Posts Tagged ‘Samsung Galaxy S’

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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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Putting the Galaxy to rights #7 – Neutralising Nocturnal Notifications

December 29, 2010

Vista busy cursor Some of the early reviewers of the Samsung Galaxy S must have been apple fanboys or simply wanted Android to fail. The litany of complaints and criticisms often boiled down to little more than determined nit-picking.  In any event, there has been no adverse effect on the fortunes of the device, which has survived to establish itself as a resounding global success story for Samsung.

One of the more unusual complaints trumpeted by reviewers turns out to be a fair one, although there is a simple solution. The issue relates to the process of charging the device on, say, a mains charger.

It is this. When the battery reaches full charge, the user is alerted by a dialog box and notification tone. And where is the problem with that, you might ask? Well, it’s down to typical usage patterns. People are out and about during the day, rapidly using up the battery on their phones, and usually plug them in to charge overnight. Most often they will have their phone charging in their bedroom so they can use it as a wake-up alarm, for emergency calls or just have it handy to play Angry Birds before going to sleep. The problem being that the aforementioned sleep is then likely to be disturbed at 3 or 4 in the morning by the phone playing its battery full charge notification sound!

Yes, it happened to me on the first night. Not only did I get the phone in one ear, disturbing my sleep, my wife also woke up so I got it in the other ear too. Not one to be repeated.

There is no simple setting which just turns off the full-charge alert on its own. You can set all notification sounds to silent but that also disables audible alerts on receipt of emails, text messages, notice of calendar events and so forth. I don’t want to be bothered by email alerts at night but I certainly want them during the day. A possible workaround would be to turn notification sounds off manually at night, and on again in the morning, but its is a crude solution and relies on my remembering to do it, and having the time to worry about it. There had to be a more elegant fix.

I found an app in the Android Market called Advanced Mode Scheduler by Webcipe. It allows you to change your phone’s settings at specified times of the day, so I set it up to switch off all notification sounds at midnight and on again at 8am, all automatically under scheduler control. It even supports separate settings for different days of the week so I have been able to recreate my much-loved separate ringtones for each day of the week, and with far less effort than to achieve the same result with Windows Mobile.

There is only one mild annoyance about the scheduler app.  Each scheduled event sets ALL the settings en bloc, even ones you don’t want to interfere with.  So, for example, all my scheduled events have to specify wifi “on” or “wifi” off.  I don’t have a setting for “leave wifi in whatever state it is at the time”. So there are times when I might have deliberately turned wifi off only to have the scheduler turn it back on for me, just because it happened to be time to turn audible notifications on or off.

And one final thought. Did neither Samsung nor Google think about the battery charge notification disturbing users at night? Why did they set the device up that way? Apparently, you are not supposed to leave the phone on the charger once the battery is at full charge.  It is in some way not “good” for it.  Well, since nocturnal notifications have been neutralised, the phone has often been left plugged in for hours after full charge and I have never noticed any issue.

Posted in Android, Mobile phones, Putting Galaxy 2 rights, Technology, Windows Mobile | Tagged | 1 Comment »

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Putting the Galaxy to rights #5 – Froyo Wi-fi Fix

December 14, 2010

Vista busy cursor Updating my Samsung Galaxy S to Froyo appeared to resolve a problem I had been having with bluetooth and wifi but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions too soon.

It had been a particularly annoying problem whereby I had to keep turning the wifi connection off when away from the house, otherwise on my return my headphone’s stereo bluetooth connection was likely to be broken when the home wifi connection was re-established. A typical scenario would be walking the dog. I would be out and about listening to audiobooks or podcasts. On returning home I would hear the warning tone the headphones play when the bluetooth connection goes down and the podcast would suddenly be playing through the phone’s loudspeaker. I have my phone scheduled to turn notification sounds off at night and on in the morning and this automatically reinstates wifi so, even if I had remembered to turn wifi off, it might still come back on unbidden during a walk or trip to the shops. Worse than that, the wifi would then try to connect to someone else’s wifi and on occasion freeze up as a result. There have been a few times I’ve had to take the battery out to force a reboot.

Having said that, this misbehaviour did not happen every time and its failure to reappear after Froyo might have just been a run of good fortune. Also, while the bluetooth/wifi clash had been discussed in Android forums there was no change brought in under Froyo designed to fix it, or at least none advertised.

It has been a few days since my Froyo update and all doubts have gone. I can wander as far and wide as I wish with wifi left on and nothing untoward happens. Neighbours’ wifis are ignored and when I get home my phone reconnects to my wifi without prompting bluetooth to miss so much as a beat.

My guess is that the improvement has nothing to do with any software changes to the wifi or bluetooth stack under Froyo. It could just be that the modest increase in performance from the upgrade is what has done the trick. Maybe the pre-Froyo connection drops were simply due to the phone not being able to process code quickly enough to keep the bluetooth connection alive while going through the wifi reconnection handshake, or at least not every time. It would depend on the resource load on the processor and could explain why the effect was intermittent. Froyo’s small performance boost might just have been enough to allow the phone to keep both stereo bluetooth and wifi handshake processes on the go simultaneously.

Posted in Mobile phones, Putting Galaxy 2 rights, Technology | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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Putting the Galaxy to rights #4 – Ice Cool Froyo

December 10, 2010

Vista busy cursor My patience ran out out before my caution did.  The plan had been to hold off installing Froyo on my Samsung Galaxy S until I was certain that it was safe, based on comments in the T-Mobile user forum. But the furore in the forums had ground to a conspicuous halt.  So I went for it, in the middle of yesterday evening.

I did take a few precautions.  The latest version of Kies was installed.  I used MyBackup Pro to backup everything I could think of to the cloud.  Made sure the phone was fully charged.  Made a detailed list of all my apps (I had 40 of these on top of the built-in ones) along with a note of where I had put icons or widgets for them on the various desktop screens (I was using 4 out of a possible 7).  I also dismounted the external SD card; probably not important but some forum posters had mentioned it.

Kies had no trouble connecting with the phone.  Immediately offered me the update.  I clicked the button to accept, gave authorisation to the UAC dialogs and left it to chug.  I had other things to do and resisted the temptation to start fiddling with the phone too soon.  I did check on it periodically; the download of the software and update of the phone did not take all that long, maybe 10 minutes.  Even after the update was proclaimed complete I left well alone for quite a while, maybe half and hour.

When I felt I had given the phone long enough I closed the update dialog on the PC, closed Kies and disconnected the USB cable.  The phone came on looking very much like before. Slight change in the lock screen with “Sweep glass to unlock” text and animated chevrons.  Standard icons identical to before, icons for user installed apps all missing.  My desktop photo was still there. Everything was there and working.  Call log was there, contacts all there.  I feared the worst when opening the messaging app, given many users had reported having to do a factory reset to get that working, but it opened and all my conversations came up fine.  Whew!

I ran the Quadrant benchmark to find an improvement from 835 to 936. Not earth-shattering but it is something.  I may yet try the One Click Lag Fix but that can wait a while.

In general everything was there and working fine.  Responsiveness of the phone seems better – not conscious of any noticeable lags so far.  Referring to my copious notes I reinstated all my icons and widgets.

So what has changed?  Apart from the lock screen and slightly different status bar icons (e.g. bluetooth icon has lost its blue background).  For one thing I was able to add all my gmail accounts to the Google Mail app. Previously it had locked up when trying to add a second account.  I can now ditch use of the standard Email app for the other accounts.  I had hoped to use the standard Email app for my hotmail account.  It had refused to work before and still will not work now.

I opened the Downloads tab in the Android Market, expecting to see all the apps I had installed but only the 4 ones I had paid for were listed.  That was worrying because I relied on that listing to find out about upgrades to my apps, both paid and free.  I don’t know why that was, but after I next installed a new free app the Downloads listing was restored to show all of my installed apps.

I have been less plagued with interference between bluetooth and wifi.  Previously I had to ensure wifi was off before returning to my house after walking the dog if I had my A2DP bluetooth headphones on.  The reconnection with the home wifi once within range would break the bluetooth connection.  Sometimes failed attempts to connect to other people’s wifi could cause the phone to lock up.  This is a known issue and Froyo is not supposed to fix it, but so far things seem better although it is early days.

The Music Player still has my albums/tracks but doubleTwist has lost all information about which songs go with each artist/album.  That might be fixed when I next connect to doubleTwist on the PC.

The Audible Android app started playing up.  It seems to be very resource hungry on Froyo, even more than on Eclair, and keeps triggering the Watchdog app resulting in a notification beep and interrupted playback.  I have whitelisted Audible on Watchdog and this seems to have done the trick.

And of course, you can play Flash on websites.  Not something I have much call for but it is nice occasionally to be able to play the videos on the BBC News website.

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

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Putting the Galaxy to rights #3 – Fits of Froyo Frustration Flaring in the Forums

December 9, 2010

Vista busy cursor T-Mobile have only yesterday released the official Froyo update for the Samsung Galaxy S, having promised that it would arrive before the end of November, following months of stringing customers along prior to that.  The missed deadline was compounded by inadequate communication and generally poor expectations management, with the result that tempers had been flaring on the T-Mobile user forum.

Even now that Froyo is available for download (through the hated Kies software) the grumbles rumble on.  Some people are unable to get Kies to co-operate with the upgrade at all.  Others have upgraded but complain their phone runs slow or email is sluggish, and suchlike.

A lot of people complain that upgrading kills the text messaging system and the only way to get SMS working is to do a factory reset, which means elaborate backup and restore procedures and a lot of careful planning.  One forum member mentions that a user data reset from the Settings menu is enough to solve the SMS problem and no pictures, videos etc are lost.  You still have to reinput all your application settings though.  In any event, even if SMS is working after Froyo (as it seems to be for some) you still have to set up all your application icons and widgets from scratch.

It does all sound a bit fraught and risky.  The result of the upgrade also seems to vary with age of phone and whether it was bought unbranded or direct from T-Mobile, already with the annoyingly loud T-Mobile power up splash screen. My phone is relatively new which is probably good news. Another pointer is that leaving the phone alone to do its thing, during and after the upgrade, makes for fewer glitches.  I get the impression some people are too anxious to start fiddling with their phones after the upgrade, before everything has “settled down”, and somehow applications get out of kilter as a result.

I shall wait for a few more days and keep my eye on the forums, in case any more useful pointers come to light.  When I do take the plunge with Froyo I will document all my settings, use MyBackup Pro to back everything up to the cloud, ensure I have a very full battery, leave the update to chug and settle without interference for a couple of hours.  Hoping to give myself the best shot at a smooth Froyo.

Posted in Mobile phones, Putting Galaxy 2 rights | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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Putting the Galaxy to rights #2 – A nearly affordable mobile

November 30, 2010

Vista busy cursor Having decided on a Samsung Galaxy S on T-Mobile, the next step was to find the best deal.

It wasn’t hard. Affordable Mobiles were offering an 18 month contract for 300 minutes/300 texts at £29 for the handset and only £25 per month including “unlimited” data. In practice that data plan is subject to a “fair usage” limit of 1GB per month, as opposed to 3GB for contracts taken out direct with T-Mobile, but I expected my normal usage to fall well within that. So I signed up and also ordered the Krusell leather case from Mobile Fun.

The case turned up a few days later but no phone to put in it. I rang Affordable Mobiles, quoted my order reference and asked when my phone would be despatched. I was told they were newly out of stock (this had not been indicated on their website) but more handsets were expected very soon, certainly in the next 5-7 days.

I believed them, and waited.  Occasionally I would call and check on progress.  They were always charming but there was always an excuse why the phone was not available.  There had been some software issue and stocks had been pulled.  Or some other excuse, none of which resonated with anything I could find on the web.

My own suspicion is that the deal had been a loss leader for publicity and they did not actually intend to sell any phones on those terms.  Of course, I cannot prove that and I might be wrong.  It’s just my interpretation.

I cancelled my order and bought a Galaxy S direct from T-Mobile.  This was a couple of months ago now.  T-Mobile were very helpful and did their level best to match the Affordable Mobiles deal.  I am on a £30pm contract instead of £25, and the upfront handset charge was the same.

The phone arrived next day.  Magically, T-Mobile had a plentiful supply.

Posted in Mobile phones, Putting Galaxy 2 rights, Technology | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

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