the Nexus 5 from Google Play. But, as it stands, I won't be getting the Nexus 5. So I'm in a holding pattern until someone is able to kill KNOX on the SGS4.

 

You'd be the first person I've pseudo-met that actually enjoyed the look and feel of TouchWiz. Personally, many of the reasons I don't like it are 1.) it doesn't do well at all with lower DPI's. Their assets break the UI with anything other than stock DPI. 2.) The Gingerbread-like colors are still there. 3.) Their idiotic redesign of things, like the Settings APK. (worse with 4.4) 4.) I feel like TouchWiz was designed for people with eyesight problems. Everything is huge.

And for many more reasons.

But then, everyone has their own taste. But...

Spoiler

 

Yep! Knox is a critical part of Samsung courting government and enterprise customers. They're not going to let it be circumvented by consumer tech enthusiasts who want to mess with their phones more. And if it can be circumvented by the latter, the phone is useless to government and enterprise.

 

Well it was nice to pseudo-meet you too!

The reason I've always liked TW is because the UI and it's assets are high(er) in both DPI and size. I will agree the settings APK looks like it was retooled by blind woman beating the keyboard like it was a large rodent. I also like the color scheme cause I hate the newer kit kat purple red and orange puke pallettes they (and by they, I mean you) slathered on.

I don't think I will have to wait long for the unKNOX to be engineered. At least, not for the SGS4. I have faith in the XDA community to figure a way to revert an SGS4 from 4.3 back to 4.2 stock image with ODIN. I also hope they can get the 0x1 flag removed as well.

 

Public service announcement: Samsung has made a piece of software that doesn't suck. In fact, it's quite good.



Samsung's Milk Music internet radio service is only for Galaxy devices (video)

This is shaking my worldview right now.

 

"Milk Music"?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Brought to you by the company that thought "TouchWiz" was a good name...

Still, it's free and ad-free (for users of Galaxy devices) and it's frankly a fantastic streaming radio service. Superb UI, good music selection.

 

Hmmm... where are you seeing those colors? They shouldn't be there, wherever they are. The orange, yes... but it's only to show lack of connectivity.

KNOX is locked and encrypted. There's a large difference in having a locked bootloader, a la the Verizon GS3 at launch, and a locked AND encrypted bootloader like what Motorola was using for YEARS that has still yet to be undone. Also, KNOX also has hardware assisted rooting detection and prevention through secure boot, much like the Blackberry Playbook. There's checksums/MD5s on everything.

 

Well...

A. I have more respect for Motorola's locking abilities than Samsung's. Motorola's been doing it for way longer, and there was one instance where the bootloader was cracked. Development community finally breaks Motorola's locked bootloaders? | RootzWiki.com

B. I though the hardware assist is only available on the newer devices which came with Kitkat preinstalled? My hope is that the SGS4 (which came with 4.2 preinstalled) will be deKNOXed. Even on the devices produced and shipped with 4.3 preinstalled. It's certainly more than possibly for the SGS4 to be downgraded with the stock 4.2 image. XDA Dev's just need to figure out a way to do it and remove the 0x1 flag and secure boot.

C. You tell me where you see orange. It's subtle, but it's there...

 

A. Respect all you want... it still doesn't need to be happening, unless specified by the user. It needs to be setup like BitLocker on Windows, where if you want to enable the secure features you enable it yourself. I'll even take Google's way of shipping with a locked bootloader, but letting the user easily unlock it if they want. There's a reason, actually, why those particular Motorola devices were cracked though. They all shipped with MSM8960, which didn't fully support all the security features like TI's OMAP that Motorola had been using for quite some time, of which none of the OMAP devices have come anywhere near being cracked. People even tried brute-forcing the Droid X... nothing.

B. Hardware assist is available on every Samsung device with Snapdragon 600 and higher. It's built into the SoC. A simple signed software update from Samsung enables it.

C. By the way you were accusing -me- on the KitKat palette, I thought you were talking about stock/AOSP/CM colors. I have no part in TouchWiz. Never will. If I ever got access to change Samsung's UI direction, TouchWiz would be dumped like the steaming hot pile it is.

 

Yup. Multiple campaigns were made to try and crack the encrypted boot loader on the Droid 3 as well. No dice. We D3 users were lucky enough to have hashc0de set up safestrap dual boot but that was never as clean of a method as totally replacing the stock ROM would have been.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

I have respect for their skills. Not for their bass-ackward reasoning to do it in the first place. There's something to be said about corporate paranoia.

Interesting. I wonder if the Exynos SoCs have it as well.

I wasn't accusing you (ok, maybe I was ), you were just guilty by association. Nor was I making a crack at the AOSP KitKat. I don't know what the 4.4 AOSP UI looks like. My gripe about the sherbert barf color scheme was directed towards TW. I do like the current layout in JB (sans Grannie Crosseyed's System.apk), but if the leaked renderings of the KitKat refresh turn out to be accurate, I will be ditching Sammy...as painful as it may be.

PS: remember all those nay-sayers who said the PS3 bootloader couldn't be cracked??

 

Exynos uses TrustZone from ARM, which is arguably better.

This is my CM, with a touch of Harmattan.

Spoiler

 

Interesting. Not a bad UI at all. Another bump in the road for me is soft keys. I just don't like the concept of the home back and menu button being OS driven.

And I thought the ARM TrustZone was meant for DRM & NFC payment type application environments?

 

It can be used for those usage scenarios, but Samsung is going to be using it to it's fullest extent... KNOX is layers of security.

 

Anyone update their sprint Galaxy S4 to the new 4.4.2 ota release? I did mine and some of my widgets are broke, wont work even after reinstalls, some apps were gone and showing they weren't even installed. @$&#!

 

Just more reasons I think major OS updates shouldn't be done OTA.

Boot into recovery and delete your cache.

 

My eyes hurt after reading all that in 1 sentence. I wouldn't ever do an OTA update for any phone, it's always laced with issues.

 

My review of Samsung's Galaxy-device-exclusive Milk Music, for anyone who is interested:

Spoiler

My general impression of Samsung is that they make good (if non-luxurious-feeling) hardware mated with crappy software. Ugly UIs, settings-options overload, and lag are the three things I think of when I think of Samsung software. So when I heard that Samsung had released a free-and-ad-free streaming radio service for Galaxy devices (downloadable from Google Play), I was skeptical. But I thought I'd give it a shot.

I'm glad I did. Samsung knocked this one out of the park.

The core of this UI is a ring of stations brought up by tapping on the screen while playback. Tapping on the ring blurs the screen you're on and brings up this overlay:



Rotate your thumb around the circle in an iPod-click-wheel fashion to move the dial quickly; move your thumb around in a smaller circle within the wheel and you move the dial slowly. Each sub-station starts playing immediately as you pass over it (and the album art appears in the ring as you spin), so it mimics the feel of spinning a real dial through real radio stations, hearing clips of music as you go. The eleven categories are customizable (want to replace "hip-hop" with "Christian"? No problem), and each has a number of separate sub-stations within it. For example, "Rock" has the following stations:

Rock
Classic Rock
60s Rock
70s Rock
80s Rock
90s Rock
Rock Hits
Folk
Southern Rock
Jam Bands
Party Metal
Prog Rock
Rock Ballads
Eclectic Rock
Classic Metal
'00s Rock
New Rock First
New Metal First
Rock Adrenaline
Classic Rock Deep Dive

"My stations" are Pandora-style customizable stations made by you naming an artist or three to start with and up-voting and down-voting songs. The rest are curated mixes that are surprisingly good. In both cases, I have yet to find any picks where I say "huh, I have no idea why it stuck this song into this mix."

It says at points "powered by Slacker," but in my experience, Slacker Radio was ad-laden and had a royal mess of an interface. This has neither downside. It's got the best interface of any of the music services I've used (Pandora, Spotify, Google Play Music All Access, Xbox Music), and it has no ads--either audio ads or banner ads.

It seems stable and bug-free.

At least for the moment, it's become my music service of choice in the car and walking my dogs, two situations where I use my phone as my music player (I have paid subscriptions to Xbox Music and Pandora, which I tend to use via PC).

 

Oh. Well, are there any new/upcoming Nexus phones?

Right there was your first mistake.

 

Guess who uses Helvetica Neue Ultra Light?

Apple.

 

Guess who doesn't have exclusive rights to the Helvetica Neue Ultra Light font? Apple

"Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann."

Spoiler

Helvetica is among the most widely used sans-serif typefaces.[26] Versions exist for the following alphabets/scripts: Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Urdu, Khmer and Vietnamese. Chinese faces have been developed to complement Helvetica.

Helvetica is a popular choice for commercial wordmarks, including those for Societe Generale, 3M, BMW, ECM, Jeep, J. C. Penney, Kawasaki, Lufthansa, McDonald's, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Electric, Motorola, Panasonic, Target, current logo of Speedway LLC, Texaco, and Verizon Wireless.[27]

Apple Inc. has used Helvetica widely in iOS (previously iPhone OS), and the iPod. The iPhone 4 uses Helvetica Neue Ultra Light.[28]

Helvetica is widely used by the U.S. government; for example, federal income tax forms are set in Helvetica, and NASA uses the type on the Space Shuttle orbiter.[1] Helvetica is also used in the United States television rating system. The Canadian government also uses Helvetica as its identifying typeface, with three variants being used in its corporate identity program, and encourages its use in all federal agencies and websites.[29]

New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) uses Helvetica for many of its subway signs, but Helvetica was not adopted as the official font for signage until 1989. The standard font from 1970 until 1989 was Standard Medium, an Akzidenz-Grotesk-like sans-serif, as defined by Unimark's New York City Transit Authority Graphic Standards Manual. The MTA system is still rife with a proliferation of Helvetica-like fonts, including Arial, in addition to some old remaining signs in Medium Standard, and a few anomalous signs in Helvetica Narrow.[30]

Washington's WMATA uses Helvetica on its signage for Metrorail. The Chicago Transit Authority uses Helvetica on its signage for the Chicago 'L'. The former state owned operator of the British railway system developed its own Helvetica-based Rail Alphabet font, which was also adopted by the National Health Service and the British Airports Authority. Additionally, it was also adopted by Danish railway company DSB for a time period.[31] North American rail company Amtrak used Helvetica typeface on its now defunct "pointless arrow" logo. New Brunswick and British Columbia provincial highways uses the typeface on the numbers on the highways.

CNN used Helvetica as its main font for much of its history; they recently switched to Univers. The NBA on TNT used Helvetica from 2002–05; NBA on ABC used the font during the 2003-04 NBA season. CBS Sports programs have been using Helvetica since 2006, particularly during its broadcasts of the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament and the NFL. The U.S. adaptation of The Office uses Helvetica in its graphics. UK television channel, Channel 5 (UK) used the typeface when it rebranded in 2002 as "five". The channel retired the logo in 2008. The PBS 1970 - 1971 Logo uses Helvetica Bold.

Helvetica - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

True, but is there a font they could have chosen that could have represented the platform and not their interests in copying other platforms? Yes. Roboto Thin. They could have used that and not had any sense of iOS in that app, yet no... they had to use Helvetica Neue. I can't see anything but Apple when I look at that screen, with Helvetica Neue and the gaussian blurred artwork in the background. It screams iOS7 to me. 100%.

But obviously that's just my opinion.

EDIT: Also, widely used? No. Helvetica is widely used. Ultra Light? Apple. Other than Apple it's use is very -extremely- far and few between. Roboto is close to Helvetica but there are certain very glaring differences in "Ultra Light" and "Thin" in a UX designers eye. VERY glaring.