Android phones: Tips, tricks?

Merc:
My on sale stereo headphones from Motorola, 35 bucks, allow me to change songs and volume from the headset. The sound quality is good to very good.
Bluetooth, no wires.
 
Why bother with having to plug in your phone every time you get into the car?

Just put your music on one of these and all the music is there and ready to sort through and play, however you like, as soon as you start up the car. They are available in pretty large capacities (16GB). Probably larger than the available memory on many average phones....and I'm sure they will get larger.
 
Clocker said:
Why bother with having to plug in your phone every time you get into the car?
Click to expand...

That thing is probably interesting, but I already have extra Android phones with 32GB microSD cards. You're right that I don't want to plug my phone in when I get in my car. The idea is to just leave on in there all the time.
 
This is actually the one I have. For $13 shipped, I think you just spent more time typing about how to get that phone to do what you want than it's worth. :-)
 
The Borg have arrived, and are quietly implanting stuff.

Spent the entire day trying to s-off and gain root access, if only temporary, without
loading another os.

After trying everything, I've found this update has shot me in the foot:
Unread Yesterday, 03:31 AM
# 37
Originally Posted by nlarge View Post
1.45.0013 hboot

oops, yeah, your phone was updated somehow to the last ota. not much you can do at the moment, but stay tuned until that HBOOT is cracked or something, people are working on things. also keep an eye on the HTC Bootloader unlocker, which will hopefully be fixed to work as it's supposed to.

So, prior to this update I would have been able to gain root access, and get rid of a bunch of garbage on my phone. Currently, I'm SOL.
 
Clocker:
That's too sensible an approach. Plus, it doesn't have the snob factor of playing your car sound system off a phone. I'm with Merc on this one. In particular leaving the phone in the car. I'm sure that will go over very well in the area he lives in and, the guys will look in, see the phone, and just go,
"Wow, dude! We get a cool phone, plus the sound system and amps?! WTF, it's Christmas! Thanks Merc!"
 
woot.com has a 32GB HP Touchpad for $220 today and a 16GB one for $170 (on deals.woot.com). Honestly, that's a pretty tempting deal. The Touchpads have nice screens. From the little bit that I've gotten to mess with one, WebOS is slick and different from Android, and HP is actually still supporting it. Of course, those things can also run Android as well.

If nothing else, they're around $50 cheaper than what competing Android tablets sell for.
 
I was pretty surprised by HP announcing that they're definitely going to continue to support WebOS, they're open sourcing it and they'll think about actually shipping products that run it...
 
Santilli said:
Clocker:
That's too sensible an approach. Plus, it doesn't have the snob factor of playing your car sound system off a phone. I'm with Merc on this one. In particular leaving the phone in the car. I'm sure that will go over very well in the area he lives in and, the guys will look in, see the phone, and just go,
"Wow, dude! We get a cool phone, plus the sound system and amps?! WTF, it's Christmas! Thanks Merc!"
Click to expand...

Haven't you seen Merc's version of "The Club"? Some call it "The Tree". It's not something the average gang banger can remove in a hurry.... :) Can't find the pic now.
 
The tree is a might impractical for most people.

IMAGE_119.jpg


I can't say I'm terribly worried about someone stealing my spare phone, if only because it doesn't have an Apple logo on it.
 
Something I've found that I like about the 10" tablet over and above the smaller ones: It's a good adjutant to the screens on the computers I'm using. With some experimentation, I've found a collection of widgets and tools to keep on my Xoom so that it's displaying useful information every time I tap it on. I kind of wish I had an easy way to attach it to one side of a monitor. Right now it just sits below my second monitor.
 
Walmart is offering the Kindle Fire for $200 with a $50 gift card this week. Which is a pretty good deal if you already buy groceries and stuff there.

It's kind of a toss-up between the two. The Nook Color is really heavy (almost 1lb.) for a 7" tablet, and it only has a single core CPU. But the Fire doesn't have any storage expansion and as much as I like the integration with Amazon's services, I hate the Fire's custom UI and how many apps need to be side-loaded before the device is reasonably functional.
 
Hi Moderator and friends:

Since this topic is
"Android phones:..."
Would you please move the tablet discussion to the tablets thread?

I like to check on progress on phones.
 
The Nook Color weighs more than my Galaxy and needs a rooting every bit as bad as the Kindle Fire. Fortunately, it is a straightforward process. BN even tolerates third party Android builds loaded off the SD slot.
 
Looking at all the ridiculous hoops I've jumped through, I think something I'd kill for is a single general-purpose Android rooting procedure. There isn't even a single procedure that works on every Samsung or HTC device.

I don't mind the vendor-imposed UI irregularities or App markets, or the sometimes vast differences in performance between similar device because in many cases rooting the device fixes those things. But if I have to spend four or six hours screwing around between patch levels and unlocking tools and moving roms onto SD cards and whatever else, that's annoying as all hell.
 
That's about the way it is when dealing with exploits. Same on apple for example on the 3gs phone there are different tools depending on what bootloader the thing has. IMO if they found one exploit that worked across the board that would be a huge cause for concern.
 
It wouldn't be so annoying, but in my opinion nothing Android is fully functional until I have superuser access (and I'm not sure that any istuff is EVER fully functional, given the app sandboxing and reliance on itunes). Things don't ship with the Google versions of tools, or they don't have access to a functional app market.

I know everyone wants to control the user experience and provide security but there REALLY needs to be a better way to handle this from an end-user point of view.
 
On the phone with HTC right now.
Apparently I'm not the only one with poor wifi calling quality.

As a phone, it isn't really good. Speaker phone was better on the Nokia 5320.

Soft reset, done. factory data reset.
call 888617 1113.

Wonder if this will take me back before the update?

We'll see.
 
Why are you using a phone on WiFi? Is it not in an area of good cell reception?
 
Wifi minutes are free on my Tmobile plan. Today I spent nearly 3 hours on the phone, at home, on Wifi, no charge.

Reception coming home late last night on their cell network was the same, or worse. It does appear resetting the phone has helped considerably. The microphone works better,
picks up farther away on speaker phone, and the speaker phone is louder.
 
On one hand I'm not sure why I need four cores in a phone but on the other hand I'm absolutely sure I want all of them.
 
I wish the extra cores would shut down and CPU slow down to save power when needed.
 
I'm pretty sure thats the idea in todays dual core phone CPU's. I think there is even one that shuts down two cores and relies on a very basic third core while the phone sleeps. You can't get multi day standby without it.
 
Android adoption rates are of lock-in by the carrier or vendor. As an end user the newer releases really aren't all that different anyway.
 
The aim of that article was developer support difficulties in having to develop software for a broad range of versions and thus not being able to use new features in the os, or worse having to detect which os they are on so they can select which feature to use. On the forum here we have someone commenting about something not working in a 1.5 version of android to bring that point home. The users might not care what they have or can get but they will certainly bring it back to the developer when something doesn't work for them, the android market is a bit hostile for developers.
 
Just like computer gaming, I'd say you concentrate on what most people have (Android 2.3) and plan ahead accordingly. I'm not aware of any Android applications I use right now that require any newer release of Android than 2.3; almost everything comes down to either file manipulation or access to an internet service.
 
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