Android phones: Tips, tricks?

[mubs]

Can't help there, I don't have an Android. Am still on Symbian.

I'll check tomorrow with some other guys in the office and get back to you.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm about to start a bit of an experiment. I made good progress on the pyramid of physical books in the general vicinity of my bed over my annual break. With the new year, I've decided that I'm going to do as much as I possibly can with ebooks. I have a number of different platforms and form factors to try out, but I've never really made any attempt to be a full time dedicated e-Reader sort of person, so hopefully this will show me something about the different devices I have to play with.

 

[ddrueding]

I don't have any eInk devices, so while I have played with them I haven't tried reading a whole book on one. I do quite a bit of reading on my ASUS Transformer and it works pretty well.

 

[Mercutio]

Between the 7" and 8.9" Galaxy, 10" Xoom, Fire, Nook Color and ipad2, I should be able to find something that agrees with me. If not, I've made arrangements to borrow a Kindle 3G, though in the past I've been annoyed with the slowness of e-ink screen updates.

 

[MaxBurn]

For best possible reading experience I think the eink kindle with buttons (non touch) is about tops. For me it's about not carrying an additional thing though and I read on my phone. Book is always with me.

 

[Sol]

I think the key with e-ink is just to get used to how long it takes to refresh the screen. Once you really know the timings you can hit the next page button before you finish reading the current page and have the redraw occur while your eye is traveling from the bottom right to the top left of the screen. A bit like writing to VRAM during a CRT displays vertical blanking interval.

 

[MaxBurn]

True and on the latest generation eink I think they made four or five refreshes in a row quick and the next one is the long slow one. The older ones did the full screen refresh every page turne.

 

[Mercutio]

The biggest problem I'm seeing is the proliferation of formats and reader applications. My format of choice is .epub, but few ebooks are legitimately available in that format, other than Barnes and Noble's download store. Amazon's .mobi reads fine in Kindle and I suppose that's fine. .PDF, .CBR, .LIT, et al. need readers of their own.

As a reader, I know I can use a tool like Calibre to convert ebooks into the format I like, but I suppose I really should take a stab at finding the most appropriate tools for each format.

For what it's worth, on Linux or Windows PCs, I do virtually all my reading in a web browser, mostly through the magic of Firefox plug-ins.

 

[MaxBurn]

All iBooks purchased books are ePub. I don't know what the deal is with their DRM but I have yet to find a book with it. Also if you go to the publisher you can get whatever format you want usually.

I generally use stanza as a reader. It also does some basic conversions and allows you to edit the book info. They pulled the PC app a while back but it can still be found.

 

[LiamC]

Aldiko can read epub and PDF on Android, and is free. I use that on my phone (Incredible S) and find that quite usable.

 

[timwhit]

I also use Aldiko on my Evo 4G.

 

[mubs]

Can't help there, I don't have an Android. Am still on Symbian.

I'll check tomorrow with some other guys in the office and get back to you.

I've never used a CDMA phone, so I have no idea how to change anything there. My experience is limited to GSM phones. In your world, that's either AT&T or T-Mobile (mostly).

In the GSM Samsung Galaxy S (also known as Vibrant, Fascinate or Captivate, depending on the carrier) running Android 2.2, walk the menu as follows:

Menu --> Settings --> Wireless & Network --> Mobile Network --> Network Mode

Here the choices are:

GSM only (i.e., 2G)
WCDMA only (i.e., 3G)
GSM or WCDMA

Hope this helps.

 

[MaxBurn]

Keep in mind that with locked phones a lot of those detail settings are hidden. Locked phones are quite common here in the US with subsidies. The idea is they choose the settings that work and that's all you need.

 

[Mercutio]

The Galaxy 8.9 has a 1280x800 screen, same as the 10.1" model, compared to 1024x600 on my 7". It weighs roughly 100g more. Both of them have ridiculously nice screens, but they're not the same. The 8.9's seems to have better contrast or deeper black levels.

On the other hand, just due to the physical shape and dimensions of the devices, it's more comfortable to hold the 7" model in one hand, and my 7" has a microSD slot instead of 16GB of fixed storage. I think a perfect tablet might very well be a 7" form factor with a 1280x800 screen.


woot's deal today is a $279 Toshiba Thrive, which is a 10.1" 16GB tablet. It's a bit heavy for a 10" tablet, but it has 1GB internal RAM and a USB root hub - meaning that users can plug in keyboards. As I understand it, mass storage is off the table on current tablets, but that doesn't mean a hacked firmware won't re-enable it somehow.

Anyway, it seems like a pretty good buy.

 

[Sol]

I've wanted a Thrive for a while (IPS screen and full size SD card slot = win for photography), but they only became available over here recently and are kind of expensive (Not quite 2x the woot price but not far off). And with CES next week likely ushering in a whole host of new gear to drool over I figure I may as well wait and see. At that price I'd grab 3, unfortunately Woot don't ship outside of the US.

 

[Mercutio]

Looks like it would be about $40 to ship one to Great Britain. And the power adapter would probably be wrong.

 

[Mercutio]

Aldiko is nicer than some of the readers I've tried.

One of the features I really would like to see is the ability to pick the background and text colors myself. I usually like a muted grey, blue or green background with black letters, or the inverse of that for night-time reading and writing.

As I suspected, 10.1 is a bit too much to use comfortably, especially in combination with the Xoom's kind of crummy screen. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the Samsungs, but it almost seems like the Xoom has a TN panel instead of something decent.

 

[Santilli]

New battery is in. Now have a thicker phone. It's charging, for 8-12 hours, with the phone on...

 

[LiamC]

Just got the Android 2.3.5 OTA update for my phone. Some nice graphical improvements.

 

[Santilli]

I'm at 2.3.4 and that's supposed to be current, at least for my phone.

 

[ddrueding]

1.5 is current for my phone. Feel fortunate

 

[Sol]

Got my first taste of Ice Cream Sandwich today, not impressed. Looks mostly like Honeycomb, only I remember Honeycomb having a menu button along with the back, home, and tasks buttons. In ICS the menu button gets moved around on a per app basis, it's horrible, as bad as the back button in iPhone apps.

Hopefully Cyanogenmod 9 will have a better implementation (I.e. just put the button back where it should be, duplicated if needed), and hopefully a better icon as well, an ellipsis rotated 90 degrees doesn't exactly scream menu to me...

 

[Santilli]

I am REALLY impressed with the battery.
http://www.mugen-power-batteries.co...e-htc-mytouch-4g-slide-with-battery-door.html
This thing is a beast. I charged the new battery, started using the phone yesterday morning at 5 a.m. It's STILL about half charged.;-O
They instruct you to run it all the way down to as close to empty as possible, then charge it for 8-12 hours 5 times.

Makes me wonder if the batteries that are supplied with the phones aren't properly
broken in, prior to going to full use. I can't see the companies charging and draining the batteries 5 times prior to use. So perhaps some of the batteries are functioning at less then their potential capacity?

What's the thing called when you end up with a sort of capacity limitation?

I've had the screen on bright, set never to go off, using it for about 4 hours as a music player, just amazing, after watching how quickly the OEM battery sucks eggs.

 

[MaxBurn]

~What's the thing called when you end up with a sort of capacity limitation?~

Memory.

I was under the impression the types of batteries used in cell phones didn't have the memory problem.

 

[Santilli]

Apparently that isn't the case with this battery.
Perhaps that maybe why the batteries appear not to last as long as they should?

 

[BingBangBop]

I thought the only mainstream battery technology with a memory issue were NiCad's. I also thought they weren't used anymore for Smart phones because of that and that they don't have the energy density needed.

I avoid any battery device that uses Nicad's like the plague. I've had too many bad experiences (short lifespans) with them

 

[MaxBurn]

I don't know. For me the secret of getting good battery life is learning which things eat battery fast and not do those things. Seems to me that the biggest complainers are the ones that don't really understand the things this mini pocket computer is doing.

A lot of apps like twitter use GPS which is a pretty good drain you might not realize or think about.

Some apps are buggy too, in the past twitter had a bug that turned on GPS but never turned it off when exiting, hour or two later you are dead battery.

Some store apps that have a barcode or QR scanner fire up the camera services which eats battery.

Don't have the phone pulling email every 10 minutes, not only uses battery but uses data.

The radio searching for signal in a low coverage area eats battery big time, if you have bad 3G try falling back to EDGE. If that's not even working go to airplane mode, you weren't going to get those calls anyway while the phone is displaying no service and constantly eating the battery searching for a signal.

 

[Santilli]

I didn't buy the stupid phone to have to worry about it's battery life. I don't want to bother with conserving a battery. Now I don't have to. My phone is pretty much stripped down right now, as much as can, app wise.
It looks like this battery will last two days, instead of 5-6 hours for the OEM.

 

[Santilli]

It finally ran down. So, two days charge, with my useage. It does take a long time to recharge, like 20% per hour.

 

[LiamC]

My upgrade from Android 2.3.3 to 2.3.5 has seen a huge improvement in battery life. My phone used to need charging every second day with light use. Life since the upgrade seems to have doubled.

 

[MaxBurn]

pic.twitter.com/D43pEKMv

 

[Santilli]

My phone is not a very good phone. The Wifi calling is ok, but the input microphone doesn't work well in speaker phone mode, something I use a lot.

My Bluetooth headset is great for music, but when people call, it works sometimes, usually not using WIFI calling.

You really need to watch tmobile billing. We agree on a phone price, then my bill goes from Plus 200 dollars to owing 177.00. Seems they failed to deduct the full amount to give me the discount we agreed on, on the slide, then added a bunch of charges as well.

I think I got it sorted out last night, but today the bill hasn't been changed.

Still, the phone does everything I want it to, and, I have unlimited calling from home, which takes any over the minutes issues out.

 

[MaxBurn]

I am still very glad I went prepaid. Even if I had to go on monthly to compensate for heavy usage pricing I don't think I would do a contract.

 

[Mercutio]

OK. I officially dislike the Fire. The screen is just "meh", it's a little heavy for its size, it has a retarded custom UI and if there's an easier way to bring up the Android buttons OSD than turning the screen off and back on while reading an ebook with the Kindle software, I haven't found it. Many of the apps I want to install aren't available in Amazon's app store, or are available but are blocked for the Fire. Yes, I can side-load, but the stock experience is pretty lousy; I don't even particularly like the Kindle app for reading.

My ebook library is all .epub files, with a few .CBRs and PDFs that are either technical or Role Playing Game manuals that I selected specifically because they're obnoxious to read on a computer screen. It's not really a big deal to convert files with Calibre, but it does kind of annoy me that I would have to.

I suppose it's obvious, but having spent time with a 1280x800 screen, reading .PDFs and .CBRs on something lower resolution is a little bit hurty.

Other I people I know who have them, my mother and my ex, for example, are quite happy with their Kindle Fires, so I don't know if my complaints are justifiable or not. My ex in particular saw it as a big upgrade vs. her Kindle DX, which apparently has horrible issues with presentation of .PDF files. She's also an ipad owner. Her take-away between the two products is that the Kindle Fire exists almost entirely to serve as a gateway to Amazon's services; services she likes and already uses. In her view, the ipad is an expensive and not really much more functional device, just geared to Apple's services (which she doesn't use) instead and with a lot of "nickle and dime" functionality being locked away in Apple's App store.

Next week, I'll be reading on a 64GB ipad2 myself.

 

[Mercutio]

And just to prove that MaxBurn isn't the only one following the mobile space, here's some interesting thoughts regarding Intel's x86-compatible Medfield SoC.

 

[MaxBurn]

I don't think you'll like reading on the iPad either. It's too big and heavy and the screen resolution isn't great for sharp text either.

Give the stanza app a try though.

 

[MaxBurn]

Oh and hats off to merc for finding the worst mobile site I've ever seen. Completely unresponsive for several seconds after loading? Notched scrolling? No navigation possible with forward and back buttons? It has it all.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm trying to be open minded.

 

[Mercutio]

For what it's worth, I'm not sure that Medfield is really all that interesting. Apparently Motorola likes it, but that could be because it got some kind of sweetheart on chips rather than any real advantages on the platform.

Intel knows which side its bread is buttered on, though. If ARM makes a decent dent in low power space and starts creeping in to Walmart sorts of vomit box notebooks and desktops, Intel should at least be able to compete there as well. It remains to be seen if it can. Maybe ARM will turn into the competition that AMD can no longer manage to be?

It's weird that we can talk about a type of CPU where Intel isn't the 900lb. Gorilla.

 

[BingBangBop]

I just got a kindle, I find that reading web sites in that format to be outright a frustrating experience. Changing the font size to make things readable only means I have too much scrolling to do. The only redeeming feature of its experimental browser comes when I can read something in "Article mode".

Would it be worth starting a thread for the Kindle? I'd kinda like a bunch of links where I can get free books. I have no problem using different file formats, even if what I have to do is run a conversion program. The reason I got one in the first place is so I can check out books from my local library but I find that 1 week (which is how long I'm allowed to check out stuff) is not enough time...