Google Android OS

[Looser101]

Maybe try this, Nate? http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1880810&page=1

[n_maher]

Maybe try this, Nate?

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1880810&page=1

I you. That seems to work, hopefully it'll last.

[n_maher]

evidently I spoke too soon. Even after doing the resets and also making sure that all of the case screws were tight still getting really crappy GPS reception. The signal to noise ratio does seem a lot worse than they were 3 to 4 months ago, which is really weird. More than anything it's insanely frustrating.

[raffy]

Nate, do you think this is someone Verizon can warranty for you? It's a possible hardware issue so it might be worth a shot.

[jvlgato]

My S3 on US Cell just got updated the other day to 4.1.2. Haven't used GPS much since, but looking at Maps just now, nothing looks amiss. I'll try walking around with it on at lunch.

Edit: Yup, walked around the hospital campus, and it seems fine.

Edited March 15, 2013 by jvlgato

[n_maher]

Nate, do you think this is someone Verizon can warranty for you? It's a possible hardware issue so it might be worth a shot.

I'm going to have to look into it. But I think the warranty on these things is something absurd like 90 days.

[Nebby]

If it's the S3 you have 1 year warranty parts/labor

 

 

SAMSUNG TELECOMMUNICATIONS AMERICA, LLC ("SAMSUNG") warrants that SAMSUNG's handsets and accessories ("Products") are free from defects in material and workmanship under normal use and service for the period commencing upon the date of purchase by the first consumer purchaser and continuing for the following specified period of time after that date:

 

Phone 1 Year 

Batteries 1 Year

Case/Pouch/Holster 90 Days

Other Phone Accessories 1 Year

 

 

 

 

http://www.samsung.com/us/support/service/warranty/SCH-I535MBBVZW

Edited March 15, 2013 by Nebby

[n_maher]

Thanks for looking that up, time for a phone call to Verizon...

[T-Bird]

I would tell them it just happened after the upgrade last week.

[Dusty Chalk]

Ringya has made it to Android

[blessingx]

New Icelandic Incest Prevention Alarm Android app. Just sayin'.

[spritzer]

Hey, it's a real problem...

[blessingx]

Taboos can be fun. 

[Dreadhead]

So I'm thinking of /planning on getting a HTC One because they have a $100 special credit for pretty much any old phone (ie my crappy old HTC fuze) through the weekend. Is it worth getting the 64 gb? I am guessing no one ever regrets getting too much storage.

[Dusty Chalk]

It's a matter of regretting spending money on something I never use -- I bought a 32GB and 64GB SD card for my phone, and I don't think I've even used 16GB, but I haven't started listening to music on it much.

[shellylh]

My husband has a Samsung Galaxy S3 and it often tells the wrong time (not even close).  Does anyone know a fix for this?  There don't seem to be any updates that he hasn't installed and I haven't found much online (I searched about a week or so ago but wasn't that thorough). 

[n_maher]

I'd get a warranty replacement, Shelly.

[Dreadhead]

I don't know. Now I am wavering. This phone does everything I ever want a phone to do. Of course the new phone would do all that but faster so maybe it is worth it. I don't know.

[blessingx]

Shelly is his time/date set to use network-provided information? Turn on/off? Time Zone set correctly? Sorry to hit the basic stuff.

[CarlSeibert]

Shelly - that's an unusual failure. I always thought that mobile phones just passed on the carrier's system time, which has to be really precise, thus making them perfect watches.

that said, my music server got screwed up once where the onboard hardware clock strayed from the network time by more than a few minutes, which caused NTP to think the change was intentional, so then on every boot-up, the time would change from the correct network time to whatever way-off-base value the hardware clock had.

If the symptom is that it's OK and goes astray after a reboot, you might have the same disease. On a full size system, it was super easy to fix. I just synced the hardware clock to the (correct) system clock. (hwclock -W, if I remember right). As long as the difference between the two times was less than some cutoff value, NTP could take care of keeping things in sync. On Android, the whole lack of root business could make my whole thought moot.

So, what Nate said, maybe.

[shellylh]

The times doesn't change after reboot. The only way we can reset the time is to restart.

The time settings are the defaults settings: Automatic date and time, automatic time zone (right now, everythng looks correct).

One interesting thing is that the default weather app on the "home page," or whatever it is called, also has the wrong time (sometimes the weather app has a different time than the clock time and they are both incorrect). Do you think a reset of the phone might help?

Edited May 4, 2013 by shellylh

[CarlSeibert]

While we're talking phones......

I'm now a week in with the Gallaxy S4. I'm real impressed. It's like having your tablet in your pocket all the time. All the 'tablet' functionality is superb. The display is razor sharp. We're talking like pretty decent printing on coated paper sharp. Rant (There are Hydrogen Audio-esque chuckleheads out there who claim the human eye can't detect quality above 300 PPI. Not. Forget assault rifles, there should be sanity checks before people are allowed to carry trigonometry.) /rant. All the places where it looks like Samsung customized Android feel successful. Dialogs and settings pages and the like are intuitive and straightforward. As opposed to my iPhone, if I want to set something up a certain way, it just does it - without me spending hours on Google and getting all frustrated. I wanted all my email accounts and texting to have unique ringtones, for example. No problem. It just does that.

The camera seems to be pretty good. It's big enough (12MP) to actually use. It's pretty sharp. Colors are good. Low light performance is good. It's no D-4, but it's a phone for crying out loud. I showed it to my boss. He was over the moon about the camera. So it's like having a real camera all the time, too. It actually focuses, by the way. In low light, it focuses in not too much of a hurry. Just like itty bitty real cameras.

For telephony, its RF performance is good but not as good as my old Motorola. Better than my iPhone on ATT by a long shot, but not like the Motorola. Audio on phone calls is very good to excellent. In the Motorola / Blackberry range.

The voice command system is like Siri. It's server based. Which means that if the server is hosed, so are you. It's not as clever as Siri. You have to know, for instance, "Make a note" will get you a note, but "Make a recording" gets you an offer to Google that. You have to say "Record voice". It doesn't like my Bluetooth headset. If I use the mic in the phone, it does what I ask. If I use the Bluetooth, it gets all bratty. I'm going to the off-price big box to look for a hopefully better matched Bluetooth tomorrow.

Audio for playing music is OK. With an amplifier, it sounds about like my iPod. Without, dynamics aren't so great , music doesn't have a great sense of time. A number of USB DACs are supposed to work out of the box with it. I haven't tried any yet. If that works, this thing would rock for music. Battery life seems good. I accidentally left Neutron playing for about six hours and it didn't murder the battery. It plays 24/96 FLACs just fine. (And they sound pretty darn nice) I wasn't expecting that. That's pretty cool. The earphones that come with the phone could be used for enhanced interrogation, not that that is exactly shocking.

Ergonomics are fine if you put a case or bumper on. Without one, I could barely pick the thing up. It's very, very thin. I guess that's fashionable, and if I need to carry it in a suit coat pocket, I suppose I'll appreciate it. But, come on - a big, shiny, thinner than all crap thing with rounded edges just isn't gonna be easy to handle. If the internet is to be believed, it doesn't offer much protection to itself if you drop it, either. I'll probably end up with a heavy duty case like an Otter box. The upside to it being so thin is that, even in an Otter box, it'll still go in my Nightize holster. Be forewarned that the thinness of the phone may mean that the hole in your case for your mini plug might not be very big and there might not be enough stock to safely enlarge it. I had to go to Rat Shack and be overcharged for a really fashionable mini to mini to adapt.

It's not perfect, but overall I think as I get used to it, this phone will grow to indispensable status. It's pretty effin fantastic, actually.

[jvlgato]

Thanks, Carl, great info!

I'm probably getting one soon.

[n_maher]

My GPS issues persist with the S3 so I'm hard pressed to recommend Sammy at this point. I'll be getting a replacement shortly so hopefully that'll take care of it. I love the phone otherwise.

[CarlSeibert]

Incremental update.

Best I can tell, when making a simple hands free phone call, S-Voice's interface dead ends into requiring input on the screen of the device. W. T. F. How stupid is that if you're writing hands free functionality. There's a "driving mode" , which dead ends at a point where it simply refuses input at all.

Gets worse. I tried two third party voice control apps and found they do the same thing. And I rejected a couple more because I learned before downloading them that they have that same fault. Really. Whaaat the eee fuuuuck? This is a sad comment on the people who are developing mobile apps these days. And a business model that doesn't support professionalism.

So ultimately, I settled on Dragon Assistant. It's not feature complete. It's Beta-but-they-claim-otherwise-but-you-dont-pay-for-it-so-it's-ok-right-ware. It will make a proper phone call. It's voice recognition works and it works with my existing headset. It works properly with the button on the Bluetooth headset. It did apparently butt activate itself in the holster and gobble up enough CPU to make my phone hot as a two dollar pistol once. So I'll make sure to end it within ten minutes or so of using it. That said, it looks like it will eventually be a dandy voice control option. Or they could fix S-voice. Apple eventually got Siri to be reliable.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a system update that includes some sort of overheating protection, either. I've only had that one incident, but the has been internet traffic to suggest that others have had overheating while playing games and the like

Sadly, it turns out that the Nightize "tall" holster isn't wide enough for this phone. Bummer. I'll carry on with my beloved, worn out, old Nightize until I find something just right.