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How Did My Stratosphere Ever Get Shipped?
I've been using either a Samsung Stratosphere or a Samsung Stratosphere 2 from September 2012 to the present. Where to begin?
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If you open the calendar application on the Stratosphere 2, it usually highlights tomorrow's date as "Today," and lists tomorrow's calendar entries as your list of things to do "Today." Here is a picture of my phone's screen taken on June 2, with the calendar app displaying "Today, Mon, Jun 3 2013" — despite the phone knowing the correct time is 9:22 PM on June 2.
Strangely, in the morning the calendar app would display the correct day as "Today," but would switch to the wrong day some time in the afternoon, and eventually I decided that the calendar app was probably using Coordinated Universal Time to decide what "Today" was, which is 9 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.
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You'll notice that these images are not screen captures, but photos taken with another phone. This is because some time between the Stratosphere 1 and 2, the screen capture function broke — every support site says you're supposed to be able to take a screen cap on a Stratosphere by pressing the Home and Power buttons at the same time, and that works on the 1, but not on the 2.
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If someone else sends a text to multiple recipients including you, the Stratosphere gives you no indication that it's a group text, and there's no way for you to see the other recipients or reply to the whole group. (I had a lot of awkward "What, you were asking everybody, not just me?" moments before I realized what was going on.) Other users have been complaining about this for months, and it apparently affects more Android phones than just the Stratosphere.
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The built-in camera refuses to take a picture if the battery is low — it just says "Warning: low battery" and exits. Yes, I know they think they're doing it for my own good since the camera is a battery hog, but a few times I've wanted to take a picture where it was well worth using up a half a percent of my remaining battery life or however much it would have taken, but the phone wouldn't let me. That should be the user's decision, dammit.
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When I was in Canada last week, if I tried sending a text message longer than 160 characters, the phone would tell me that the message sent, but it would actually fail silently and never get delivered. I'm not sure whether to blame Verizon, Android, or Samsung for this one (or just, you know), but in the end someone has to take responsibility for the product, and the phone telling you that a message was sent when it actually got lost, is a complete fail. If it doesn't work, fine, give me an error message, but never tell the user a message got sent successfully if it didn't.
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During a phone call, the on-screen keypad doesn't work unless the phone is on speakerphone. If the speakerphone is off, the screen goes dark after about 1 second of inactivity, making it impossible to enter an account number or anything else. I can avoid this bug by turning on a speakerphone (which is how I know it's a software bug, not a problem with the touchscreen), but this is a pain if I'm in a public place and don't want to annoy everyone around me who would have to listen to all the voice prompts. (The phone's software seems to be following a rule like: "If the speakerphone is not on, then when the phone moves away from the user's face, assume the user is not actively using the phone and let the screen go dark" — where the bug is that it doesn't make an exception and keep the screen on if the user is actively pressing keys on the keypad.)
At first, these and many, many other bugs produce a state of mind that transcends annoyance to reach a kind of genuine curiosity, where you're asking "How did this happen?" not rhetorically, but because you actually want to know. But eventually the surprise wears off, and you're just left with bugs that are disproportionately aggravating because they obviously would have been caught during even the most basic UI testing. They're aggravating to me not because of how much they get in the way (you eventually get used to them), but because the existence of those bugs conveys a certain lazy attitude towards finding and fixing bugs at all.
I realize this is not a logical reaction. The aggravation you feel towards a bug should depend on how much the bug actually interferes with the user experience, not on how easily the manufacturer should have found it. Rationally speaking, the biggest problem with the phone right now (and the reason I'm having to mail to back to the manufacturer for a replacement) is that the charging port spontaneously broke, so that unless the micro USB charger is plugged in exactly right, the phone can't charge (even if you get it right and form a connection successfully, the connection breaks if you move the phone half an inch). Needless to say, that's exasperating — but it's hard for me to get mad at Samsung over that, because it's not an easy defect to catch at the manufacturing stage. On the other hand, if the calendar app displays the wrong day, I would say that someone should be fired over that except that probably nobody was assigned to do that testing in the first place.
I also posted questions about each of these problems on AndroidForums.com and AndroidCentral.com (those links show all questions recently posted from my username on each site), which have so far received hundreds of "views" but no replies. I mention this because some people think that if you do run into problems like these, all you have to do is post a question and The Community will help you out with a workaround. Nope.
Also, lest you think you can do away with these bugs by downloading third-party replacements for all of these apps, I spent part of an afternoon downloading different texting apps to see if any of them would fix even part of the problems I had with the built-in one. None of them worked much better, although several of them displayed pop-up ads over every third incoming text message, and most of them did not play nicely with each other, giving me no way to disable them so that their notifications would double and triple up on top of each other for every received text. So I gave up. Even if I thought I might eventually find a better app for texting, I didn't have time to test multiple replacements for every built-in default app that didn't work.
Farhad Manjoo has a column up at Slate arguing that the reason many Android phones suck is that they're laden down with adware attempting to extract more personal information and money from the user. I'm sure that's part of the problem, but I can't see how the manufacturer is making any money off of the bugs I ran into; they were just being lazy.
The problem, I think, is that phone manufacturers know that phone reviewers (and users, when they're choosing between models in the store) will focus on easily quanitifiable attributes, such as size, weight, battery life, and the number of megapixels in the camera. The number of aggravating bugs in the user interface is not something that is easy to compare across phones (and in any case would not be printed on the box). Thus market forces simply don't favor the development of a hassle-free interface, because in most cases the phone manufacturers wouldn't be rewarded for it.
And — I don't consider this too much of a stretch — this is where it connects with larger issues for me, because I've been arguing for years that the free market will usually fail to fix certain types of problems, often in the context of threats to free speech and civil liberties, especially if the user lacks information they need to compare multiple options. A major argument in favor of Net Neutrality is that the typical user wouldn't realize it if their ISP were throttling access to certain sites; they would just think that the remote site was responding slowly. Since that information would be hidden from the user, "the marketplace" won't solve the problem on its own. Similarly, every time I say that my Circumventor mailing list keeps getting blocked as "spam" by Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or AOL (despite being 100% verified-opt-in, natch), someone tells me that if the free market is blocking my emails as unwanted, it must be because the users don't want them. That the free market might make a mistake (in this case, because users don't have full information about what is getting blocked as spam), doesn't occur to them. I think the belief in the infallibility of the free market, is one of the most widespread fallacies of our era — people who would never make the mistake of confusing correlation with causation, have no problem thinking that if a product or service gets blocked by a third-party intermediary, it must be because the end user didn't want it.
And so when I'm staring at my Stratosphere's calendar telling me that tomorrow is actually today, it brings out my aggravation not just towards Samsung, Google, and Verizon, but towards all the people I've heard over the years claiming that the marketplace will automatically reward good products and punish bad ones. If there weren't so many people who believed that, maybe we could have collectively put more effort into rating phones according to their usability, knowing that the "invisible hand" of the marketplace was not likely to solve those problems on its own, and maybe these bugs would have gotten fixed. Instead, the "marketplace" focuses disproportionately on attributes like dimensions, weight, and processor speed that are easily quantifiable.
So perhaps the solution — seriously — would be for some third-party review company to rate each new phone on the Stupid S#!% Index. They test the phone under normal usage, and each time they run into an idiotic bug like the calendar application not knowing what day it is, they file it under Stupid S#!%, and after some fixed period of phone usage they count up all the problems and rate the phone under the Stupid S#!% Index. For greater precision, you could compile multiple scores from different users for each phone and take the average. Now you have a quantifiable rating that can be used to compare one phone to another, and could incentivize manufacturers to do more testing on their phones in order to get a better Stupid S#!% Index score.
The message that Apple keeps pushing about the iPhone, after all, is essentially that it would get a good Stupid S#!% Index rating. In his keynote address at the 2011 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs repeated the words "It just works" like a mantra — unlike, presumably, everyone else's stuff. iPhones don't score well on price, openness, or compatibility with other companies' products (I always have to tell people that my car charger is not an iPhone charger, it's a literally-every-other-smartphone-in-the-entire-world charger) — but all of that scarcely matters to some people as long as It Just Works.
Well, I couldn't tell you. I can't test an iPhone under normal usage because I'm too addicted to the Stratosphere's slide-out keyboard, which enables me to type much faster than a touchscreen but which only comes on a few Android and Windows phones, and not on any version of the iPhone. Maybe I'll try one more time to make the switch to a touchscreen while my Stratosphere is in the shop.
Yes, these most First-World of First World Problems — especially the bugs specific to the Stratosphere — only apply to a small fraction of the population. But it should be a lesson for anyone who thinks the "free market" would prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Meanwhile, every time I hear an ad talking about how "thin" some new phone is going to be, I just want to say to the phone the same thing that I want to tell all the anorexic girls in nightclubs: You're already thin enough. So stop worrying about being thin, and just try to work on not being so f@#$ing stupid.
The correct way is to hold it over a trashcan and unclasp your hand.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Next you'll tell me that sometimes budgets get cut while demands increase.
Hey Bennie, that's some cool wall-o-text yeh got there. Tell yeh what, yeh can do all that writing fer us at Samsung, and we can give yeh some cool 500 bucks...just a few short comments an'such, howzabouit?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
bennett again ? Nervals lobster again ?
do those guys give blowjobs to the editors or what ?
this is where it connects with larger issues for me, because I've been arguing for years that the free market will usually fail to fix certain types of problems
Sorry, but that is WAY too much of a stretch.
The free market has fixed this problem - there were bad glitchy phone UI's in the past, and eventually the iPhone arrived exactly because all phones had these "lazy" errors all over the place. The iPhone originally was built to be a device where the functions it supported as a smartphone were really thoroughly tested and refined.
Now of course we have Blackberry 10, and Windows Phone too - each of which offer very carefully tested environments in which to use a phone.
Market forces are not about fixing one model of a phone, they are about a phone eventually arriving that solves a problem competitors have not addressed. Your problem is that you are looking for stability in a system whose primary purpose is not stability - Android came about in part to address the issue of phones being more locked down than some people like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The free market doesn't "prevent" anything, it merely rewards success and punishes failure.
The free market can't prevent Microsoft from making a Kin or a Microsoft Bob, but the market will punish them for it by consumers not buying it. Fail too many times and the market punishes you with bankruptcy (unless you have cronies in Washington to bail you out with taxpayer money).
If government owned Microsoft, they'd be Too Big To Fail, and might still be making Microsoft Bob...
1) No one, not even the most "hard core" fiscal conservatives / libertarians, claim the free market is "infallable." The free market is individual human beings making individual economic decisions without coercive interference from others. Human beings are fallable, thus the free market is "fallable."
2) 3rd party reviews = free market. What is not free market is when government creates oversight organizations / watchdogs through taxation and uses them to enforce laws and regulations. Examples are the FCC, FDA etc.
3) As imperfect as it may be, at least when a company releases a major catastrophe of a buggy product they get penalized with support and replacement costs, bad PR and a market that will think long and hard before buying another product from that company.
4) There is nothing stopping anyone from implementing your suggestion for creating better cellphone reviews. That's the beauty of the free market. The fact that no one has done it (as far as we know) does not hint to the free market's imperfections, it means there is a business opportunity waiting to make someone some money.
If you want a keyboard that badly try the Blackberry Q10. Its not terrible.
Oh wait, they do.
The problem, I think, is that phone manufacturers know that phone reviewers (and users, when they're choosing between models in the store) will focus on easily quanitifiable attributes, such as size, weight, battery life, and the number of megapixels in the camera. The number of aggravating bugs in the user interface is not something that is easy to compare across phones (and in any case would not be printed on the box).
Ok, I can agree to that. So, are there any websites that provide comparisons or reviews of the UI problems of various phones? That is, a guide for shoppers to alert them to the pros and cons of various products.
I've been using either a Samsung Stratosphere (S1) or a Samsung Stratosphere 2 (S2) from September 2012 to the present.
The v2 wasn't yet available in September 2012...
So there are several options:
Bennet then complains market forces don't fix some things... indeed they do NOT. They do NOT fix stupid customers buying crap they hate with good money.
If I piss in your face and you hand me 50 bucks, then next day give me 50 bucks to piss in your face again... market forces tell me to piss in your face.
Does he even know what market forces are? Does he even grasp the concept of voting with your money?
Frankly his long list of complaints has to many "user is an idiot" elements so, having googled a few reviews, I am left to conclude the phone isn't perfect but the majority of his issues are imagined or over dramatized.
Similarly, every time I say that my Circumventor mailing list keeps getting blocked as "spam" by Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or AOL (despite being 100% verified-opt-in, natch), someone tells me that if the free market is blocking my emails as unwanted, it must be because the users don't want them. That the free market might make a mistake (in this case, because users don't have full information about what is getting blocked as spam), doesn't occur to them. I think the belief in the infallibility of the free market, is one of the most widespread fallacies of our era — people who would never make the mistake of confusing correlation with causation, have no problem thinking that if a product or service gets blocked by a third-party intermediary, it must be because the end user didn't want it.
AH... it alls becomes so clear now... this guy is a spammer and can't grasp that the market does INDEED work. I do NOT want his spam, I want Google to filter my email and if I didn't want that, I wouldn't use gmail.
The market works, it just sucks when it doesn't work FOR you but against you. But that doesn't mean the market doesn't work, it just means the market doesn't like you. He doesn't want the market to fix things for everyone, he wants the market to fix things for HIM alone so HE can spam freely.
Well fuck him AND his crappy phone he bought a year after it had been reviewed as a crappy phone.
Buyer beware.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you have an Apple developer account, have a look at the WWDC session video about dates. Handling dates is difficult. The simple difficulty is about the fact that you have absolute time and calendars - if we talk to each other on the phone, the absolute time is the same for both of us, but our watches may show totally different times if one is in the USA and the other in Australia; that's what the "calendar" is there fore. But not only the hour might be different, but also the day, depending what calendar you use. And that's just the easy things.
It's running a newer version of Android.
All the new android phones take a screenshot by placing the "blade" of your hand on the side of the screen and sliding it across the screen.
Calendar issue, Not sure, but I'd wager there is a setting like you said using the wrong timezone. there are 300 calendar apps. I use google's and have never had an issue.
Group texts are NOT BUILT INTO SMS. It's kind of a kludge and iMessage from apple makes it worse because group texts in iMessage are not even SMS. They use data and the apple servers, so you get all sorts of weirdness there.
When you were in Canada, using a foreign service, it maybe have been rogers, or whatever that blocked it as their roaming contract doesn't cover that. No telling why that failed. I wouldn't blame that on the phone.
Camera not working. there is a good chance that using the flash could kill it, also risking the battery going incredibly low and damaging it. This setting can be changed I believe without rooting, but definitely with rooting.
The display turning off IS a setting, also make sure when you go to type, you don't cover the light sensor on the front. It wants to turn the screen OFF when you put it to your head to talk to save battery and avoid your cheek pushing buttons by accident.
Overall score for your rant, Meh. Nice long rant, but you obviously didn't spend as much time googling as you did writing that.
I am 31337 or something.
Its because management shoved a shitty product out the door without letting the engineers finish their job.
You should be thankful it wasn't PC-based software from Samsung. What I got with my last Samsung phone was bad enough that it made me wish I was still using Sony's MagicGate.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Your phone is from the future!
Well that, or it came from a very strict timezone; you can only live 30 years.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Your mailing list is being marked as spam because most people unsubscribe from anything by marking it as spam. It's a 1 click interface that solves their problem with consequences that don't affect them.
It was build this way using outsourced offshore contractors in India and China.
Sure they may have technically fulfilled the contract.. but was it a good business choice? I don't believe so.
While your "Stupid S#!% Index " sure sounds good, the time required to get valuable data about a device on it would be roughly equals to the time needed for that device to be "obsolete" and "replaced by newer, better, faster, stronger" model (at least, that's what PR would say).
This is the obvious downside to the "release early, release often" development philosophy. Just get the product out the door and any bugs in it will be fixed by the next major release. It's the same sort of crap that makes me pull what's left of my hair out with some linux projects.
Almost everything you are describing is a productization issue. These types of issues exist, randomly, from phone to phone, because each phone is separately productized by the partner vendor. Generally, the productization, even between single letter/digit hardware versions from the same vendor, end up being handled by different teams, so there is typically not a lot of consistency here. There are vendors who are exceptions, but they are rather rare. Samsung is not one of those vendors.
I used to be a big fan of Palm, and I used a Sony Clie which ran Palm OS.
Though Palm had licensed the hardware rights, Palm did not maintain rigorous
control over the Palm OS as used by companies which built hardware under license
from Palm. Due to the lack of OS control Sony ended up using an OS on the Clie which
would NOT sync with Palm desktop on OS X when an install of a newer version of OS X
necessitated an install of a newer version of Palm Desktop on the Mac laptop I used at the time.
Bottom line : the lack of rigorous control over the software resulted in a significant loss of
functionality on the Palm device, and the Palm instantly became a toy rather than a tool.
The lesson I took from this is that if you need stuff that works and you don't have the time
or desire to mess with stuff to keep it working, it is best to use a handheld which is built by the
same company which builds your mother ship computer. Since I use computers which are made
by Apple and which run OS X, this means that for me an iPhone is the best choice. I am aware of
many of the shortcomings of the iPhone, but the bottom line is that Apple's tight control over software
and hardware means I can be reasonably certain that my handheld and laptop will continue to work
well together. And that matters most, because I use devices to get work done, and I do not have time
to screw around with things in order to keep them working.
By the way, I could care less what you Android/Linux/WIndoz fanboys think of the iPhone or OS X. It's your time
and your life and if you want to waste it dicking around with stuff in a struggle to keep it working,
that is your right. But I have better things to do, and that's why I am happy to pay more for stuff that
works well.
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On top of all that shit, the phone runs Android, too! Oh, the humanity!
Somewhat OT, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of third-party sources to repair micro USB connectors. I don't know if it was a manufacturing issue, but the micro USB went on my Samsung & HTC at about the same time. For around $30 to $40 each, I was able to get them repaired.
Have you tried making your texts more concise? I find brevity sometimes facilitates communication.
Int the free market, your phone problems are fixed by you buying a new phone. Maybe the new phone will work, maybe it won't. If not,you are free to continuing to buy phones until you find one that works. Then the bad phone maker are free to go out of business.
That is the ugly dark side of libertarianism. Your car explodes because of a defective gas tank? Acter enough people know about this, the car sales slow, and the manufacturer might go out of business.
You'll still be dead.
We need to strike a balance between over-regulation and the completely impractical wild west approach that might have worked in the early 1800's. I
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Asian quality standards. That explains everything. Now every damn thing is outsourced from the image design to the market research to the engineering to the testing and asian companies' quality standards are a joke. If they want a good product, it has to be developed elsewhere.
Yet you used a completely new product from before the release, if I understand correctly from the release date of the Stratosphere 2 (Nov 2012).
For both video games and phones and indeed any complicated piece of hardware one must wait. This is a hard learned lesson for me as well. I played Skyrim without bugs... six months after it was released. I've skipped other games and phones entirely. Markets are not instant feedback devices that make every product perfect, they are feedback devices that tell us which products are best.
There are some problems that markets can't fix... monopoly, regulatory capture, etc... Buying complicated technology without waiting for early adopters to pay the break-in price is another one of them.
Well, that's the opinion of many Fandroids who get their kicks talking about Apple Maps and holding things wrong.
No frigging Tech Maker is infallable. They ALL get things wrong from time to time.
As the calendar does not work, the owner should have got their money back from whatever dealer sold it to them.
I strongly recommend Consumer Reports -- they basically do as you suggest, buy and use the products themselves (from the store, no complimentary review items), and give you the down-low as to if it work well or not. More emphasis on usability than specs. http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/electronics-computers/index.htm
AND THEY DON'T DO ADS! :)
I don't think you understand free market.
Free Market doesn't prevent selling junk. It is a free market you can sell what you want, Junk or something great.
However if the product fails to meet customer expectation they may not buy the product, buy an other product from that company and give a negative recommendation about the product. So other people can choose not to buy the product. As it is a free market they don't need to buy it.
The problem isn't Free Market. But the biggest supporters of free market are also so anti-Education, they they try to stop research into the product, as someones normal course of action. Preventing Free Markets natural checks and balances.
A controlled market would probably prevent bad phones from being released. But also good ones, as it is near impossible to predict consumer demand.
Sure the iPhone was successful... However it could have failed. Even the all mighty Apple with its teams of Fan Boys has made flops, without having any major technical issues, it just wasn't what the market wanted.
I have never heard of the Stratosphere until today. Probably because it wasn't really a good phone. And you have no one to blame except for yourself for buying a phone you didn't know much about. The phone isn't dangerous, and for the most part it works, it just doesn't suit your needs... Sorry.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
lol! love the last paragraph.
It's only an Android issue insofar as Android is open enough to let people ship a super cheap phone that is not well tested... you can (and some do) ship Android phones that are very carefully tested.
Basically I am just saying that the market has long ago fixed the problem of crappy phones in spades. There are tons of rock-solid reliable phones now. So to buy a poorly tested Android phone does not mean the market has failed, it means you suck as a buyer. I've never even heard of the phone he mentioned, he must be listening to sales people in phone stores...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's the Free Market for you: The Stratosphere is probably not a huge $ maker for them, so they spend less $ on development and QA than, say, the Galaxy S phones.
For some reason, PM's (especially those at larger companies) think that developers create code that works. Frequently -- at best there is a "let the customer find it, well fix it on the next revision" attitude, however more frequently there is a "just bury the problem all together". Another one is -- hire QA form China (I've seen this fail time and time again). They (the PM's) think these actions will save money -- and it never does. Lost customers, lost business relations, lost faith in company, products that just don't work.
A recent example in Slashdot : Twitter - is hiring. Look at the number of job openings for QA -- just THREE, and all of those are developer based (technically SDET's). Number of "testers" is zero. Number of testers should be 3 or 4 developers to 1 QA (max). Any ratio with a testing staff less than this and you (your company/product) are asking for trouble. Twitter has an 85 to 3 ratio (Yes, they might have 20 testers sitting around waiting for work from development that will be hired, but I don't think so). Think about those numbers for a minute. How many companies have a "Quality, that doesn't even make it on our radar" attitude? Surprisingly, most of them. Frequently these same company's actually resent meaningful testing.
Similarly, every time I say that my Circumventor mailing list keeps getting blocked as "spam" by Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or AOL (despite being 100% verified-opt-in, natch), someone tells me that if the free market is blocking my emails as unwanted, it must be because the users don't want them. That the free market might make a mistake (in this case, because users don't have full information about what is getting blocked as spam), doesn't occur to them. I think the belief in the infallibility of the free market, is one of the most widespread fallacies of our era — people who would never make the mistake of confusing correlation with causation, have no problem thinking that if a product or service gets blocked by a third-party intermediary, it must be because the end user didn't want it.
So you run a mailing list that distributes proxy addresses to get around government interference... that's a truly admirable task... honestly...
But you're being blocked by mail providers... that sucks....
So your solution to your attempts to get by government interference being blocked by the free market is more government interference? Dude I think you forgot to take your lithium today.
We have a winner!!!
I've owned both the phones the submitter refers to, for basically the same reason (slide out kebyoard). The Strat2 also edges out the Droid 4 for several reasons for me (slightly better performance, battery life especially on LTE, and removable batteries).
- I just looked at my Strat 2 calendar app and today is circled Friday, August 2 just like I expected. I have NEVER noticed this bug.
- I'm a Google Voice user for 100% of my texting. I neither know or care what VZ texting does and 99.99% of my texting is one to one. Can't really comment on this one.
- Can confirm screen capture doesn't work as Home+power. However, if I -really- cared, I'm sure I could find a way around it. When my Droid 1 was custom ROMed, I got that feature, but I used it precisely once pretty much just for vanity/curiosity.
- Sure, the built in camera thing is annoying, but all my phones have done it. I can't honestly remember if the iPhone 3G I had did it because I so rarely take photos with my phone. I might add that this is one reason to own a strat... just pop in a new battery (I carry 2 spares) and a minute later take the shot.
- Both the Strat 1 and Strat 2 (and my wife's Samsung Captivate Glide) all have the sucky can't-decide-if-the-screen-should-be-on-or-off-when-on-a-call experience. I've NEVER had a problem with the keypad but when I pull the phone away from my face, it turns the screen on and then off. So I'm frantically hitting the power button to try to get it to a keypad so I can key something in. That is definitely annoying. Also related to this is the fact that the screen turns on with phone unlocked when a call ends even when on a headset. I've had numerous bad things happen with the phone in my pocket because of this situation.
My only real gripe with the Strat 1 and 2 has been how the keyboard Fn/Shift keys are no longer working reliably on an app-by-app basis. Sometimes, I can just press the key once for a single Fn/Shift action or twice for unlimited Fn/Shift actions or a third time to turn it off. Other times, I have to HOLD the button while pressing the key I want to do the action. And other times still, I have to open up the software keyboard to put in that bit of punctuation because the app just won't respond. This drives me nuts more than anything else combined... it's the #1 reason I have this phone -- for fast text control, and it's completely faceplanting. I'm currently debating about the newest VZ software update (only about 2 for 4 on updates from VZ not doing one or more really destructive things) and waiting for someone to respond... but they don't indicate my problem is fixed.
But I have a real bet about bugs and fixes. Manufacturers are focused on their best sellers. That's where they put the best and most developers and where they will give the most maintenance attention. The problems we deal with are largely because we have a third tier phone. Not only that, once you start complaining about this or that, it's "Buy a Nexus." Well, SSUUURREEE, I'd buy the Nexus if it had a good keyboard, a removable battery, and a micro SD slot. Then they say my problem is that I'm too picky. At this point, I know I have no real chance and probably in the long run I'll just have to accept I'm not going to have a physical keyboard because so few buyers care. If you own a Strat or similar phone, you are a "low end user who doesn't care." No, I just care about some things a little more.
The only real hope we have is for Android to be a little more like Windows... where you decouple the hardware and the software. I can run anything from XP to 8.1 on most of the PC hardware in the world. I can get the fixes I want. I'm not forced into anything. You're lucky to get ONE android version upgrade, especially if you don't run a hero phone. And if you complain about this... "Buy a Nexus" or "It's a phone... get a new one in a year." And that one android version upgrade will likely be forced on you; you can't say no, and it may well break a lot of stuff.
So basically, I love Android and wouldn't use anything else. I just don't want to have to use one of the top 5 smartphones (and pay top 5 prices) just because I want improved software.
Sorry, the problem with the declaration The free market has fixed this problem is that it only fixed it AFTER I spent my $500 on a really crappy phone...
The free market fixed crappy phones long before you bought yours. There were phones that existed that addressed your problem before you made your purchase.
Your problem is that you were not using the information the market gives you to make choices based on the criteria important to you.
But you won't make that mistake again, right? Thus the market works over time exactly as it should. A free market does not fix a SPECIFIC problem. It fixes problems over time due to people's natural behavior in not wanting to be shafted, and companies seeing an opening in markets where consumers are being shafted...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The irony is that the solution he proposes, "would be for some third-party review company to rate each new phone on the Stupid S#!% Index." In other words, he's proposing a market based solution that already exists. One thinks first, of course, of Consumer Reports, but there are countless publication which review products as a business. It looks rather like he didn't even bother checking reviews.
Seriously. The ending to this article is one of the best last words I've seen in awhile.
They'll ship anything.
No, quite the contrary, it's a very logical reaction. I find consistently that the care a company takes in the little things reflects the care a company takes in the big things. A company whose software has really obvious and easily caught bugs almost certainly did not do a great job at designing the hardware either, hence your broken charge port (which should always be the single most robust component of a phone, because it is the most heavily abused).
Case in point, I recently shipped back a Canon 28-135 lens (two copies) because of severe lens creep. I tend to assume that if the tolerances on such a user-visible component are that sloppy, the tolerances on other components that are less visible are probably equally sloppy, and such sloppy tolerances are likely to result in severely diminished life expectancy.
Helpful tip: You can buy cases for iPhones that include slide-out keyboards. You do have to charge the keyboards separately, but IMO that's a small price to pay for a phone that knows today isn't tomorrow. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
They were using the blackberry release model, force the release and then hurry up and release updates to often.
Like evolutionary forces, the free market ensures the survival of the fit (good enough to keep going), not the fittest as so many people have erroneously come to believe. Unless a product is bad enough to sink a company, the company will stumble on with the same folks making the next generation of products. Bad management almost assures that even if the company halves in size as the result of a string of bad products they will not actually fix their internal company problems, as management can hardly tell a good employee from a terrible one (heck they look on the mirror daily and fail to immediately quit for the good of the company...).
So the free market will never drive companies to perfection, only weed out the weakest serial non-performers at best. Even then, those weeded out are weeded out based on profit, not product excellence (see: Firefly). At worst bad companies will have other large operations that will let them subsidize terrible behaviors for decades in their badly run groups (see: Microsoft).
A lot of this boils down to the engineers often having neither a clue there is a problem, nor the power to do anything about it when they have a clue. A group of good engineers can be powerless in the face of an awful product roadmap managed by a pointy haired buffoon. See Putt's Law for many more details.
Keep in mind that Samsung is really a hardware company. They do allocate resources for software (indeed they do some Tizen work and have their own OS), but keep it in mind: Samsung is really a hardware company. They make hardware for freaking everyone almost... the number oh phone models out there that do not have any Samsung made components in them is a small minority.
Going further: Android sucks. There I said it. Its display system (SurfaceFlinger) sucks. Its NDK sucks. Its entire way of working just plain sucks. I cannot figure out which I think sucks more: writing for Android, using an Android phone or attempting to deploy binary only applications successfully for desktop Linux. That it is quasi-free for a phone or tablet manufacturer to use makes it worse; there is far too little vertical integration (because that is the cost of using a system that works in so many places). Android as an OS, is much worse than iOS and Windows Phone. Ouch. It sucks to write for Android (again from a combination of a sucky OS together with hardware all over the map). That Samsung makes some crappy apps for their phones... rather than using the crap apps that are part of vanilla Android might tell you'all something: Android sucks hard. The built in web-engine is always a massively lagged behind WebKit and that is why Google Chrome (Webkit too) is so much better.
For myself, I won't use an Android phone.. unless someone literally pays me a metric fuckton of money to use it.
Want a nice cheat tough phone: get a Nokia Series 40
Want a nice smart phone with lots of apps: get an iPhone
Want a nice smart phone with few apps: get a Nokia Lumia
Want a phone that only looks nice in the shop and on paper: buy an Android.
As I learned from my Galaxy S and then from reading other peoples issues with other Samsung issues, Samsung will release a buggy product (not necessarily a sin in itself) but will then stonewall, refuse to admit that the problem exists, promise solutions "soon", fail to deliver solutions that solve the problem and then just ignore the issue until it goes away.
I will never buy a Samsung product again that hasn't been out for a while. And then I will read to find out what bugs and issues there are with the product to decide whether I can live with them on the expectation that they will *never* be fixed.
Mind you, Motorola doesn't seem much better. The last OS update borked Swype (It Now Capitalized Every Word Like This In Web Input Forms) and there's not hint of anyone actually working to fix the problem.
Samsung software is just bad. Kies may be the single worst piece of desktop software I've used in a decade (I'm sure there's worse, but I haven't used it).
Whenever I get a new phone (currently an S3) I wait a couple days to see if anything has improved, then rip all the Samsung crap off it and it's like a whole new (har) phone with better performance and much better battery life. And it's stable. Uptime on my S3 is currently at 46 days; T-Mobile sends me a support text every week warning me to reboot it or it may be unstable - because they think I'm using the crap that came on it.
Next time I'm just going to get something with stock Android.
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In the cell phone market, Time to Market is EVERYTHING. Small things like this have precisely zero shits given about them when the release date is approaching. The phone WILL be released on the release date, PERIOD.
Anything that is wrong with it may or may not be fixed later in an OTA update.
This is why I never run stock carrier ROMs on my phones. I always use a third party "hack" because at least those are more or less continuously updated.
I can't see how the manufacturer is making any money off of the bugs I ran into
They make money by making new phones. Period. If you're holding the phone in your hand, the only way they can make more money from you is to get you to buy another phone.
Yes, I know there are other ways through services, selling apps, customer loyalty, blah blah blah. But the real way is to sell you another phone.
I worked at Samsung. They gave out insanely large bonuses to workers in Korea on phone teams every time a phone shipped. They did not give out bonuses when you did a carrier update. Number of phones shipped is a huge metric, and one they wanted to always raise. Selling the most phones in X region for Y period is a big deal. Fixing bugs in a phone that already shipped isn't.
To add to this problem, workers are paid overtime for hours above a given amount in Korea; they don't have the same concept as the US of a salaried worker that makes a set wage if they work banker's hours or are in startup mode. And when told they need to ship a phone in a year with a team of a hundred, they take great pride in saying they can do it in in 9 months with 50 people. But then everyone works 80 hours a week, and racks up huge amounts of overtime, plus gets that big bonus. And the extra hours and added stress are why you'll find so many bone-headed mistakes in their phones.
Excellently articulated. There is a cesspool of bugs on Android phones that are usually programming in to by the manufacturer or the retailer. I wish Google would stand up and say, STOP MODIFYING OUR OS. But that will never happen because apparently Android fragmentation is "Overblown":
http://slashdot.org/story/13/07/10/220251/android-co-founder-fragmentation-an-overblown-issue
The answer is really easy. You do not have a flagship product. You have a product meant to fit a hole in the low end of the market. Why pour large sums of money into polishing a turd? If you want a better experience but don't want to spend much money, go get a legacy Galaxy S{n} or equivalent flagship line from another vendor.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
As with all large systems used by a society, the free market is incapable of solving problems, and is easily corrupted if most of the people in it are too stupid to make good choices for themselves. The thing that's great about a free market is that it works as long as enough people are smart enough to promote their own interests, it has no prerequisite for "moral" behavior because the individuals police each other's bad behavior. But the whole thing breaks down is most individuals are too stupid to do that.
If you have an Apple developer account, have a look at the WWDC session video about dates. Handling dates is difficult.
Or ask any developer for any platform that has ever touched dates and times what a pain they can be. Sheesh.
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I have a Samsung Charge. Getting your phone and all it's issues sounds like an upgrade to me. Samsung may do well in other products, but they make poor quality phones.
I'm amused that someone is still talking about the Samsung Stratosphere. The first model was obsolete nearly as soon as it came out, in the sense that Android 4.0 came out a week after the Stratosphere, but the phone never received an update past 2.3 (the two it did receive brought it up to 2.3.6). I've never used the Stratosphere 2, and it sounds like that's where most of Bennett's complaints are coming from. One the Strat 1, I've never experienced the calendar bug, and the screen always comes back on when I'm on a call and pull the phone away from my face.
I will commiserate about the fact that there are almost no phones coming out anymore with a slideout keyboard.
They sold a fraud.
There is no way they could not know about all that.
They need to be criminally charged.
Well, SSUUURREEE, I'd buy the Nexus if it had a good keyboard, a removable battery, and a micro SD slot. Then they say my problem is that I'm too picky
Buy a Google Edition Galaxy S4 then. Stock Android, removable battery, microSD slot. Just no physical keyboard, but there are good external keyboards (and it's possible to get used to non-physical keyboards, specially on larger screens. Check out Hacker's Keyboard from the Play Store for a full, desktop-like keyboard).
Not as smart as a smartphone, but it had looked like it would do enough for us; but even what was on there didn't work right. And in particular, basic Bluetooth didn't work right, which was the deal-killer. So my wife broke down and got an iPhone, like her sister's whole family and her brother's whole family, and every feature she tried just worked, and now she's a happy little Appleist like the rest of them. Happy being the important part.
I work in embedded systems, with over 10 years in telecom protocols. The fact that Samsung could get something as core as Bluetooth wrong, this long after it's been a standard, is simply an embarrassment.
Are these issues with Android itself? How is this issue not showing up in other phones then? Or did Samsung go out of their way to "customize" Android on this phone, and shit up everything they touch? Why do carriers and manufacturers go out of their way to do this? Are they retarded?
The free market has fixed the problem. It's called the iPhone. Or if you don't roll that way, a newer Android phone from any number of other suppliers. I hear HTC makes a heck of a phone. To not engage in the free market (i.e. not buy the better product) and then complain that the free market isn't solving your problems seems like self evident stupidity to me. Just sayin.
planet texture maps and more
It took about four seconds to find one
You just have to jailbreak (to head your outdated hater arguments off at the pass, yes it is legal, no it does not void your warranty). It's basically a pretty silly thing to claim such a specialized technical need is a problem for the platform when most people would just look at the WiFi list on the phone itself...
Meanwhile, you go find something as powerful as GarageBand, Pages, and iMovie on Android. I won't wait because they don't exist.
Anything is possible to do on iOS. The converse is simply not true because many more complex applications just do not exist on Android.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I never had a problem with a miniUSB port, but those micro ports constantly break and the male connector bends. Its a stupid fucking design.
Bennett, Can Cynaogen run on your phone? Have you considered it? Market forces have created a ROM that beats standard ROMs in many ways, and its name is Cyanogen.
The free market does fix things, but only if consumers keep each other informed.
Bennett Haselton has done his part by writing up this nice overview of the bugs he observed. Now other consumers must do their part by first getting informed, and then voting with their dollars to reward superior products and punish inferior products.
The free market is not a magic tool; it requires participatory effort to fix things. It's far better than the alternative -- an unfree market.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Yes, that will be the direction I head if I can't have a physical keyboard any more. I've tried all the virtual keyboards (used an iPhone for a year also), and the only virtual keyboards that work well for me are on a 10" tablet size. I guess I have fat fingers.
The other big advantage of a physical keyboard is that you give up 0 screen real estate to use the keyboard... and since screens on phones are so small...
up yours, dude. what a whiner. You have a phone that sucks, but you tell iphone users their phone is worse? really? ok.. good luck with that.
and you throw in a generic anti-woman body issues jab at the end of a tech piece -- what? why?
you need to try to not be so stupid.
really -- go write a 300 word essay about your phone. maybe that will help.
So, not only have you been using it for almost a year, you got the next model of it! Whatever reasons there might be for Samsung to straighten up, you're certainly not supplying any of them.
I find it funny that the review mentions apple doesn't let you do so and so and so but it just works and then samsung doesn't let u do this and this but it doesn't work.
Someone elsewhere gave the possible reasons for all these things, so I don't want to repeat that, but if its not customizable, it'll always work for some and not for others.
It is another matter that if apple had shoved the 'you don't need it pill' with billions of dollars of 'why it's cool' ads down your throat, you'd be proud displaying your iShit everywhere
You bought a stupid shitty phone and now you are surprised that is stupid and shitty? And you had the previous version too? And this is somehow the fault of the free market?
Look, the "free market" works by people voting with their dollars. Stop buying stupid shit and companies will be disinclined to keep selling it. Try buying a good phone next time. At least try sticking to phones that other people may have heard of. I had to google "samsung stratosphere" to even figure out what you were whining about.
The absolute worst piece of consumer electronics I've ever owned was a Samsung digital set-top box. There's nothing I will put past them in terms of releasing catastrophically shit products.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Samsung's market cap is about $170 billion USD...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
Apple charges a premium for their products of about 30%. However, they have a very large and dedicated team of developers, and only one major product to work on at a time. Furthermore, as a firm, they are aware that their survival and profits depend on Getting It Right. If they cut corners, maybe skip some testing, don't support their products the day after it ships, it lowers the public perception of their brand, and they will no longer be able to consistently charge that 30% markup.
Shoulda bought an iphone. With the subsidized carrier model, it wouldn't have cost any more than you are already paying.
I wonder how much this flagship fetish is an effect of Samsung and other similar manufacturers, who may give a shit about fixing bugs in premium products, but anywhere else the software is utter garbage. I do have an okay working Samsung Blu-Ray drive, but I figure it's only because it's made by a JV with Toshiba.
I think the right answer is, refuse to sponsor shoddy production practices and pick a manufacturer that does its job diligently across the whole product range. If Nokia can make great $30 phones, why Samsung should be excused?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
If you start a Stupid Crap website, I'll visit it. Every time a friend or acquaintance asks me what they think about the phone they're thinking of buying, I'll direct them there. Every time someone comes to me and says, "Look at my sweet new Statosphere 3!" I'll say, "I don't know, man. I was looking at StupidPhoneBugCrap.com and how do you like your calendar?" and then I will encourage them to take the phone back. That's the free market at work. Now if I can beat you to the punch and create such a website, I'll make the money and you won't. Thanks for the idea, dummy!
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.