Android!

[RhyssaFireheart]

Stopped to check out new phones tonight.  Played around with the Incredible 2, the Charge and an iPhone.

So what is the big drawback with the Samsung not being on the latest-greatest version of Android versus the HTC?  Someone pointed that out upthread when I asked for suggestions and I'm wondering if it really makes that much difference.  Because that Samsung screen was ever so pretty, although the price was a bit stabbity.  The iPhone felt so small compared to the Android phones, tbh, but it was very smooth to play with.  The HTC was nice, but being a bit smaller than the Samsung didn't make a big difference.

The prices though - ouch.  I get that the 4G LTE stuff is just coming out, but those prices were just painful, even with a 2 year contract.  4G is in my whole area now and I doubt I'll do so much traveling that I'd be out of the 4G zone, but is it really worth getting it now versus waiting a bit for the phone prices to come down.

All this prompted by my BB Storm battery going from just under 2 bars to dead in the span of 4 hours sitting on my desk at work doing nothing.  Sometimes the damn phone holds a charge like it's never going to run out and sometimes I have to toss it on the charger every night.

[rattran]

Samsung seems slow and ineffective at upgrading the os in it's phones, my gf has a Sprint Samsung, every push upgrade brings instability and problems. Verizon did release the DroidX2, LG Revo, and the playstation phone recently.

HTC also said today they're not going to be locking their bootloaders from now on. LINK

[Sand]

Hey Rhyssa Im not sure what you consider to pricey for phones, but I do know that Best Buy has the Nexus S for just $100 with a two year contract.
Not sure which store you went to but thought I would toss that out there.

[RhyssaFireheart]

I went to the local Verizon store where I've gotten my last few phones.  I wouldn't have an objection going to Best Buy, but Verizon doesn't have a Nexus S phone except for the HTC ones, right? 

[fuser]

Something stupid I realized about the Galaxy Tab 10.1. It has a wall charger and a normal USB port connector. If you try to charge off of a PC with the USB it will take forever (we're talking two days easily). It will trickle charge at a lower voltage taking a huge amount of time.

The wall charger has 2amp output vs USB's MAX 1amp, so use the wall charger 

[MuffinMan]

I went to the local Verizon store where I've gotten my last few phones.  I wouldn't have an objection going to Best Buy, but Verizon doesn't have a Nexus S phone except for the HTC ones, right? 

Nexus S is made by Samsung, Nexus One is an earlier model made by HTC. I don't believe that Verizon carries either of them.

[RhyssaFireheart]

I went to the local Verizon store where I've gotten my last few phones.  I wouldn't have an objection going to Best Buy, but Verizon doesn't have a Nexus S phone except for the HTC ones, right? 

Nexus S is made by Samsung, Nexus One is an earlier model made by HTC. I don't believe that Verizon carries either of them.

Ah, then that's out for me.  We have no desire to switch from Verizon. 

Oh, forgot to answer the "what's expensive" question about the phones - I'm talking $300+ for a new phone plus a 2-year contract.  $100 would be peachy but $300 or more is just making me look for knives to start stabbing folks with.

[MuffinMan]

I think the closest phone to the Nexuseseses on Verizon would probably be the Droid Incredible.

[Quinton]

It's not a phone, but if you want a stock-android tablet on VZW, Xoom runs Google's build, not a custom one.

[MahrinSkel]

Something stupid I realized about the Galaxy Tab 10.1. It has a wall charger and a normal USB port connector. If you try to charge off of a PC with the USB it will take forever (we're talking two days easily). It will trickle charge at a lower voltage taking a huge amount of time.

The wall charger has 2amp output vs USB's MAX 1amp, so use the wall charger 

USB devices aren't supposed to draw more than 500mA (and even then only if connected directly or to a powered hub), and devices that pull down the full 2.1A that many PC's will provide if the device tries to take it can burn out the USB port or even the power supply (especially in laptops).  Samsung is being paranoid and limiting the USB draw to the 100mA of an unpowered hub.  News stories about tablets setting laptops on fire would be...bad.

--Dave

[Sand]

$300 or more is just making me look for knives to start stabbing folks with.

  I'd be right there with you! Holy mother of God that's expensive when combined with a contract!

[Thrawn]

How many of you run rooted Androids?  My wife and I have been very happy with our Droids but people are always telling me I should root.  But no one has every really given me a good reason other than "You have like full rights and you are free from the man and stuff." pretty much.

Don't care much about custom themes, I use my phone to get stuff done, no to look at how pretty it is.
Don't care much about tethering, it's 2011, everywhere I am has internet I can use with the laptop if I need.

So how significant is the battery life and phone speed that rooting improves?  Does the phone really run much faster or is it just a few ms faster on some benchmark test?

[Quinton]

It's going to depend a lot on the specific device and the specific custom rom.

Though some people talk about "rooting" meaning "installed su so you can run apps as root" (which is unlikely to impact stability or features by itself), but others mean "completely replace the OS with a custom build."

Generally, if your phone works for you as is and you like it, leaving it with the standard OS build is probably the way to go unless you have some specific need not addressed by the stock software that makes it worth mucking with stuff.

In some cases the modified systems may give you better stability or more features.  In other cases things can be a lot less stable.  It really depends how well it's done and quality will vary.

I only really use devices that Google directly supports (apart from sometimes checking out a new device to see how it works), and I either run the latest public build, or something off the internal build server or my local build.  I have no experience running third party system images.

[rattran]

With my original droid, I rooted it for wireless tether and to overclock it a bit. I ended up going with a very stable rom to get froyo sooner, and got used to the tweaks. With my G2x, I rooted it to get rid of the metric asston of crapware T-Mobile decided to infest it with.

[MahrinSkel]

Tethering it to a linux box (using the dev kit) is the only thing that tempts me to root my Droid 2, for everything else (including battery life) it seems fine.

--Dave

[Thrawn]

We both just have Droid 1.  Mine at least has been pretty stable, I could probably count the crashes in a year on my fingers and I've had to remove the battery to force reset maybe 3 times.  The Droid 1 (Verizon) doesn't seem to suffer very bad from bloatware so I'm leaning to just leaving it un-rooted unless I come across some rooted only amazing thing I must have.  Thanks for the info.

[Tale]

I rooted mine to install custom firmware - I've got one of these babies and because they're so cheap there's a huge community of modders. There was a battery-extending version of Android 2.2 and now there's a customised version of Gingerbread (2.3). Sticking with poorer performance and poorer battery life of the stock ROM wasn't worth it on an expendable phone.

Do you have BYO phone plans in the US? I put my phone on a cheap contractless BYO plan in Australia. It's one of the major networks being resold under someone else's brand - same effect as going into a contract with the major network.

[Quinton]

The original Droid runs a stock Google build of the OS (similar to Nexus One, Nexus S, Xoom, etc).  It's a really solid (if not exactly beautiful) device.

I'm somewhat surprised to hear that there's actually better battery life to be had with the custom roms.  Most seem very performance/overclocking focused.  Of course for a device like the original Droid that's no longer getting OS updates, I can see custom builds starting to look more interesting.

[rattran]

I was using the CVPCS Sapphire rom on my original droid, low voltage, high clock. Much better battery life, with moderate use I was dropping it in the dock to charge every 3 or 4 days.

After using a few different Android phones, the clean 'google experience' is the best. Except the photo gallery. Really need to fix that pos

[Quinton]

The photo gallery is waaay overdue for an overhaul.  Expect better in Ice Cream Sandwich.

[Tale]

I'm somewhat surprised to hear that there's actually better battery life to be had with the custom roms.

The one I mentioned, FUSIONideos (Froyo based), saves battery by underclocking the CPU to 30MHz when the phone is on idle:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=970832

That and whatever else it did, added about a day of use to my phone over stock Froyo (which it shipped with). It also overclocks the phone when in use, if desired.

[Quinton]

I'm somewhat surprised to hear that there's actually better battery life to be had with the custom roms.

The one I mentioned, FUSIONideos (Froyo based), saves battery by underclocking the CPU to 30MHz when the phone is on idle:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=970832

That and whatever else it did, added about a day of use to my phone over stock Froyo (which it shipped with). It also overclocks the phone when in use, if desired.

On anything we've shipped, if the phone is idle, the CPU is halted entirely.   There are usually no frequency steps below 100-200MHz that make sense, since you end up having trouble servicing IO interrupts in a timely manner in the low 10s of MHz (we played with stepping down to 19.2MHz on MSM7201A targets like G1, and it was disasterous).

Of course I can't speak for what OEMs may or may not be shipping... if they're not tuning idle and suspend mode power management correctly there could certainly be some real gains to be had down there.

[Tale]

On anything we've shipped, if the phone is idle, the CPU is halted entirely.   There are usually no frequency steps below 100-200MHz that make sense, since you end up having trouble servicing IO interrupts in a timely manner in the low 10s of MHz (we played with stepping down to 19.2MHz on MSM7201A targets like G1, and it was disasterous).

Of course I can't speak for what OEMs may or may not be shipping... if they're not tuning idle and suspend mode power management correctly there could certainly be some real gains to be had down there.

Thanks, interesting to read. The phone ships with unmodified Froyo slapped on it - I don't think they paid much attention to tuning it. There are several large message board threads unanimously finding significantly longer battery time with the mod and I don't think I'm deluded. But they're all now switching to CM7 Gingerman.

[fuser]

Co-worker went with me to Google IO and his Galaxy 10.1 tablet has been having weird issues. It hard locks when the screen is locked and if its not powered off it will drain the battery completely.


Notice his "Mobile network signal" has yellow ticks in it which directly line up to a huge battery drain. Both tablets are WiFi only which is super confusing, we're attempting to get a good snapshot of his log via debug monitor to see what happens system wise when the system freaks out.

Any ideas on how to track down if its application based?

[Quinton]

grab a bugreport (adb bugreport > bugreport.txt) and dig through the battery stats and wakelock stats -- they're usually a really good indicator of what's actually keeping the device on and draining the battery (if it's software -- sometimes a driver bug may leave some peripheral in a high power state, but that sort of thing should be sorted out before ship...).

A goodly was upthread I picked apart a battery/wakelock report to show what's in it. 

[Bunk]

I am sad. The Sync system in my new car doesn't recognize my HTC Desire as a valid media device through USB, yet it does recognize a generic USB stick.

[MuffinMan]

Does it have an AUX jack as well or just the USB?

[KallDrexx]

I am sad. The Sync system in my new car doesn't recognize my HTC Desire as a valid media device through USB, yet it does recognize a generic USB stick.

Why don't you just bluetooth connect it?

[Bunk]

I can, but unfortunately Bluetooth Audio only supports playing all the music on the phone - no option for playlists or or anything like that.

Does it have an AUX jack as well or just the USB?

It's got the standard headphone linein, but that leaves you controlling the music directly on the phone.

I'm just going to grab a decent sized USB stick and drop everything on that. Bonus of no wires running to devices that way.

[Kitsune]

In belated answer to your question Thrawn, no, if you aren't hurting there isn't a compelling reason to root your phone.  A lot of the rooters are Linux geeks who consider recompiling a kernel to be great entertainment for an evening and will tinker with an OS just for tinkering's sake.  If that's not your thing, you probably won't miss out on anything important with an unrooted phone.

Rooting is, however, the only way to get new versions of the OS on older phones that won't get official updates.  A lot of manufacturers give the middle finger to their customers once a phone's over a year old and stop putting out updates for it.  If a new version of Android has a feature or fix you need, and your phone isn't being supported anymore, rooting and installing a hacker-built OS is going to be your only way to get it.

Likewise for stuff like the nook tablet where the official OS is intentionally stripped down by the manufacturer, if you want an un-gimped version of Android, gotta hack it.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Likewise for stuff like the nook tablet where the official OS is intentionally stripped down by the manufacturer, if you want an un-gimped version of Android, gotta hack it.

I wasn't sure where to ask about this, but does the nook actually have Android on it?  Because even if it's stripped down (and hackable), what are the major differences then between the ~$250 nook and a more expensive Android tablet like the Xoom or Galaxy Tab?

[rattran]

Likewise for stuff like the nook tablet where the official OS is intentionally stripped down by the manufacturer, if you want an un-gimped version of Android, gotta hack it.

I wasn't sure where to ask about this, but does the nook actually have Android on it?  Because even if it's stripped down (and hackable), what are the major differences then between the ~$250 nook and a more expensive Android tablet like the Xoom or Galaxy Tab?

There are differences in screen, processor, memory, etc. But not always huge ones.
Anandtech: battle of the budget tablets nook color vs galaxy tab

[RhyssaFireheart]

That was a good read, thanks!  Now I'm conflicted, although getting a nook just appeals to me for some reason, and the author of that article said rooting it was a simple process.

[Kitsune]

Yeah, people've been hacking the nooks pretty much since day 1.  But bear in mind that the things are cheap for a reason; 3-D games and anything demanding are not going to work well on them, ever.  If you just want a tablet for fucking around on the web and running some apps, it'll do fine for you, but don't expect it to have the ipad's performance at half the price.

[bhodi]

I have a hacked/rooted nook color and I love it, personally.

Then again, I use it as a mobile web surfer, angry birds player, and ebook reader. And twitter and gmail. But that's it.