Technology Android

[ARon]

The S5 seems less aesthetically pleasing than the S4. Truly strange.

It's the edge, the chrome, it's too thick.

 

[dilla]

You didn't answer the question if you could hook us up with some sweet T-Mo deals.

Could a boost in new signings to help pad that resume of yours. It'd be a family plan of four.

 

[ARon]

I haven't started yet lol. If I do I will start part time and transition out of my current job. If I do work there I will definitely do what I can to hook people up

 

[THEV1LL4N]

Are you rooted? If so, install Xposed Framework and then check this out:

http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/0...-to-the-google-now-launcher-for-rooted-users/

For some reason I can't get Root. I tried using WugFresh's Nexus Root Toolkit. I'll try it again tomorrow.

I'm also going to try and install it on my Mum's SGS3 if she wants it.
http://androidcommunity.com/how-to-...uncher-on-almost-any-android-device-20140227/

 

[dilla]

I can't believe I used RSS for as long as I did. Twitter really is just much easier. Whatever I do miss out on, I don't notice. If I care enough, I click on the website's twitter and go through the backlog of posts to catch up. Namely BMW sites and Autoblog. I can do without knowing every new post from the TheVerge or whatever.

Anyone check out Redmond Pie? Just recently discovered it.

This change is happening as a result of me deactivating Facebook, so not getting my news from there. And also me getting tired of using Feedly for my RSS feeds.

 

[dilla]

Why does iOS get more features than the Android version....on a Google app?

http://techtraverse.com/redesigned-hangouts-ios-google-added-video-messages-new-animated-stickers/

 

[Pittsey]

I can't believe I used RSS for as long as I did. Twitter really is just much easier. Whatever I do miss out on, I don't notice. If I care enough, I click on the website's twitter and go through the backlog of posts to catch up. Namely BMW sites and Autoblog. I can do without knowing every new post from the TheVerge or whatever.

Welcome to 5 years ago.

 

[dilla]

Welcome to 5 years ago.

I started using it over five years ago, so cut me some slack.

I just can't check Twitter as often enough, nor can I read it for long as I move down my timeline because the damn retweets and answers to questions by sports writers and blogs take precious time and space.

I suppose it's for the best. I don't need to be spending that much time about shit like that.

 

[ARon]

I can't stand twitter

 

[Pittsey]

I started using it over five years ago, so cut me some slack.

I just can't check Twitter as often enough, nor can I read it for long as I move down my timeline because the damn retweets and answers to questions by sports writers and blogs take precious time and space.

I suppose it's for the best. I don't need to be spending that much time about shit like that.

My widget doesn't clutter up my feed with that shit. I use it for news and it's great for that.

 

[dilla]

My widget doesn't clutter up my feed with that shit. I use it for news and it's great for that.

Widget? I use the app and have it set to autoload tweets every hour or so.

What Twitter app are you guys using? I've been using TweeCast for a while now and Tweetbot on my computer. I heard Android had Falcon? Some app that was hyped but the devs ran out of tokens or something. Whatever it is, I just read tweets, I never tweet or respond, so I'm wondering if there is a better app for just reading and not so much the extras.

 

[Casey]

Falcon Pro is great, but yeah, they ran out of user tokens. Even though Twitter's success was built on 3rd party apps (I had a Twitter app on my Sidekick in 2007), they pulled a bitch move last year and limited third party apps to 100,000 tokens. Meaning any 3rd party app can only have 100k unique users.

There's a way around it, though. It involves registering your own blank app with Twitter and using your own user ID token to log in to Falcon Pro. But I guess most people can't be bothered to do that.

You may be able to find some public keys that other users have made on xda and just use those.

 

[Casey]

Voila
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2407281

 

[masta247]

It's the edge, the chrome, it's too thick.

The bezels are bigger now too, which is contrary to what everyone's been waiting for. The S4 minimized the bezels compared to the S3 which alone made the phone look much better. The Note 3 went even further and now it feels like we're going back with the S5, while spec-wise it's impossible to feel a performance difference or any other technical difference compared to the S4 other than minor new gimmicks by the looks of it. Sure it packs the fastest chipset around but at this point the performance difference between all high ends is within a 10-20% margin which is extremely hard to tell in reality. The S4 had over 100% performance jump compared to the S3 in comparison - going from old 1,4ghz A9 to 1,9ghz Krait. Now it's going from 1,9ghz Krait to 2,5ghz Krait so just clocks get increased - same with the GPU. The screen, battery and by the looks of it even the camera get improved in an imperceivable way.
I mean, the bezels are still smaller than Sony phones which are waterproof, but I'd take smaller bezels over having a waterproof phone any day.

On a side note, project Ara is pure awesomeness. I signed up a while ago and I'm on the project now..! Glad to be even a minor part of it.

http://www.gsmarena.com/project_ara_component_swapping_gets_demoed-news-7952.php

 

[masta247]

One sentence, maybe, describes Masta in the "Samsung Fan" section lol

Haha, I hope my comments about the S5 point out that I'm not a Samsung fan. As a matter of fact I've been at least a few from that list, if not most at some point.

I hadn't seen the Xperia Z2 until Casey posted that pic. Was it designed in the 90s? Fucking ugly.

Actually fanboys are all jerking off to that phone, saying how it's the best looking one and how Sony has the best design. The bezels are ugly and the phone is literally a rectangle. It's not terrible imho, but not great at all. And Sony still need to do something about their displays which are the worst of all companies, which is a shame considering Sony's TV reputation and how they're boasting gazillion of display techs whenever their new phone is coming out.

How are they the good networks? I guess T-Mo is in price, but coverage is probably the worst of the four main carriers. If you live in a metro area, I guess you'll get coverage but maybe not speeds since there's so many people there.

They're good because they're GSM. GSM is good, CDMA is not. I don't really understand why so many people in the US (because nobody else uses CDMA) tolerates carriers using CDMA. Compared to GSM it's just limiting so badly. Also, phones are not designed for CDMA - they're designed for GSM and the fact manufacturers and radio manufacturers have to consider a CDMA variant means more costs to them and the hardware for CMDA is never as polished.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407896,00.asp

On second thought, I think I confused 4K camera and 2K screen and made them both 4K. I think people were expecting the 2K screen, which sounds less lucrative now since the Retina is over 2K anyway. My bad.

Technically Retina on new Ipads is 2K. 2K means resolution in any form factor with the vertical (or horizontal depending on which is the bigger) resolution higher than 2000 pixels. With displays, 2K usually means QHD which is higher than retina, however - since for instance the 2K Samsung tablets have a 2560x1600 resolution.

Does the industry term "tick-tock" apply to hardware like this, or just internal components like CPU/GPU? This seems like the S4 and S5 now both have been small improvements in performance and perhaps increases in efficiency? I don't know, I don't think there are numbers that back that up as yet, but it's still two minor updates in a row. Apple is guilty of this too, though, and they managed to still post-iPhone 4 record sales.

Unfortunately tick-tock is the philosophy Intel applied, but nobody else. The S4 was a much bigger upgrade compared to the S5 and pushed the technology much futher. The S5 was the tiniest update possible on many fields but then again the smartphone tech seems to be stalling - everyone hoped Samsung would push it forward. Now all eyes are on Apple since they seem to be designing their phones regardless of what the rest of the market is doing and might come up with something interesting.

Well, dated might have been the wrong word. I suppose it still has the top hardware on the market right now, but what I meant was the release time made it rather old. It was released in October or November, right? That was almost five months ago. It'd be hard to bite on that, for those upgrading, unless it was $50 or less, on-contract. What I was saying is what you are saying now, that it would be worth looking at the next batch of flagship phones due later this year. I don't think the Summer will bring much noise from LG since the G2 is still new (to them). The S5 and the HTC phone that's due out soon will probably be the big summer phones, and then we probably see LG's offerings and a new Nexus phone in Q3/4. That is when my proper upgrade date is (instead of the early upgrade I can do in April).See bold above.

If I had the S3 now and was considering an upgrade and my upgrade was due this fall or a faster one in April I'd wait for the proper one this fall - the new LG G3 will be out, the Note 4 will be out and the new Nexus phone will be out. The Snapdragon 805 will be out and maybe the Tegra K1 will be out.
There was a bigger jump last year, so far this year not much has changed from the last year.

If I was buying a phone soon I'd get the LG G2, Note 3 or the Nexus 5 despite the S5 being out (although let's wait for the reviews).

 

[Pittsey]

The only twitter widget I like is the one in Android Pro Widgets. I can't find a single app or widget that compares. I want it to take up one whole screen and scroll down about 50 tweets at a time. I don't want to have to swipe through a tweet at a time like the official app. I don't tweet. I just use it for news and to follow what's going on in many different topics.

Attached is an actual screenshot of my twitter feed.

Actually fanboys are all jerking off to that phone, saying how it's the best looking one and how Sony has the best design. The bezels are ugly and the phone is literally a rectangle. It's not terrible imho, but not great at all. And Sony still need to do something about their displays which are the worst of all companies, which is a shame considering Sony's TV reputation and how they're boasting gazillion of display techs whenever their new phone is coming out.
.

That's crazy. Like you say, it's a rectangle. Probably the worst looking phone I've seen for many years.

 

[dilla]

Voila
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2407281

Thanks a lot. Worked perfectly for me. Giving it a shot now and it seems to just have a different theme set than TweetCast. What are the big pros of this app?

Also, if anyone tries to use the keys provided on XDA, make sure the person that made the keys is from the same time zone as you. Otherwise, it gives you an error message.

 

[dilla]

Haha, I hope my comments about the S5 point out that I'm not a Samsung fan. As a matter of fact I've been at least a few from that list, if not most at some point.




Actually fanboys are all jerking off to that phone, saying how it's the best looking one and how Sony has the best design. The bezels are ugly and the phone is literally a rectangle. It's not terrible imho, but not great at all. And Sony still need to do something about their displays which are the worst of all companies, which is a shame considering Sony's TV reputation and how they're boasting gazillion of display techs whenever their new phone is coming out.



They're good because they're GSM. GSM is good, CDMA is not. I don't really understand why so many people in the US (because nobody else uses CDMA) tolerates carriers using CDMA. Compared to GSM it's just limiting so badly. Also, phones are not designed for CDMA - they're designed for GSM and the fact manufacturers and radio manufacturers have to consider a CDMA variant means more costs to them and the hardware for CMDA is never as polished.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407896,00.asp




Technically Retina on new Ipads is 2K. 2K means resolution in any form factor with the vertical (or horizontal depending on which is the bigger) resolution higher than 2000 pixels. With displays, 2K usually means QHD which is higher than retina, however - since for instance the 2K Samsung tablets have a 2560x1600 resolution.




Unfortunately tick-tock is the philosophy Intel applied, but nobody else. The S4 was a much bigger upgrade compared to the S5 and pushed the technology much futher. The S5 was the tiniest update possible on many fields but then again the smartphone tech seems to be stalling - everyone hoped Samsung would push it forward. Now all eyes are on Apple since they seem to be designing their phones regardless of what the rest of the market is doing and might come up with something interesting.



If I had the S3 now and was considering an upgrade and my upgrade was due this fall or a faster one in April I'd wait for the proper one this fall - the new LG G3 will be out, the Note 4 will be out and the new Nexus phone will be out. The Snapdragon 805 will be out and maybe the Tegra K1 will be out.
There was a bigger jump last year, so far this year not much has changed from the last year.

If I was buying a phone soon I'd get the LG G2, Note 3 or the Nexus 5 despite the S5 being out (although let's wait for the reviews).

Well, in the States, people don't think in terms of GSM and CDMA. It just so happens that the network with the best combination of speed and coverage is Verizon. Which is also the most expensive, althought ATT may have topped it.

T-Mobile is the cheapest, usually, but has some shitty coverage the further away from a city you are. Those coverage maps don't always tell the truth. You have to be sitting in someone's house and realize you have one bar for data. Luckily, I haven't lost voice signal, otherwise I'd really be pissed. But I am on Sprint which has decent voice coverage, but can suffer from data congestion and have shit data speeds. To put this in perspective, however, I stream Netflix on my iPad using my S3's Sprint data. It flip flops between 3G and LTE, but it is a very smooth experience with no buffering or stalling. And I believe it is 720 or even 1080p. I am unsure because I have only done this recently with House of Cards, which was actually shot in 4K as well, one of the few (only??) shows on Netflix done this way. So when I saw a bump in quality, perhaps I was going superfast and seeing 4K (modified for an iPad screen)? Is that possible?

So the fastest networks and the best coverage seem to be CDMA networks here in the States. Many of my friends have TMo and ended up switching to Verizon. I switched from Verizon when my parents switched from US Cellular to Sprint. So I have no complaints. Sprint is the only one with unlimited data. And if I can stream Netflix at the speeds I'm streaming at on Sprint's network, there really is no better network. I've used 10GB on Netflix watching House of Cards in about 8 days. 26 hours of video.

I understand overseas it might be a different case, but now that I think I'm done having extended stays outside of the US, I no longer long for a GSM phone.

I seem to have the same plan as you do for me in regards to upgrading my device. I may even go into next year as well, we will see. My S3 is holding me off so well right now, I can't imagine using an upgrade in April. The G2 is nice, but I should have gotten it earlier. But then it would have been too expensive new, probably at $199.


On an unrelated (blasphemous) note, I was reading the comments section of a post in the Android section of Reddit and was surprised to see many Android fans mention their thoughts about switching to the iPhone 6, if it came with a bigger screen. I think it was in a thread about the new Hangouts features in the iOS version that did not make it into the Android version. Video call and stickers being two of them. Many of them said they were tired of Android apps simply not getting the attention of the developers in their updates. It's hard to argue that as it seems many Android apps look like they've cut roughly cut and slapped out for a release, instead of iOS apps which seem to be tailor-fitted. I understand the diversity of Android devices, but it's still a shitty situation. Can't blame Google and you can't blame the developers either.

A compromise for Android users may be that developers develop their apps for Android by using the latest Nexus device as blueprints, they way the do the same with iOS apps and the iPhone 5S (for now). At least someone should have a proper custom-fit experience with an Android app the way iPhone users do with their iOS versions.

 

[dilla]

The only twitter widget I like is the one in Android Pro Widgets. I can't find a single app or widget that compares. I want it to take up one whole screen and scroll down about 50 tweets at a time. I don't want to have to swipe through a tweet at a time like the official app. I don't tweet. I just use it for news and to follow what's going on in many different topics.

Attached is an actual screenshot of my twitter feed.

That's crazy. Like you say, it's a rectangle. Probably the worst looking phone I've seen for many years.

The Falcon Pro app Casey suggested actually has a similar widget to that. Give that method a shot to getting a token and see how you like it. It seems the same as my old app....but also kinda different. And I'm trying to figure out what exactly it is.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

The only twitter widget I like is the one in Android Pro Widgets. I can't find a single app or widget that compares. I want it to take up one whole screen and scroll down about 50 tweets at a time. I don't want to have to swipe through a tweet at a time like the official app. I don't tweet. I just use it for news and to follow what's going on in many different topics.

Attached is an actual screenshot of my twitter feed.

That's crazy. Like you say, it's a rectangle. Probably the worst looking phone I've seen for many years.

That looks very similar to HTC Sense. I quite like the design of the Sony Xperia Z2....... and you lose points for following Lineker lol.