All Things Android - Apps, Phones, Tablets - Discussion

Hence the removal of it in ICS. It's now contextual.

 

Well, that's software for you.

I don't like the idea of software keys - in Honeycomb it means you lose space on the screen because the notification bar is never allowed to be covered.
I'd much rather have proper hardware buttons for key functions.

 

No Ice Cream Sandwich for Samsung's Galaxy S and first Galaxy Tab - latimes.com

 

It has been already posted

 

Agreed, I dont want software keys. Hopefully some phones will keep the hardware button design.

 

I think most will, though some will certainly switch to all screen-based controls.

 

Merry Android Christmas!

My sister bought me a nice leather case with USB keyboard for an Android. Problem is it's for a 7". Anyone know if a case exists with keyboard for a 5" device? Thanks!

 

Thanks to everyone who gave me info on the Tablet S and the Kindle Fire. Just ordered myself a Fire. For the uses I was going to do (e-reader, Pandora player, web browser), the Tablet S's higher specs and gorgeous screen weren't enough to outweigh the 2.5x price difference. It'll arrive next week...I'm very excited!

 

Congrats. My dad got the fire for christmas today and loves it. It's very well done

 

About to get myself a Android tablet. Not spending more than $300 for it.

I'm thinking of getting either Kindle Fire $199 and rooting it or the Acer Iconia Tablet for about $60 more.

What do you guys think?

 

If you want a straightforward Android tablet out of the box, definitely the Acer. I would pick the Nook Tablet over the Kindle Fire because of a MicroSD card slot, 1 GB RAM vs. 512 MB RAM and if I'm not mistaken, it just got rooted as well.

 

Yea I might just go for the Acer. I hate the design of the Nook, so I never considered it.

 

Got my Samsung Galaxy S II skyrocket. Not much surprise with it since I've played with one many times at work since the release. Couple of n00b questions. What's the best remote desktop app? Anyone have any idea which of the scanner apps is the best, is it scanner buddy? I'm willing to pay for them.

 

Go with Logmein.

 

Are you talking about this scanner buddy app?

As for the remote desktop, you can use Teamviewer

 

Yeah, I was looking at the various scanner apps so I could listen to rail traffic as nutty as that sounds. Would beat using my bulky scanner and I'll look into teamviewer. Thanks.

 

There's always Splashtop too.

It's one of a number of premium apps GetJar have for free just now.

 

Yes! SplashTop. I use that app all the time, and it's awesome.

 

I'm kinda decking my phone out for all my favorite hobbies. So, remote desktop just one of those things I think will be neat. But first I kinda need to get off my duff and reformat an old computer I have specifically for the purpose.

 

I use this for my office and it works great. The free version is enough for most users and is one of the best remote desktop programs out there IMO. I have yet to test out the app version but I've heard good things about it.

 

HAL, if you could, could you take a look at this thread and tell me what else I can do to help him? Or is it perma dead? Bricked? I can flash a kernel but not a rom.. - xda-developers

EPIC EDIT : My fix WORKED! He's now from an unflashable brick to a working GSII

 

Just got a galaxy S2 X yesterday (Snapdragon & 42mbps model). Pretty good deal. Phone was $0 rather than $100 with the 3 year contract and I got a $150 gift card from Future Shop. I have 2 questions:

I still have a month to choose if I want the extra warranty plan. It's kind of pricy($13/month in 2 year or 3 year format) but:

No condition exchange for a new one (including theft and lost)
When Telus has a new phone (i.e, the Galaxy S3), no condition exchange for the new model. Which means you terminate your contract with a new state of the art phone

I'm usually against these type of warranty but this is kind of tempting. But on the long run, it's harsh. $468 for the 3 years. The phone is worth $600.It's a bit much.

Second, is there a way to enable auto-sync while on wifi and disable it on 4G?

 

That's just an extended warranty and not insurance then JCMS?

BTW Tried out teamviewer off Pistachio's first recommendation. Had to install extra software but works brilliantly for what I need.

 

Well, if you don't take it and you lose/break your phone, how much will it cost to replace it?

 

550 - (1/36) * 550 * number of months since beggining

@Metamorphical: It's called a service plan.

 

Heh, Service plans always sound fishy to me. I don't know about Future Shop but I remember when I used to work for SanDisk how people would get the extended service plans from Bestbuy on the MP3 players. Bestbuy would refuse to honor it within the first year of the manufacter's warrenty say if you dropped it and shattered the screen or even if it was a manufactered defect. They'd tell customers to call SanDisk for a replacement within first year. Article 1 obviously isn't covered under warrenty anyways and for article 2 SanDisk would refer them to Bestbuy for defects because they had the service plan. The poor customer would get stuck in a loop.

 

It's idiots like this that anger me to no end...

Editorial: Samsung To "Review" Possibility Of Galaxy S, Tab Ice Cream Sandwich Upgrades, I Try To Care

Sure, from a pure economic stance Samsung would be doing the right thing. But the one thing they're not taking into account is that you DON'T BURN YOUR CUSTOMERS. If you ever expect them to buy your brand again, you just don't. Samsung is in the wrong here, and the idiot in the article isn't being subjective to anyone else's views in the least.

Another thing to think about is that if Samsung could cut back on the amount of differing SoC's and stick with the ones they themselves develop like Exynos 3110, 4210, 4212, 5250... Instead of having to rely on Qualcomm MSM solutions for their LTE basebands and compatible SoC's, and Tegra for overflow capacity. With the partnership announced today between Samsung, Fujitsu, NTT DoCoMo, and several others, maybe they can put some pressure on Qualcomm. All I want to see is a device with Exynos and an LTE baseband that ISN'T Qualcomm. Qualcomm LTE basebands need improvement BIG-TIME. The first thing on the chopping block should be ANY component that's 65NM. We have fab's for everything at smaller processes than that, and smaller processes use less battery power and produce less heat.

 

Gotta Agree with you on the article. "Different Hardware". Whatever is the different hardware, it's all using ARM v7, an openGL-based GPU and the same Linux kernel. There's not much job to do

 

My Kindle Fire arrives tomorrow. Any must-have games I should get for it? Not interested in Angry Birds. Was thinking about an old-school RPG like Symphony of Eternity or Eve of the Genesis, but open to all genres.

 

Doodle Jump remains my favorite phone/ tablet game of all time. I have bought it on WP7, iOS and Android... lol

 

Couldn't agree more. Plus he's not taking into account that both Samsung USA and the us carriers haven't said a word yet. Until I hear anything from them I'm taking it with a grain of salt: the Charge and Stratosphere are too new IMO to be left behind.

On a slightly different note, I'm a bit annoyed by the somewhat recent revelation that the "RIL" on stratosphere is locked. This apparently means that until its decrypted, everything has to be based off of stock ROM components in order for the 3G and 4G radios to work. In other words, semi-custom ROM's a'la most modern Motorola's.

And here I thought I was buying a Samsung to avoid the Motorola like trap of having to wait for samsung to do upgrades before installing that version of Android? it's a big reason why we don't have CM7 or any ICS builds yet.

Still, I love the phone and this replacement's still rock solid. Overall no regrets.

 

First impressions:

The build quality is AMAZING. It's heavier than you expect when you first pick it up, but incredibly solid. I didn't expect this sense of tactile quality from a $199 device.

The screen is GORGEOUS. I'd heard mixed reviews, and if this is bad, I can't imagine what good is. The pictures are sharp and the colors are vibrant. It's a fingerprint magnet, but I suppose that's the case with any touchscreen device.

Reading is a real pleasure. Page-turns are fast and seamless, and the screen is nice and sharp. Great resolution for reading.

Setup was refreshingly simple. It was already configured with my Amazon account, and I was ready to use it within about two or three minutes of powering it on.

Packaging was simple and eco-friendly--shockingly so. No owner's manual (except for a single card), no plastic (except for the single plastic protected placed around the device), no styrofoam.

The size is just right. Big enough to read comfortably, small enough for a coat pocket.

Why do we just get an AC charger unit instead of a USB-and-charger combo unit, like you do with a normal Kindle? In addition, the charger unit is bulky and not very portable (for example, you can't fold up the prongs of the wall plug to make the charger smaller and prevent damage while stuffed into a bag). This is the one thing where I can tell cost-cutting to make the $199 price point was involved.

Onboard audio is, as expected, laughably bad. Shame the audio jack is on the bottom--this prevents you from setting it on the shelf of an exercise machine if you're using headphones and if it's in portrait mode instead of landscape mode. However, you can avoid this issue by just setting it down in landscape mode. Not the end of the world.

It would have been nice to have had dedicated buttons for audio controls and screen-rotate-lock instead of on-screen controls, but it's not the end of the world.

 

Sounds like you're happy with it overall!

When mine arrived, I was actually sort of worried pulling it out of the box that it could be damaged. The lack of packing materials blew my mind!

Hope it suits your needs!

 

Amazon has made big strides in reducing packing materials. I ordered a Logitech Anywhere MX and it didn't even come in a Logitech box. It was a wholly cardboard box with the mouse seated inside and the case, disk, and manual behind it. Really cool.

 

Is that what they mean by 'fuss free' on Amazon?

 

Yeah, they work with the manufacturers to box the Amazon-bound products off the line in packaging that doesn't include junk like heat seals, twist ties, and cable ties. It's pretty great.

Prevents this from happening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsuKYKsk6W0

 

Lol. Somehow reminds me of the time I had a customer that simply needed remove the battery from the Infuse 4G. Broke it taking an otterbox case off. No insurance. That was a pickle.

 

Nice job! The GS series, OG or the SII, are damn near impossible to brick... some people just don't understand that.

The RIL is like that on all Samsung phones. All the Galaxy S series phones running CM7 are still using the Samsung RIL, instead of a CM based RIL. It was particularly ugly on the T-Mobile Vibrant... ask AHL about that one.

Basically it's a hackjob by Samsung. It works, but only works well with their proprietary libs and frameworks.

My Dell Vostro came in that "frustration free" packaging... I almost had a fit when I opened the box. Then I realized it was kinda strapped to the inside with that piece of rubbery plastic... same with the Hitachi HDD's I recently ordered on Amazon. It surely takes you a bit to adjust to this type of packaging.

 

Thanks! Indeed. If I'm not wrong, if a flash with a .PIT + Re-format goes wrong, THEN it'll fully brick, right? Or when flashing a Bootloader with the bootloader section in ODIN?

EDIT : http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=20724865&postcount=17 LOL, that's what happens when I post RIGHT after I wake up... I meant "flash" not "root" :laugh:

Speaking of RILs and CM (codeworkx faced lots of problems with the RIL not working at all, along with many other kernel [Kernel version 3.0.9] related problems), codeworkx got the lastest XXKP4 (ICS) leak for the GSII, and is now able to work on CM9

But he still faces a problem with NITZ... When he fixes that, I think it's pretty stable to say that CM9 release won't be far ( For the GSII )

https://twitter.com/#!/codeworkx/status/152516449737515008

[REF] [ALPHA RELEASED!] [29/12/11] Galaxy SII CM9 Progress - xda-developers

 

Ahh, there's still hope then! Fingers are officially crossed.

EDIT: Has anyone tried BlueStacks App Player for PC yet? http://bluestacks.com/

I'm struggling to see the point, admittedly. If it let me view my phone's UI on screen and let me interact that way (like MyMobiler did for WM) then i'd be all over it.

EDIT 2: Holy crap, there's now MyMobiler for Android! http://mymobiler.com/ This has seriously made my day, if it's anything like the version for Windows Mobile, it's epic. Hell, I haven't tried it yet but I'm recommending it, I'm that confident.

 

I'm going to replace my current Android (Moto XPRT... very problematic)... what would you guys recommend?

Galaxy II S
HTC EVO 3D
... or something else from the Sprint lineup?

I don't really like the big form factor phones... so I've looked at the Conquer and the Evo Design... but I'm wondering if I should just get the bigger ones. If they carried the Galaxy Nexus, probably a no-brainer (although my trade warranty only allows phones $199 or lower).

What is probably near the top of my list is battery life so maybe I should look at the non-4GWimax phones like the LG Marquee. I had wanted a candybar keyboard (hence the XPRT) but the only other ones Sprint carries are all Moto which I'm trying to avoid... and I don't like the slide-out keyboard phones.

 

I'm currently using XXKI3 on my GSII, and I got 36h after a full battery calibration. I believe the GSII is the best choice, as you don't have the GN available. Or you can take a look at the Sensation...

 

I think the S II is probably the second best Android phone on the market right now (first being the GNex). If the GSII had been available on VZW I wouldn't have waited for the Nexus.

 

The Note comes first, the Nexus and S2 are joint second - IMO.

 

The Note is really too big... although... having something of that size would probably remove my need for a 7" tablet.

So it seems like the SII is the consensus... thanks for the advice.

 

The Note's size is really it's only issue, beyond that the hardware is the best you can get.
And the battery life would seem to be a fair bit better than the Nexus' if GSMArena's tests are to be believed ( and I see no reason why they wouldn't be).

You can't go wrong with the Galaxy S2 though.

 

I have Sprint as well and have the Galaxy S II myself. Definitely get it. It's a great phone all around. Though its pretty large at 4.5". Inside, spec wise its superior over the Evo 3D, which I was looking at myself before the GSII was available.

The Motorola Photon is a decent choice too. With a slightly smaller 4.3" screen. It's better than the Evo 3D but still not as fast as the GSII.

And definitely get it from LetsTalk. They have the Galaxy S II for $49
Samsung Epic 4G Touch (Sprint) | LetsTalk.com

 

I would disagree with that.
The Photon is basically an Atrix whereas the Evo 3D is a Sensation with a 3D camera - comparing my Atrix to my colleagues Sensation, there's no contest IMO. The Motorola's not a bad phone but it's really nothing special.

If it's a warranty thing, he may not be able to choose where he gets the handset from.

 

Well spec wise, Tegra 2 is better than the MSM8660. Tegra 2 has synchronous dual core, whereas the Qualcomm is asynchronous. Other factors i dont know.

True. If its just a normal new contract or upgrade on a line, LetsTalk works.

 

I'm avoiding Moto.

I've read the Photon is plagued with the same issues my XPRT is (overheating, random reboots, no sound on calls, etc etc). Supposedly a firmware update has fixed that for the Photon and I have updated my XPRT to the last one that was supposed to do the same but I'm tired of having to take it into the Sprint Store to have them hard reset it so I can restore all my stuff again.

Sprint has a 3-repair lemon rule where they'll replace your unit with something similarly priced... and the techs admit there are way too many software problems with the XPRT. I liked the XPRT because of the candybar keyboard and being only 3G, the battery life is decent. I don't even have 4G where I live/work.