Calling all geeks!

Rose Woodhouse 21 Comments

Something gives me the impression that some LoOG regulars are geeks. It’s just an occasional hint, but there it is. So I have a bleg for for all the geeks.

My phone contract is up in July. I currently have a Droid X, which now due to OS upgrades operates at a grindingly slow pace. I’d like to get a better phone while paying (obviously) the least amount necessary. My husband recently sprung for a Galaxy Samsung. It’s is horrible. The battery is so bad that if he begins a night with it fully charged and leaves it unplugged, and does nothing with it, it will be dead by morning.

Anybody have good smartphone recommendations and how many GB I should get? I like Droid because they are cheaper than iPhones, Swype is awesome, and it links up better with gmail, but I could be persuaded otherwise. I’d like to be able to take a good number of pics and short videos, but I don’t use it for watching shows or playing games or music very much. I do use it for navigation. Is it worth springing for the Razr Maxx?

Rose Woodhouse

Elizabeth Picciuto was born and reared on Long Island, and, as was the custom for the time and place, got a PhD in philosophy. She freelances, mainly about disability, but once in a while about yeti. Mother to three children, one of whom is disabled, two of whom have brown eyes, three of whom are reasonable cute, you do not want to get her started talking about gardening.

More Posts

21 Comments

  1. I love my Atrix 2. Razr Maxx is essentially an Atrix 2 at half the price and better battery life.

      • I felt like a jerk for even typing something so ridiculous as “Razr Maxx.”

  2. I’m supposed to be in the smartphone market, I’m very interested in seeing what people suggest.

    • Same here, but I want a dumbed-down version of a smartphone.
      Something more of a half-wit phone.

  3. I was going to say that I like my Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere, but then I see your dissatisfaction with the Galaxy. Battery life has been an irritation, but not nearly as bad as you’ve had it. It’s possible that some tweaking might help. I’ve got my battery-loss down to an average of 8% an hour. Less if I’m not using it, up to a little over 10% if I am using it aggressively. Early on, there were some hours I lost upwards of 20% and ever getting below 10% seemed like a pipe dream . I never realized how good I had it with my last Windows Mobile phone. I’ll be glad to share some tips on that if you are interested.

    As to your question, if you like what you have, definitely stick with that family. I have a Droid 2 and didn’t like Motoblur (Motorola’s Droid interface) at all and so ultimately never used it (I also wasn’t able to make the jump from WinMo). If I’d used it more, I’d have tinkered and replaced Motoblur with GO Launcher.

    People keep telling me how awesome Swype is, but I have all sorts of trouble with it and stick with my slide-out keyboard. Since I suspect that they’ll stop making slide-out keyboards at some point, I am going to have to figure something out.

      • The main thing is to figure out where the battery power is being used. I downloaded something called the Battery Widget. You don’t need it, but it helps. You download that and it lets you put a battery icon on your Home Page. When you click on that icon, it will have an option to see where the battery use is going. Check that periodically and you might be surprised. My wife was losing 40% of her battery on one app that was unnecessary and another app that was not even being used. I was losing a lot of my battery life to excessive sync’ing. Sometimes you can simply uninstall the offending program and replace it with something else. At other times, you will need to go into the app’s settings and tell it to stop syncing (or choose the “manual sync” option), sync less frequently, stop running in the background, and so on.

        If it’s primarily used indoors, dial back on the backlighting. Display is one of the primary battery-sucks. Along these lines, get in the habit of turning the screen off whenever you’re done using it, if you’re not already in that habit.

        Unless you have a realistic fear of running up against your data limit, turn off WiFi. Unless you’re using it as a GPS, turn off the GPS radio. I know that by pushing you onto WiFi, they think that they’re helping you preserve data, but I don’t have to worry about data and I do have to worry about dead batteries.

        It’s also supposed to be best for the battery if you let it run down instead of constantly recharging it, at least early on. This, of course, is a Catch-22 when you have to keep recharging it for fear of running dead.

        Spare batteries are not necessarily a bad idea. If you get them though, get Samsung originals. This didn’t matter with HTC, but the generic replacement batteries I got for the Samsung are junk. If for some reason you have a generic battery in there, then that alone could be your problem (but you probably don’t). Also, it can make a difference if you’re actually using the Samsung power supply or not. Don’t ask me why.

        • Steer clear of some of those wretched apps which claim to clear your cache and suchlike. There are some interesting apps out there, System Panel is really nice, but I can’t always trust it to give me a list of all running processes.

          GPS is really nice when you need it but it is a constant power draw. Here’s what happens: say you go into a building and your GPS is on. The signal obviously gets weaker so the GPS radio will attempt to increase the gain. You can actually feel it heat up if the situation gets bad enough. WiFi, same story. You do want those radios to increase the gain if you’re using those devices but the phone has no way of knowing your intentions.

          After a while you just think about it like turning off the lights when you leave a room.

          • You do want those radios to increase the gain if you’re using those devices but the phone has no way of knowing your intentions.

            Not for a lack of trying! My phone is constantly saying “Hey, you might want to turn WiFi on now.” I do like that I can turn GPS off and when it’s off, and I turn on Google Navigator, that it lets me know that I should probably turn GPS back on. I wish it turned GPS off when I closed the app, though.

          • App Nagging is the new Antipattern. Everyone knows all those little Free Apps would like nothing better than to do a quick LocationManager invocation and pump your browser history back up the pipe.

  4. We bought two of the Motorola Photons back in February. This is a lesser known phone but Consumer Reports listed it as the top pick for Sprint and rated it higher than the iPhone. It’s my first smartphone so I may not be an expert but I have really liked it so far. The battery life is reasonable or better and we love the Android operating system.

  5. If battery life is your primary concern, then there really is no better phone out there at the moment than the Droid RAZR Maxx. It has by far the largest cap battery available on a smart phone, and it really is a sight to behold.

    It’s also worth noting that Motorola really went all out when designing the thing. You could probably use the RAZR Maxx to set off an IED and the phone would still be there afterward. Durability is an underrated part of phone design, and while the Maxx isn’t one of those mil-spec phones that you can throw off a cliff, the kevlar and gorilla glass will make sure you’ll still have a working phone after one of your kids knocks it out of your hand and it goes sprawling.

    • If I had it all to do over again, there’s an increased likelihood that I would have gone with the Droid 3 or Droid 4. There were four main reasons I went with Samsung, and two of them have become moot.

      1) I have a Samsung tablet and liked the idea of having one software on my computer for interaction. However, the interaction is a lot less necessary with Android as it was with WinMo since Android does so much of its syncing with the Internet and very little with desktop applications. It’s a good thing that the interaction is unnecessary because dang if I can get it to work. I have worked in smartphone R&D professionally, and I can’t get Samsung’s software to work for the life of me.

      2) I’d just learned to use Samsung’s TouchWiz interfact and determined that I liked it (especially compared to Motoblur). This one was rendered moot when the phone came with a different – and much inferior – contacts interface and, more importantly, I don’t use TouchWiz or Motoblur anymore.

      3) Cheaper.

      4) The form-factor is very similar to my old phone and I like it. This one holds true, though was comparatively unimportant.

  6. I’m not going to be very helpful, but I’ll just vote for iPhone. I’ve owned a Blackberry, a Droid X, and now an iPhone 4. This phone is the only one I haven’t hated. It actually works (at all times – which is something that can’t be said for any Android phones, as far as I can tell), the battery doesn’t run out instantly, and it’s effing gorgeous. I’ve just never been able to get into the other OSes. They’re basically Windows: more powerful, tweakable, will crash every 12 seconds because of something you accidentally did to anger them.

    • If your functionality desires are limited to things that the iPhone does, and you don’t mind a bit of a price premium, it’s really the way to go. If I weren’t responsible for phone maintenance and keeping track of parts/accessories, I would have gotten an iPhone for my wife.

      (And if you do mind the price-premium, then a used iPhone might be a better idea than a new something-else anyway. I’m like that with Thinkpads. If cost is an issue, I’ll get a used Thinkpad before I will get a new Dell.)

    • I got rid of an iPhone. Nothing would ever make me go back.

      • I never had one to get rid of, and can’t imagine getting one.

        What you have to remember, though, is that we’re freaks.

Comments are closed.