I'm currently on Virgin Mobile. The deal is good however there is some caveats. When I got this phone (Kyocera Loft) I had nothing but fucking problems. The first month they had an outage which lasted a whole weekend. If you pay to topup online (I pay my bill through the phone) they fuck with the dates your bills roll over on. Sometimes the texts end up coming in 10/15/20 minutes later than when they were sent. I don't know if the texts is a phone issue or a network issue as I didn't have this intermittent problem until recently. If you want the latest and greatest phones you're shit out of luck because they have crappy phone selection. The only good phones they have are a Blackberry and the Samsung Intercept (2.2 is coming out either this quarter or 2nd quarter) which is the only droid phone. Edit: Apparently they also just released an LG Optimus which is Droid 2.2.
AT&T is buying T Mobile USA for $39 Billion. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110320005040/en/ATT-Acquire-T-Mobile-USA-Deutsche-Telekom" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/2 ... he-Telekom</a>
Anyone with a Android phone have battery charging issues? Specifically, I have an HTC Hero on Sprint coverage, roughly 9 months old. The problem is that recently, (1) charges EXTREMELY slow, to the point where it is barely charging at all. I'll leave it for hours, at it will go from 10% to 20% of battery power. (2) It loses power and dies on my a lot recently. I think this is more a consequence of (1) than an independent problem. It's probably not getting properly charged in the first place, rather than dying extraordinarily fast. It is unlikely to be a problem with the battery itself, as it has persisted despite me getting a new battery today. I intend to call Sprint, but any ideas TIB?
A bit late but, I'm assuming your phone isn't rooted? If it is rooted, I'd say you may have the wrong kernel version (I had the same problem with my Eris). If not, I'd definitely say it's just the phone itself.
Never been much for cell phone gimmicks.... just needed a phone that works. I use a blackberry nothing special. Highly considering getting an atrix just for this. Backtrack 5 on a phone. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.backtrack-linux.org/xoom/photo.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.backtrack-linux.org/xoom/photo.jpg</a>
I'm interested in a contract free unlimited talk/text/web provider. I want to be using an android phone. Does anyone have any insight? I don't mind buying the phone separately and tweaking it so that it works on the provider's network (assuming it's possible).
Definitely. I'm not sure why the Galaxy S2 isn't out in the US right now, but if you're looking for a new Android phone, that's the one to get.
Just got my wife an LG Optimus for our T-mobile service. It's awesome, and a little bit complicated. Any "must have" android apps you guys think it needs?
The phone is going through the battery like crazy. Is there any way to figure out if it's searching for wifi constantly or something that is draining it like that? She charged it all night last night and didn't use it today, but the battery was completely dead by 7 p.m.
Might want to see what apps you have installed. This just came out today: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/388831/motorola_ceo_open_android_store_leads_quality_issues" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.computerworld.com.au/article ... ity_issues</a> Not sure of the impact it has on LG, but I can imagine it'll be similar. 70% is an insane number to me.
Just in case it's your/her first smart phone, does she have an app killer? Absolutely crucial as apps don't actually stop running once started unless you use an app killer to shut them down manually. And running apps will drain your battery super fast.
In case you don't know already, Menu button > Settings > Info > Battery will show you a general breakdown of what's been draining the battery. My Galaxy S has been going crazy as well since I updated to the latest firmware version. "System" started using a huge amount of battery and if I leave it unplugged for the night, it'll probably be dead by the time the alarm is supposed to sound (All programs/data connections off, phone is simply idling). Tempted to wait for the newest official firmware, since it should be rolling out here soon, but if not I might just have to root the thing.
App killers are probably the worst thing for people to use to try and improve battery life. App killers are not "absolutely crucial." A well behaved app running in the background is sleeping in a suspended state, taking up no battery and little memory. When you then go to launch one of the sleeping apps, it comes up from its suspended state, taking far less CPU time to launch itself because its already done all the heavy lifting to start the app. Android is quite adept at killing off background processes when it needs memory. There are some specific times and ways you can use app killers correctly, but they are really very unnecessary. What you should do is look into your battery manager in the Settings menu to find out what is consuming the most battery life. Cell Standby is a big one if you see a lot of time without signal under it. If you see a particular app that's consuming a lot of time, you could try uninstalling it - a misbehaving app running in the background might drain battery life, but killing all of your background apps to stop one bad app is like setting your garden on fire to get rid of a weed. Sure, it works, but it's better to just find the weed and pull it.
Cell standby and wi-fi search seem to be the two biggest killers. I showed her how to turn off the wi-fi (by default it looked like all the signal acquisition shit was on) and it seems to be running better. Thanks guys.
Ideally you're probably right, but in my experience when I use an app killer my battery lasts a lot longer than when I don't. Using the a widget shortcut for the app killer means it takes an extra tap on my main screen to kill off the random stuff that's draining my battery and it has never had a downside for me. I'm not the cell phone equivalent of a "poweruser" though so it might just be that I don't run apps where killing them is problematic. And googlemaps navigation even has a built in protection against being killed if in the middle of active navigation and that's the only app I can think of that I use where that would be an issue. The other thing I do is I have the widget screen that lets me turn wireless, bluetooth, GPS, and a couple other things on and off from the main screen and I keep most of that off unless using an app that specifically requires it.
All that means is that you have one app somewhere that is behaving badly. Actually, I suspect your battery is NOT lasting longer because of the app killer, but if it is, again, it's because you have a misbehaving app - not because the app killer is good to use. App killers, by and large, are not better for battery life and recommending their use is bad practice because people tend to think they're necessary, and use them unnecessarily. I mean this with utmost respect, but if you're not the equivalent of a power user, perhaps you should refrain from making strongly worded statements like "app killers are absolutely crucial" in a thread targeted towards people asking advice from power users? I don't mean that to be as pointed as it sounds. But a lot of bad habits come from widespread myths perpetuated by people making recommendations who don't really understand what they're recommending. Heck, the Verizon Wireless employees tend to suggest app killers. It's simply not good advice. There are times and ways to use them, as I said, but with their general recommendation comes the assumption that background processes are bad, which is thoroughly incorrect. Also, it's not that killing apps is problematic per se. It's that it's unnecessary, and wasteful. Most background processes restart after you kill them, wasting battery. Apps that were happily sleeping and didn't need to be killed now need to consume extra resources next time you start them. Bluetooth and WiFi actively drain battery when not in use and are not bad ideas to shut off. If you turn off the WiFi notification event that tells you about available networks, WiFi drains the battery less, but still more than zero. GPS does not drain the battery at all. GPS is only active when you see the GPS icon appear.
It's not a bad point to make, but I think there's a value in a degree of pragmatic "man on the street" style experience with some of this stuff. For example, I listen to the This Week In Tech podcast. I enjoy it and the information and perspective I get from it. On the flip side, the way those guys use cell phones and tablets and computers is really different than almost everyone I know so sometimes the advice they toss out on how to use them isn't as helpful as the advice my Droid owning smart friend might give me or my ipad2 gamer friend. So i'll concede my language was too strong, but in my experience, using an app killer has three factors going for it. First, it doesn't do any harm for most people I've ever talked about it with. Second, it kills apps that drain battery life in the background (which my battery monitor tells me *is* happening when I don't kill them). Third, it's wicked easy to do. If tapping one icon gets me most of the utility that carefully scrutinizing every app for good or bad battery life design and then having to find alternatives for the bad design ones, then I think that one tap is probably the way to go for most people. Anyway, you *are* way more knowledgeable about this stuff than I am. Heck, I recall you helping me out on some phone stuff last year, so I'll leave it at that and work on moderating my language when giving advice here in the future.