Yes; that’s precisely what I suggested upthread.
As a side note, iPods with smashed screens are perfect for this use. I got one for free from a friend (“the screen is smashed so it’s useless”) and when hooked up to the car stereo, it works perfectly.
If the broken screen is readily visible, it may even be *better *than an unbroken one for a car, since it will be a theft-deterrent.
Yes, indeed. I have a Samsung Android that’s at least 2 years old (probably 3 actually) and now I just use it as a telephone, mp3 player (it has expandable memory), flashlight and camera. The apps, especially Facebook, have got more and more demanding and slowed it down too much. I also now have a Nexus 7 so all of the apps I had on the phone are now on there.
AndroidOS did ingratiate itself to me again last night. I was downstairs, on my computer, and found an app I wanted to install on my phone. My phone was, unfortunately, upstairs in the bedroom. So I clicked on the file in the Play Store, and told it to install onto my GS3. A few seconds later, my Pebble wristwatch let me know that the file had installed.
Suck it, iTunes.
Anyone found a way to mount the phone’s SDCard as a drive over wifi, without having to use Kies? I’d like something that’s always on, and (last I checked, anyway), Kies has to be running on the phone whenever you want to use it.
I’ve switched back and forth between Android and Apple (and for 6 months, I had a Palm Pre—yuck). I’m very happy with my iPhone except its lack of 4G/LTE. I won’t switch back due to the better variety of apps on the iPhone that I use most often whose interface is just better on the iOS or are just unavailable for Android (Ticket to Ride, Tichu, and Catan are either better or exclusive)
I do that now with iTunes, well, except for the wristwatch thing, I don’t have one of those. My iPhone shows up in iTunes when it’s got the WiFi on and I’ve added apps and music with no problem. (But apparently the Pebble watch is iOS compatible.)
One thing to note is that people are talking about rooting in this thread as if it’s easy. It’s not.
I have a Motorola Droid 3 and I gave up after about five hours of trying to root it.
Every root app I tried failed. Searching on the error messages I was seeing produced tons of people seeing the same issues and no solutions.
Maybe my Droid is an outlier but rooting wasn’t easy. Not for me at least.
Well, after a weekend of playing with the S4, my impressions overall are (so far) highly positive. It’s very fast and the display is good.
I’ve had some trouble figuring out how to differentiate or choose between the built-in Samsung vs. Android default versions (and in some cases, a third AT&T provided interface) for things like Internet/Chrome, text messaging and picture browsing. And how to set up apps that launch things like web pages or messaging to hook into the one that I want. That is annoying, but I knew up front it would be something I’d have to do.
I’ve found the “Apps” tray to be as cluttered as an ungrouped iPhone, but get around that by never using it - I have set up a succession of about 6 swipe pages of apps that I actually use, leaving the “all Apps” tray to be whatever the heck it is.
I love Swype. I didn’t think of it as one of the big gains over iOS going in to this, but after trying it out my ability to enter text on my phone feels exponentially faster and more natural. No more iPhone AutoCorrect annoyances, either - I like that the spelling corrections are presented as a list of probability-weighted suggestions underneath my text, so I can choose them quickly or ignore than as I will.
I’ve installed a bunch of apps and widgets and really like the effect of the widgets, it’s kind of like how I used to arrange my computer desktop 5 years ago or so. It’s very handy to be able to swipe to a given screen, or just look at my home screen, for “FAQ” type of information like time, weather or sports scores for The Teams That Matter without having to open up an app.
I liked being able to transfer my music library and several video clips or DVD rips to the phone via the SD Micro card. No iTunes intermediary needed, and my AVI videos work just as well as my MP4 ones. Hooray!
On the other hand, and now we come to the three biggest negatives I’ve encountered so far:
The battery life is terrible. Much worse than either the iPhone 4S or the 5. Yes, I’m in the “play with the phone nearly non-stop” phase, which will surely affect things, but I’m talking about just putting the phone away with the screen off. In my pocket it might be bumping buttons that cause the screen to come on, but I did this test on my desk at work too - with the screen off, it ran down by about 7% of battery life over the course of a 45 minute meeting (during which I did not use my phone). If I’m actively using my phone it’s much worse.
I’ve reduced my screen brightness but it hasn’t helped a whole lot. I’m thinking there must be a lot of background apps running that never go into some kind of low-power sleep mode. Maybe it’s all those widgets I’ve got going - after all, the reason I no longer have screen widgets on my computer desktop - too much CPU suckage to justify what amounted to comsetic distractions.
I miss my Camera+ app! I went through my list of “must have” iPhone apps on Google Play before buying the S4, and was misled by a similarly named app. The “Camera+” I found on Google Play is by “Tiny Piece Co.” while the “Camera+” app I love so much for iPhone/iPad is by “tap tap tap”.
That said, the default camera app on the S4 (I suppose it is Samsung software) is very, very good, and I can do a two-app process to get what I had in the iPhone’s Camera+ in terms of donig things like cropping, color adjusting or image warming, vignetting, framing and labeling. It’d be better to have it all in one app, though. (Also, still trying to figure out how to get the camera app to save in full res JPG not whatever-it-is PNG after editing.)
This is serious to me, it’s quite possible that had I realized this ersatz flimflam doppelganger for what it was beforehand, and that apparently no similar one-app-does-it-all equivalent exists on Android, I might have chosen the iPhone 5 over the S4. It is far and away one of the biggest things I cherish(ed) about the iPhone. Oh, well.
Free Android apps = ads, full-screen spam and worse? I don’t know if this is something Apple mandates as part of its “closed environment” review of apps before they hit the iTunes store, but in general, (a) free iOS apps that include ads offer a pay version ranging from $0.99 to $2.99 that is ad-free, and (b) the ads are “banner ads” at the top or the bottom while you’re using the app, kind of like on a web page.
In one case already I’ve found the Android version of an app to actually lack an ad-free version: the Scrabble app from Hasbro. On my iPhone I gladly paid $1.99 or whatever it was not to have those ads. On my Galaxy S4 I am forced to deal with the ads, which come up as full screen ads with a “Press to continue” that ungrays out after a few seconds, or with a tiny little “x” circle in the upper right that if I misclick slightly ends up launching the web page the app is trying to direct me to. Perhaps that meanas they make more money from the ads than they do in letting end users off the hook. Does that mean Apple requires advertising-bedecked apps to provide a pay-for-ad-free option? If so, God bless them.
In another case, a highly-rated free full-screen battery level indicator app I installed (mainly for its widget form) seems to have a hook for full-screen spam. The last two times I checked my battery with it, it suddenly put up a picture of some woman or other with a button to Talk To Hot Russian Girls Now or something like that, a bright image that took up the whole screen. Pretty embarrassing if that were to happen in a meeting or something with my phone visible to others (it almost did).
I am not actually sure if it was the battery app that installed it, as I had used the battery level app many times over Sat and Sun without this happening, and none of the reviews of the app in Google Play mention fullscreen spam as a side effect. But since it’s happened twice today, both while I was bringing that app up (plus the fact that it had been a free app), and because I hadn’t installed any new apps in the past 24 hours or so, I figured it probably was and deleted it it. It hasn’t happened again since (only about 2 hours).
This is a case of where I’d have to rely on other users’ reviews rather than some gateway guardian process, to protect me from stuff like this. The very fact that I’m not sure if it was THIS app or another one that’s hooked into the “check battery level” feature somehow says a lot.
Apologies if it’s already been mentioned, but rooting (gaining full administrative access over the device) offers substantial benefits even without flashing a custom ROM, or if you don’t delete all the bloatware. IME the better system maintenance and monitoring tools usually require root access.
One huge minus- at least for me- with the AndroidOS: it’s apparently impossible to bluetooth voicedial. Apparently the Jellybean update broke the speech recognition in VoiceDialer over bluetooth. You can use third-party programs, but the built-in apps are broken, and Google is dead silent on the issue.
I use a bluetooth headset when I’m on my motorcycle, and my car stereo is also hands-free. I can receive calls, but to make calls I have to dig my phone out of my pocket. Kind of defeats the purpose of hands-free…
I haven’t read this entire thread so sorry if its been mentioned. But I would recommend the Nexus 4 ordered from Google if you’re switching to Android. I’ve had mine 2 days and so far I love it. No carrier added bloatware, updates come directly from Google and rooting it was very easy. I bought a Samsung S3 back in december and liked it but ended up returning it. i had spent $600 on the thing and the extra crap bugged me so I just kept my old rooted G2.
The Nexus 4 won’t be going back. I have no regrets so far.
I very rarely use Bluetooth for talking at all - only sometimes while driving (and I don’t drive a lot), if I remembered to enable BT on my phone, basically only if I’m expecting a call while on a trip. For that matter I don’t talk a whole lot on my “smartphone” anyway, maybe 2-3 times a week. It’s mostly a portable Internet device.
As a motorcyclist myself, I tried using a BT headset (one integrated with a Nolan helmet) and after the novelty wore off, soon felt it was a serious hazard. I’m more than happy to pull over to make a call, on the rare occasion that it happens, which is how I prefer to do it even while driving a car. On a motorcycle, it feels even more imperative - especially since a majority of my riding time is in the city or curvy one-lane roads in each direction, not cruising wide-open highways.
I considered the Nexus but eliminated it early on due to the lack of LTE. I refused to pay $10/month for a data plan for my iPad when I mostly use it around the house - I got a WiFi only version - so I use my phone as a hotspot for it and my kids’ iPod Touches when traveling.
I have simply avoided the Samsung “bloatware” apps; they are there in the apps tray but not on any of my home screens except for the built-in camera app and memo app. I also prefer the AT&T carrier-provided Messages app due to its integration of voicemail. I’ve left all the gestures and eye-movement based stuff disabled.
The phone’s perfectly usable so I see no reason to root my phone just yet to clear out those built-in apps, unless I find they’re responsible somehow for CPU/battery drain just by existing (I don’t think they’re doing anything in the background when not running or disabled).
One thing I’ll miss when the day comes is how easy it was to restore my iPhone settings to a new device, either due to upgrade or replacement due to damage or loss. It seems the apps I buy on Google Play are saved and can easily be restored, but all the time and care I spent choosing wallpaper, specifying app and network defaults, setting up my home screens and arranging icons - none of that is saveable for a quick restore on a Google cloud somewhere? Or as a config file on my SD card or hard drive?
Is there a third party app that does that?
Not that I’m aware of. It’s a vastly more complicated problem than iPhone backup is, as there are a myriad of handsets with differing capabilities you might be moving to. As someone who views the initial setup as fun, I don’t see this as a problem, but I appreciate that others feel differently.