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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  It is out of date now but still works.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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No, I’m not going deaf!

September 12, 2010

Vista busy cursor If there is a downside with in-ear headphones it is that ear wax accretes on the speaker mesh over time, and it can be difficult to clean them without making things worse.

Twice now I’ve made the mistake of trying to scrape surface wax particles off with my fingernail.  All that happens is that the wax gets pushed into the holes in the mesh, effectively blocking the sound.  The impact can be far more dramatic than you might imagine.

About 18 months ago, I ditched one pair of Sennheiser earphones because I thought one channel had failed.  It had not completely failed but the volume level was a fraction of that from the other channel.  I noticed the effect just after trying to remove ear wax with my finger and assumed I must have somehow damaged the speaker physically by applying too much pressure.

I then acquired my greatly beloved Sennheiser MM200 A2DP stereo bluetooth earphones and they were fine for over a year.  After that I became aware output levels were somewhat reduced and noticed a build up of wax on the speaker surfaces.  As before I tried a simple scrape clean with a fingernail, this time being extremely careful not to apply physical pressure down into the speaker.  But once again the result was to reduce output volume still further and quite severely, particularly in the left channel. The only possible explanation was that in trying to remove the wax I had only succeeded in almost completely blocking the speaker mesh.

I put up with it for weeks until I decided to Google for a solution and found this comment in a forum.  It reads:

I have been having the same problem for the past week, I have just fixed it, reading your post gave me the idea to clean them and it actually worked

What i did was to “heat them up” with a hair dryer so that any wax from my ear that had gotten inside would “melt”, then I cleaned them with alcohol and a q-tip and I made sure I let a bit of alcohol to get inside the ear bud, then I dryed it with the hair dryer again very carefully and tested to see the results and WHALA works just fine

I tried the method and it was a total success. My earphones are back to full volume.  Literally as good as new.

So a big thank you to zkitz, whoever you are.

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O2 should give the Zest a rest

July 17, 2009

iPod A hideous disappointment, and that’s being kind. Describing it as a steaming pile of camel droppings is not too harsh. I’m talking about O2′s XDA Zest, the only XDA branded phone to date not made by HTC.

The Zest is made by Asus, better known for motherboards and notebook computers. Their first foray into the smartphone market has not been auspicious.

It looks cheap, feels cheap and the battery won’t hold enough charge to keep it alive overnight. I got my son Alex one of these as a stopgap, to replace his dead LG phone and dead iPod Touch. The plan was to find a phone that would also handle media, in particular being able to take a large (32GB) micro SD card. On paper the Zest fitted the bill, despite being an unfashionable Windows Mobile phone. As I recently found, you can get WM phones to perform perfectly well as media devices.

In practice, twice in a row his alarm failed to go off in the morning because the battery had died, despite having been fully charged the evening before. I wondered if GPS might be on all the time or the power/display options were screwed, but was able to eliminate all issues of that type.  Maybe the battery was defective. Even so, the plasticky build quality compared with every HTC-built XDA I have ever seen was enough to deem the Zest a reject.

It has this morning been collected by the courier.  Good riddance.

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iPhone RAM issue not going away

January 29, 2009

iPod Most of the hits on this website now are coming from iPhone users who are desperately trying to find a solution to the much-loved device’s tendency to crash.  The problems are due to insufficient RAM for all those functions and apps, as described in depth here.  The iPod Touch is similarly affected.

As the number of iPhones and iPod Touches in circulation increases, the more the clamour for a fix. Here is a taste of the search strings which brought visitors here just in the last few hours:

iphone ram
iphone not enough ram
iphone specifications ram memory
iphone flush memory
how to clear ram on the iphone
iphone songs gone, but memory still in u…
iphone touch memory usage
iphone memory usage
ram in iphone
open iphone add memory
iphone memory swap device
iphone available memory
how to use less ram memory on ipod touch
128 mb limit iphone

I really can’t understand why Apple haven’t done something about this yet. Come on guys! There’s a problem here.

Sort it!

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iPhone iNadequacy – plenty of apps but any more RAM?

July 15, 2008

iPod The original iPhone was already hampered by its limited 128Mb RAM; restrictive enough to make it crash on browsing websites with a large number of images or when using Cover Flow with a large album collection.

Well, the problem has just got worse. The new 3G iPhone invites you to download lots of fascinating apps from the iTunes app store. This will place yet further demands on the iPhone’s RAM so you would have thought Apple would have taken the opportunity of the upgrade to boost it by the odd few hundred megabytes.

Well Apple are being rather coy about the specifications so it is hard to be sure, but it does look like the RAM has not been beefed up.

The release of the 3G iPhone has coincided with a big increase in hits to this website (particularly this post) from iPhone users (or maybe potential buyers) trying to find out about the amount of RAM on the iPhone or because they are encountering Safari crashes or other similar problems. It is probably too early to say but I suspect Apple have just exacerbated a problem they should have been acting to fix.

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iPhone’s limited RAM struggles under the stress

February 28, 2008

iPod Most iPhone users may not be conscious of problems with software crashes, but for some owners this happens all the time. Applications close without warning and the iPhone returns to the home screen. It can happen while surfing the ‘net on Safari, while selecting or playing music, watching video, anything. The effect is indistinguishable from using ‘Force Quit’ to close an application (by holding down the home button for 6 seconds) except that it happens unexpectedly rather than at your instigation.

The same thing happens with the iPod Touch, particularly the new 32GB version, only worse.

It is not a widely reported issue, but is definitely real. It was confirmed by Engadget when they reviewed the iPhone in July.

“We managed to continuously crash the iPod app while listening to music and doing other things, namely browsing. We wouldn’t call it incredibly unstable, but we wouldn’t say it’s rock solid, either.”

ipod touch 32GB

My son Alex recently bought a brand new iPod Touch 32GB and promptly loaded it up with 20 or so GB of music, videos etc from his computer. It started misbehaving. He would flick through albums using Cover Flow and would suddenly find himself looking at the home screen. It was starting to get difficult to play music without a song crashing halfway through.

He thought he must have messed up the setup so he returned the device to its factory settings, flattened the memory and started again. Same result. He went straight back to the Apple Store and they seemed puzzled, had no explanation, but replaced the device without a quibble.

Alex set the new iPod up with the utmost possible care and for a time all seemed well, but later on the problems started to reappear. Ultimately, it became clear things were no better than before.

What then? A bad batch of iPods? Some rogue corrupt music or video file? If the latter it could be a real needle in a haystack job to find it.

I tried Google and found that many iPhone and iPod Touch users have had the exact self-same experience. It is all there on Apple Discussions. All there, that is, except an explanation or solution.

A Hard Reset (hold Home and Sleep/Wake buttons simultaneously for at least 10 seconds) does make the problem go away, at least for a while. That got me thinking, as did the fact that using Safari (via the domestic wifi) seemed to encourage the misbehaviour. In particular, under no circumstances could Alex fully open the home page of my personal blog without his iPod crashing. As the images downloaded it would get to the point where it gave up and died. Now there are a lot of images on my blog home page, and many are large high resolution files, so memory, or insufficiency thereof, would seem to be implicated.

My conclusion is this. It is not that hard to completely run out of RAM space on an iPhone or iPod Touch. It depends on how many applications you leave open and the memory usage demands placed on each application.

Early on some iPhone users thought it was a Safari related problem because they first encountered it while surfing the ‘net. It wasn’t though anything to do with Safari specifically – it is just that the easiest way to crash an iPhone is by navigating to a web page with a large amount of embedded content, particularly images. If there is more on the page than RAM can hold it will just crash. I do not think there is an equivalent of a Windows Swap File or this would not happen – slow down yes, but not crash. Alex still has a fair few GB spare on the iPod’s flash memory.

With the iPod Touch there is greater likelihood of a crash while, say, using Cover Flow particularly if a large proportion of the 32GB is filled up with music files. It means Cover Flow has that many more album art images to display. Overdo the flicking back and forth from A to Z and at some point it will crash. Less likely to be an issue with the iPhone or Touch 16GB because the flash memory doesn’t hold as many albums/music files.

There is no solution reported in Apple Discussions because there is no solution. The 128MB RAM in the iPhone/iPod Touch will simply run out if challenged too hard. Users just have to live with this, adapting their behaviour to minimise the impact. That means avoiding some websites, closing down applications (with Force Quit) when not using them, using Cover Flow just to locate music not as a pretty plaything.


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