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Android Upgrade Process: Galaxy S to Note

February 15, 2012

Vista busy cursor  Yesterday I ordered a new Samsung Galaxy Note as an upgrade, to replace my Galaxy S.  It should arrive sometime today and I need to prepare. I want my new phone to be set up with everything I need as quickly as possible and as painlessly as possible: my apps, my email, my contacts, my calendar, my various customisations. This should not be a major planning exercise but does need a little bit of thinking ahead and a few preparatory steps.

Contacts, Email & Calendar

Trivial. My contacts, email, calendar are all tied to my Google ID. I use gmail and other Google services for everything. Once I have logged into Google on my new phone all these things will just be there. No help from Yoda do I need.

SMS/MMS history, call log, browser bookmarks, alarms

Do I actually need this? I have kept my texts from when I first had the phone, but rarely had occasion to look at old texts. I can think of one occasion – my son had texted me the postcode for his flat in London. I wanted to mail him something and had no other record. So there is little harm done if I start with a blank SMS history but as an experiment I am going to try to transition it to the Note.  I’m using  myBackup Pro to back up various items to the cloud: Call Log, Bookmarks, SMS, MMS, Alarms.  I will attempt to restore these into the Note.  Could be interesting. The bookmarks won’t be complete as I have taken to using the Dolphin browser which has a separate bookmark system.

Done it. Backup uploaded.  The app helpfully has a facility so you can email yourself the access details for later retrieval of the backup from the cloud.

Apps

Also easy. I installed AppBrain and used it to create an on-line record of all my apps. I should be able to rely on the Android Market to recover all my paid apps but possibly it won’t have the free apps.  I currently have around 80 apps in total, most of them free ones. That’s where AppBrain comes in; I should be able to install them one by one from there. Time to do an AppBrain sync.  Done.

I installed Google Currents from the apk as it has not officially been released in the UK.  I still have the file as an email attachment.  It is out of date now but still works.  That one will have to be done manually.

Photos and other media

I’m just going to copy the entire accessible file system, both on-board and on micro SD card, to my PC.  I can copy as many of my media files as I want on to the new phone. Quite a lot of music.  Some photos. I will in any event take the opportunity to back my photos up the the cloud.

Tasker

I use the Tasker app to customise the behaviour of my phone. This includes handy buttons to turn brightness up to max (handy if you are out in the street and can’t see your screen), auto switching of wifi on and off depending on whether I am at home, switching off notification sounds at night time, etc.

In practice the most reliable way is to have Tasker email the XML for each behaviour profile to my gmail. I can load the profiles back into Tasker later in the new phone.  Done.

Just realised that this approach does not save the individual task definitions that are used to power the icons for max brightness, silent, quiet, SMS reader on etc.  So I have turned on Tasker’s autobackup to create a file with the complete user data in XML.  This gets copied to the PC with the other files and will be available for restore in the Note.

GO Launcher Ex

Nearly forgot! I have a lot of customisation built into my launcher settings. But there is a backup option.  I have just run the backup and the file will be copied to my PC with all the other files.

I think I am good to go when the new phone shows up.


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Taking Note of the Galaxy

February 12, 2012

Vista busy cursor  Just a few days ago I had more or less resolved not to upgrade my end-of-contract Samsung Galaxy S, instead hanging fire until the rumoured Galaxy SIII is on the market, something which will probably not happen until the summer.

But I have started to come to the view that there is a truly great option available right now, the Samsung Galaxy Note. When it was first announced I dismissed it as a curiosity, an oddball device for a very niche market. Somewhere between smartphone and tablet and with, of all things, a built-in stylus reminiscent of my Windows Mobile devices of old.

I may have been too hasty. The Note is creating quite a buzz. People who actually spend any time with it seem to fall in love.  It is not the stylus (sorry, S Pen) that is of particular interest, thought it might be useful for occasional quick note taking.  It seems to be the fabulous screen, just big enough to make browsing, watching video and reading e-books a delight, while still just portable enough to carry everywhere as your day to day phone and music player.  And the performance is streets ahead of anything else on the market, all with quite passable battery life thanks to the souped up 2500 mAh battery.

The fundamental question is around the form factor. Is it the best of all worlds, combining the benefits of a smartphone and tablet in a single device? Or might the opposite be true, that it is too big for sensible use as a phone while still being too small to serve properly as a tablet? The reviews from the Verges, Engadgets and TechRadars of this world all fail to give the Note a ringing endorsement. They are charmed by the screen and the performance but all feel the device is too big to fit in your jeans pocket so not really suited as a regular day to day phone.

If, though, you read the user comments on those reviews you get a different picture. People who have bought the phone seem to get used to the size quite quickly and they all think it is great. No-one appears to regret buying it.  It is bigger than typical smartphones but not too big to carry in a trouser or jacket pocket. For women it is even easier as it will fit in their purse, indeed Samsung have been quoted as suggesting they planned to market the Note primarily to women in the UK because of the purse compatibility.  Not that this will stop many men being just as keen on the Note.

My current phone contract is up on Tuesday and there is no longer any doubt in my mind. I won’t be waiting for the Galaxy SIII when I can have a Note right away.


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A double twist in the podcatcher mix

February 5, 2012

Vista busy cursor My last post was a head to head comparison of DoggCatcher and Pocket Casts as if they were the only two contenders in the Android podcatcher market. If I say so myself I was really quite dismissive of others such as BeyondPod, ACast, Google Listen and a rag tag of also-rans.

Strikes me though there is another option coming up on the rails from a slightly different direction. DoubleTwist, which has for ages been the default choice for music playback on Android, is starting to flesh out its podcast credentials and pushing very hard to get into that niche. No doubt it sees an opportunity to win afficionados already using DT extensively for music playback.  Certainly there are attractions in having a single app to cover both music and podcasts, as with say iTunes in the Apple world.

Users of DT for music would once have had to get music onto their Android phones by syncing with their computer, using a USB cable.  Then DT introduced AirSync at extra cost which allows the same thing to be done wirelessly over the domestic wifi.  DT are now trying to peddle this wireless syncing as a key feature for podcast consumers, as if DoggCatcher and all the other established podcatchers had not been offering wireless podcast downloads from day one.

So is DT any good for podcasts? The short answer so far is “no”. Adding podcast feeds is a failure, on my phone at least. There appears to be only the choice of adding from a set list under each of a number of categories, and a “search” feature. I couldn’t get the latter to work – as I type in search terms the search symbol disappears and there seems no way to actually invoke a search. Nor is there any way to add an RSS feed directly from the URL, so far as I can see.

The other killer is that there is no option for variable podcasts playback speed. I would never get through my podcasts of a week if I could not listen at say 1.5x speed.

DT seems to be a long way from being a viable podcatcher right now. They would do better to fill in the gaps in their feature list before starting to push it. For myself I will continue to use DoggCatcher which is now the complete, almost faultless podcatcher.


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What nextus?

February 1, 2012

Vista busy cursor How time flies. My Android phone is eligible for an upgrade on 14 February. That’s when I complete month 17 out of an 18 month contract on T-Mobile. 

Can it really only be 16 and a half months ago that I was still using a Windows Mobile phone? Yes, I mean clunky old Windows Mobile that needed a stylus, not the new Windows Phone with its Metro interface.  I can barely remember my old HTC XDA Stellar (Tytn II).  I’m sure it’s still lying around somewhere.

My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S, running Gingerbread 2.3.3, and I’m pretty certain my next phone will be another Android device. Well I can’t see myself buying an iPhone.  I still feel as I did 16 months ago. I think the iPhone is a stunning piece of engineering, design and software+hardware integration. But it’s a bit small screen-wise, inflexible in terms of UI and lacks other features I value such as tethering and turn-by-turn Google navigation. The worst aspect of the locked-down UI is that sliding finger keyboards (as typified by “Swype“) are not permitted on iPhones.

Don’t I need Siri? After the novelty wore off I might use it on occasion when I remembered it was there.  I’ve had a play with Siri on my kids’ iPhones. It is better than anything currently on Android (closest to date is Speaktoit Assistant) but that won’t last long.

What about Windows Phone? I actually think these are fantastic phones. They are refreshingly different and have if anything gone beyond iPhone and Android by looking for a new paradigm to supersede the grid of icons. The idea of “hubs” to integrate contacts/social networking/other services does offer something new and potentially superior. I do love the look and design of the high end Nokia Lumia phones. I steered clear of Windows Phone 16 months ago because the platform was just launching and I expected teething problems. I had no wish to be an early adopter and hindsight confirms I was right to be cautious.  But what about now that Windows Phone is past the early creakiness?

No. I really want Windows Phone to muscle its way into the market and be a major player, but I don’t actually want a Windows Phone for myself right now. I feel it is a phone that will work best for people who live on social networks, who will make the most of the integrated  hub concept.  I don’t use Facebook, don’t hang on every tweet, don’t have an Xbox, don’t use Microsoft services such as Live, Skydrive and hotmail.

I’m primarily a Google services user. I want gmail, Google calendars, Google maps and turn-by-turn navigation. I use Google+ but not on my phone. And I like to tinker with my user interface. Get it all organised exactly the way I want it.  I want to use an app like Tasker to fine-tune the phone’s behaviour. I want the Swype keyboard, which knocks all others into a cocked hat. And all of that points back to Android.

My initial temptation was to go for the Galaxy Nexus. I hate manufacturers’ insistence on trying to differentiate themselves by adding skins to the OS. Ice Cream Sandwich does not need “improving” and certainly not at the cost of being beholden to manufacturers and carriers for months while they add their skins and bloatware to new releases of Android.  The Galaxy Nexus would cut through all that, and is a fine device. But Leo Laporte put me off it a bit on “Before You Buy”. Mostly because of his rant over the pentile screen although no-one else seems to have a problem with it. I have a pentile screen on my Galaxy S and it doesn’t bother me.  Leo also objected to the soft buttons replacing traditional capacitive hardware buttons.  I actually think that is key to the concept of ICS unifying tablets/phones and may only work clunkily now because many apps have yet to be optimised for the new OS.  Still, his hostility gave me pause.

My carrier, T-Mobile, don’t offer the Galaxy Nexus in the UK. I won’t switch carrier, no-one else matches the signal strength where I live. There are third party vendors offering the Galaxy Nexus on T-Mobile contracts but I’m not loving the packages on offer.

My best hope is the Samsung Galaxy S III but that may not be out till the summer.

You know what? I’m going to stick with my Galaxy S for now, and switch to a SIM-only 30-day rolling T-Mobile contract.  I can keep my physical SIM and number and cut my monthly outlay to £15 per month. When someone finally brings out a new ICS phone worth having, that’s available on T-Mobile, I’ll take out a new 18 month contract.


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DoggCatcher vs Pocket Casts in More Depth

January 22, 2012

Vista busy cursor DoggCatcher has established itself as the leading Android podcatcher but is now facing serious competition from Shifty Jelly’s Pocket Casts.

There are other options. BeyondPod has its devotees but I could not get to grips with it at all. ACast served me well for a while but has now fallen by the wayside.  Google’s Listen is not a serious contender for podcast addicts.

Doggcatcher is clearly a stable, mature product and my podcatcher of choice for the last year or so, but I have on more than one occasion been tempted to give Pocket Casts an extended try-out. Currently I am back to DoggCatcher but until recently was using both: Pocket Casts for audio podcasts and DoggCatcher for video podcasts. It may seem like an odd thing to do but there are reasons for it, as will become clear soon.

I have already commented on the choice between these two podcatcher options, but now would seem as good a time as any to take stock of where they are up to and go into the relative pros and cons in a bit more depth.

DoggCatcher

Summary: Close to faultless. Very stable, force-closes are few and far between.  It does trip up very occasionally but mainly on BBC podcasts – for some reason BBC podcasts are surprisingly troublesome even on simple playback. DC’s visual design is fine, if not very distinctive. Don’t much like the logo. Overall, though, a sound, mature product and definitely the default choice.

Advantages:

  • Stable, lean, reliable, force-closes are rare
  • Good podcast search options when adding feeds
  • Audio and video automatically added to separate playlists
  • Option to play video podcasts in the external video player app of your choice
  • Variable playback speed, but you need to install the Presto app at extra cost
  • Virtual feed option (so you can add media files for playback manually rather than via an RSS feed)

Disadvantages:

  • Annoying bug when used with stereo bluetooth earphones or other such devices. Unpredictably can be unresponsive to the skip 60 seconds forward button (on the bluetooth device) and repeated attempts to skip can result in skipping to start of next podcast in the playlist, the current one being flagged as “done” and removed from the playlist.  Infuriating if you are listening in the car or otherwise not in a position to fiddle around with your phone to resurrect the podcast you were in the middle of
  • Rather conventional, dated design

Pocket Casts

Summary: A podcatcher with attitude. The ‘strines behind Shifty Jelly are colourful outgoing individuals, and their personality has pervaded their product. Staid it is not – the looks are modern and brash but stylish at the same time. Then again looks aren’t everything and PC still has plenty of iterations to go before it performs as smoothly and seamlessly as DC.

Advantages:

  • Attractive modern look and feel – very fresh
  • Very fast check for feed updates (because check is carried out on server not by app in phone)
  • Perfectly adequate podcast search options when adding feeds
  • Variable playback speed, but you need to install the Presto app at extra cost

Disadvantages:

  • Seems to hog more and more of the phone’s resources with continued use, with a corresponding tendency towards ever more frequent force-closes. With heavy use, can cause your phone to crash more often than you’d like (maybe less of a problem if you have a recent high-spec device).  Is getting better, with upgrades, but still a fair way behind DC
  • Breaks a number of implicit Android UI design conventions. Settings are selected only through the menu built in to the app’s UI, not accessed through the hardware menu button. Behaviour of back button counter-intuitive – typically exits app rather than returning you to previous screen
  • Episodes which could not be downloaded at the first opportunity (because, say, app was set for wifi download only and at the time no wifi was available) do not then automatically download once the phone reconnects to the wifi. The user has to instigate these downloads manually
  • Single playlist for audio and video – very inconvenient if you are on a long car journey and only want audio podcasts, saving video for when you can watch it rather than just hear the audio
  • No virtual feed option

So why was I using PC for audio and DC for video for a while? I mainly listen to podcasts over bluetooth stereo and DC’s podcast-skipping bug mentioned above was starting to drive me nuts. PC does not suffer from the same problem so I switched but then found I was getting my video podcasts mixed in with the audio ones. So using PC for audio podcasts only and DC for video only looked like the best of both worlds, particularly since DC allows me to use the excellent MX Video Player for playback. In the end though the force-closes and crashes with PC were too much and I am back to DC for everything.


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Am I bovvered?

December 20, 2011

Vista busy cursor Samsung have confirmed that the Samsung Galaxy SII and a number of their other Android devices are slated to get the Ice Cream Sandwich treatment, the former in the first quarter of 2012. The original Galaxy S is not listed, so we can take it that it has been passed over for the ICS update.

As the proud owner of a Galaxy S, I find myself asking: am I bovvered? Do I feel slighted by Samsung for their failure to include my phone in their update plans?

Maybe I might if I had bought my phone on a 2 year contract.  I picked mine up in September 2010 on an 18 month contract and am advised I can claim an upgrade from the middle of February. So I think I can wait. The phone works fine and I doubt there will be that much in ICS that will revolutionise my use of it.  I’m more interested in upgrading the hardware than the software, and have my eye very firmly on a Galaxy Nexus.  Bigger, higher resolution screen, more powerful processor, more RAM. No carrier bloatware and no waiting on carriers for upgrades. Goodbye to Samsung KIES.

I will keep my Galaxy S to try out rooting and switching ROMs.  I have never dared mess about with my main day to day phone for fear of bricking it.  I need it to work and cannot take a chance on ruining it while voiding my warranty.  Once it is a spare phone, I can use it to experiment on with very little to lose.


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A Fling with A Pocket Cast and Back to the Dogg

December 3, 2011

Vista busy cursor I have not looked back since ditching ACast in favour of DoggCatcher as my Android podcast app of choice. ACast had been reliable to a fault in fetching new podcasts quietly on cue in the background and at first I was not convinced DoggCatcher was quite as dependable.  But it soon settled down to a seamless podcast capturing service and I stopped worrying about it.

There was though one infuriating bug, affecting playback via stereo bluetooth. I nearly always listen to podcasts over A2DP, whether in the street with my bluetooth headset or in the car. I have my Android phone set up so that the forward/back buttons skip ahead 60 seconds or rewind 30 seconds respectively, very handy for fast forwarding past adverts and occasional uninteresting content. The skipping/rewinding always worked flawlessly if I was using the DoggCatcher interface on the Android handset itself, but not so if using the physical buttons on the bluetooth headset or in the car (my Lexus has the audio controls on the steering wheel). The skip forward in particular was very laggy, either failing to work at all or doing so after a long delay. Worse than that, a second attempt to skip forward had the infuriating tendency to jump directly to the start of the next podcast on the playlist, meanwhile deleting the one I had been listening to.

This became so irritating that I tried a newer podcast app, Pocket Casts. I have to say that I initially liked Pocket Casts a lot. I liked the colour scheme and the modern, slick look of the interface. I loved the fact that the response to forward/rewind button clicks over bluetooth was instant and never abandoned a podcast in mid-stream. Against that, it was very fussy about podcast downloads. The feed update cycle was lightning fast, because it happens on the vendor’s server, but if no wifi was available the downloads themselves would be flagged as failed.  That is fair enough to the extent I had specified download over wifi only, but I expect the podcast app to complete the downloads automatically once I am back in a wifi zone. Pocket Casts requires you to restart such downloads manually. And the force closes on playback started to get out of hand.

In the end I went back to DoggCatcher and was just careful with skipping forward when on bluetooth. That is, until I contacted the DoggCatcher developer and pointed out the problem, citing Pocket Casts as an app which gets that bit of functionality right, even if other problems let it down.  To his credit, the developer has taken note and addressed the problem.  As of the latest version, numbered 1.2.2919, the bluetooth bug has gone away. DoggCatcher now reigns supreme.


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ACastaway Catches a Dogg

August 18, 2011

Vista busy cursor Immediately after buying my first Android phone last September, a Samsung Galaxy S, my first priority was to find a podcast app. That’s what I use my phone for – listening to podcasts, audiobooks and, yes, occasionally phone calls.  There is a “native” podcast app called Google Listen but I didn’t know about it until later so went hunting in the Android Market.

The number one Android podcast app appears to be DoggCatcher, but it wasn’t free to try so I picked on another reasonably popular choice, ACast, just to get started.  ACast is ad supported and therefore free. It worked fine so I stuck with it. After a while I paid for the companion ”unlock key” app that switches off the ads.

ACast served me well for months but ultimately it all went a bit wrong and had to go.  It is all to do with variable listening speed and it may have been my own intervention that helped set ACast on a downward path. I tend to listen to podcasts at 1.5 x the normal speed, just to get through them all in the available time.  If you have an iPhone there is a native option to vary the playback speed, but there is no built-in equivalent in Android.  I got by for a while using the web-based Podshifter service which creates new RSS feeds delivering sped-up versions of all your favourite podcasts, but Podshifter has its own downsides including, at times, a long wait for the Podshifter servers to process the podcasts you are waiting to listen to.  

I asked the ACast developer if he would consider adding a variable speed playback feature.  Somewhat to my surprise he did just that, bless him. Maybe he was getting a lot of requests along those lines.  Variable speed playback was added as an “experimental” feature.  At first it was prone to jitters but he kept releasing updates and it became quite stable.  But other bugs began to creep in. ACast developed some annoying habits. If you tried to advance to next podcast it would sometimes go to the end of the current podcast but not advance the “now playing” cursor.  Worse than that, it became prone, when coming to the end of one podcast and starting the next, to grind to an inexplicable stop.  Often it would run out of memory and crash, needing an app restart before being able to resume playback.  

These niggles were getting worse.  I was deleting every other app I thought might be starving ACast of memory space.  The developer seemed to disappear.  No more updates or attempts to fix the problems.  Maybe he wasn’t making enough out of it and gave the whole thing up as a bad job. Who knows? In the end with regret I cast away ACast and went with the crowd, purchasing DoggCatcher.

The latter now also supports variable speed playback but requires you to purchase the separate Presto app at extra cost. Still, I was out of options and the costs are hardly prohibitive.  I now wish I had bought DoggCatcher on day one.  It is the top podcast app for a reason.

It is simpler to use than ACast.  It took a while to get used to the different UI paradigm but I’ve got it working the way I want it.  It doesn’t seem quite as robust as Acast when it comes to waking up every X hours (or whatever interval you set) and checking for and downloading new podcasts. ACast was rock solid in that regard at least and DoggCatcher occasionally seems to be playing catch-up. But the sound quality with speeded up podcasts is far superior.  I had not appreciated how much the ACast variable speed feature was impairing the sound quality until I switched to DC.  Presto does a far better job – hardly any change in quality, just faster, and no jitters or jumps. And DC does not get stuck on one podcast or stop unexpectedly.  It is less memory hungry – no crashes.

But the most amazing thing is the reduced battery consumption!  Before I upgraded to Gingerbread (Android 2.3) around a month or so ago there was no chance of getting through the day without a battery boost on the mains or via USB cable from my PC.  The upgrade from Froyo to Gingerbread made a quite noticeable difference – I could get through the day without charging maybe 2 days out of every 5. Since ditching ACast in favour of DC my phone nearly always lasts the day, often quite comfortably.  And I am not using it any less.  The only conclusion I can draw is that ACast is an absolute battery hog.


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Putting the Galaxy to rights #10 – Silent Night Tasker Profile

June 16, 2011

Vista busy cursor A while back I wrote a post about the Tasker profile I use to ensure notification sounds on my Samsung Galaxy S are automatically muted at night, from midnight to 8am.

The same profile would work on any Android phone. For the record this is the Tasker “script”: 

Profile: "Silent Night
Context:  
 Time: From 00:00 Till 08:00 
Tasks:
 Enter: "Mute Notifications" 
  A1: Notification Volume [ Level:0 Display:Off Sound:Off ] 
  A2: Notify Cancel [ Title: Warn Not Exist:Off ] 
  A3: Variable Set [ Name:%SNIGHT To:ON Do Maths:Off
      Append:Off ]
  A4: Variable Set [ Name:%VOLMODE To:L Do Maths:Off
      Append:Off ]
  A5: Silent Mode [ To:OFF ] 
 Exit: "Reinstate Notifications" 
  A1: Notification Volume [ Level:5 Display:Off
      Sound:Off ] 
  A2: Variable Set [ Name:%SNIGHT To:OFF Do Maths:Off
      Append:Off ]

The two “Variable Set” instructions are not necessary to make the profile work. They just set the user defined Tasker variable %SNIGHT to “On” or “Off” as applicable so other Tasker profiles or tasks can modify their behaviour, where relevant, depending on whether the Silent Night profile is active. I could just have had those other profiles/tasks refer to the time, but that would have involved more work and, more importantly, not taken account of any manual disabling of Silent Night. Enter tasks A2, A4 and A5 are again not essential. I use them to cancel out the effects of other Tasker actions which I use.

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Putting the Galaxy to rights #9 – The Benefits of a Mobile Meltdown

May 24, 2011

Vista busy cursor Normally a complete breakdown in the functioning of a phone would be thought of as a bad thing.  In my case at least it had a very positive result. My Samsung Galaxy S Android phone is now running far better than when it was new.

Right from when I bought it last September, the Galaxy S tended to be fairly sluggish.  Certainly not as snappy and responsive as my wife’s iPhone 4.  This may have been the so called “lag” problem which led to various “lag fix” solutions promoted on various websites, none of which I felt comfortable about trying.

I also put performance issues down to the fact that I tend to work my phone very hard – I have it playing back podcasts and audiobooks for hours during the day. For some reason, prolonged audio playback seemed to cause steady deterioration in performance.  The apps I use (ACast and the Audible app) tended to be very CPU and RAM hungry, and sometimes the phone would completely jam up, needing a reboot.  It was not uncommon to have to reboot the phone two or three times a day. That did not seem right.

There was another annoyance which caused even more reboots. This was the “stuck notifications pull-down” problem. With Android, if you see notification icons in the status bar at the top, you can look at the detailed notifications by touching the bar and dragging down, revealing the notifications screen.  Ever since the Froyo update, a bug appeared such that occasionally, seemingly at random, the notification screen would “stick”, i.e. refuse to open when dragged.  Only a reboot would fix it.

A few weeks ago there was a system update, from 2.2 to 2.2.1. I approached it with trepidation, much as I had before with the Froyo 2.2 upgrade, because of the risk of losing data.  I backed up everything I could think of, including use of MyBackup Pro from Rerware to back up phone logs, text messages and all sorts of other data up to the cloud. In the event, the update to 2.2.1 ran without a hitch and no data was lost.  It was just a matter of setting up all my app icons – I had made a list of the icons I had placed on the various desktops.

And the result of the update was a very noticeable improvement in performance. Version 2.2.1 is supposed to include an official version of the “lag fix” or at least something to make the phone run more snappily. The Quadrant Standard benchmark also showed a significant improvement.

All was wonderful … until the aforementioned meltdown.  I had just set off on a long journey in the car, driving home to Manchester from London, and was looking forward to 2 or 3 hours of my audiobook. The book was playing when my wife tried to call (she has a special ringtone) but I could not get the phone to complete the connection.  Possibly reception was bad.  I tried to return the call using Vlingo voice dialling but could not get it to recognise my voice command with all the surrounding traffic noise. Repeated attempts to use Vlingo seemed to squeeze the phone’s resources to breaking point. Every time I tried to restart the audiobook the playback deteriorated, becoming more halting or cylon-like.  Sometimes it recovers with time.  On this occasion the phone just gave up and died.  Total lock-up.

I was on the motorway approach at the time so kept on driving and later pulled into a service station so I could at least call my wife.  The battery was very low and I rang to warn her. But the phone had had to be rebooted and now was not booting cleanly. I was getting warning dialog after warning dialog about background apps failing to start up.  Many apps could not be launched at all.  I could make calls but no chance of any podcasts or audiobooks.  I completed my long journey in silence or listening to the least awful dross I could find on the radio.

Back home it was obvious the phone had suffered a terminal meltdown.  No way would it recover from the messed up state it was in. My guess is that, when stressed by my attempts to run Vlingo voice commands alternating with audiobook playback, some key configuration data had been overwritten or corrupted. There was only one way out and that was to try a factory reset. On the plus side, I had all the backups and other preparation from my upgrade to Froyo 2.2.1, so took the plunge.

It worked. The phone was returned to a stable state and I was able to get all my data back from the cloud and other locations.  Only my old Kik conversations were lost.  And the phone was flying!  It had never performed better.  No lag of any kind.  No stuck notification screen.  No gradual deterioration in performance over the course of the day.  Battery lasting far better.  And no more reboots!

I did have to reinstall my apps of course.  Part way through that process I obtained a Quadrant benchmark of 1260 which is pretty amazing for a Samsung Galaxy S.  I did notice that the benchmark was reducing as I added apps incrementally. So I left out some of the apps I had been using before, such as Watchdog and NetSentry, which I no longer felt I needed and which had been sapping phone resources continuously in the background.

The Quadrant benchmark came down to around 1050 with all the apps I felt I really needed, but that is still very good and the phone continues to be a revelation.  Frustrating lag and slow-downs have been banished, and the phone mostly gets through the day now without needing a middle of the day battery boost.

 

 

Posted in Android, Mobile phones, Putting Galaxy 2 rights, Technology | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

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