Slashdot Mirror
Why My LG Optimus Cellphone Is Worse Than It's Supposed To Be
How long would it have taken you to find these bugs, as a beta tester?
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The phone's auto-correct changes single-quotes to double-quotes in contractions -- for example, when you type you're, the phone auto-corrects it to you"re .
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When you backspace over part of a word that you've typed and then type the rest of the word, auto-correct corrects based on the letters that you type after you've finished backspacing, rather than the letters in the entire word that you've just completed. For example, if you type couchsurfing and the phone auto-corrects it to concurring, then backspace over all of the letters except the initial co, and then type "uch" followed by a space to form the word "couch", the Optimus changes "uch" to "such" to form "cosuch", because it thinks it's auto-correcting just the "uch" fragment and doesn't see the entire word "couch".
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Taking a screen capture still doesn't work, just like it didn't work on the Stratosphere 2. There are official directions on how to do it, but you can follow the steps and nothing happens.
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The first time I launched the voice mail application, the app prompted me to freely choose a new PIN code, and then sternly warned me, Mao-like, that my supposedly freely chosen PIN code was "incorrect". (I never got it working, and just called in to the voice mail number manually whenever I wanted to check my messages.)
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When I bought a movie on Google Play and wanted to "pin" it to the phone -- i.e. download a static, non-streamed copy so that I could watch it offline, e.g. on a plane ride -- the phone didn't have enough internal storage left to save a copy of the movie (1.27 GB, most of it taken up in 1-2 MB increments by crapware already loaded on to the phone, so that only about 200 MB was left). So I tried saving the movie to a 32 GB SD card that I had plugged into the phone, but ran into the problem that Google Play wouldn't let me save the movie to the SD card, a problem described in Joe Levi's 2013 article "Why does Google hate your SD card?" and still not fixed almost a year later. (The comments posted on his article indicate that lots of people are pissed.)
Unlike the other bugs, this may be an example of stupidity not at the testing level but at the design specification level -- perhaps this was done in a misguided effort to prevent illegal copying. But, as Levi says of this theory, "If the DRM being used on Android is sufficient enough for content providers to accept it when media is saved internally, they should also accept it when media is saved to an SD card. Otherwise, the DRM isn't really that trustworthy, is it?" It's pointless from a copy-protection point of view, since anyone who wants to pirate a movie can just download it from various BitTorrent sites anyway; all this "feature" does is alienate people who are trying to pay for a movie legally.
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In the Messaging (i.e. texting) app, you cannot search for messages by the name of the sender. Your conversations are listed in reverse chronological order by the date of the most recent message in each conversation, but to find a conversation with a particular person, you have to scroll down the entire list of conversations and keep your eyes peeled for the person's name.
- On certain mobile website forms (the Fandango site, for instance, and some others that I don't remember -- it's not clear why this happens on some website forms but not others), the phone won't let me type "special characters", the ones that appear in the upper-right corner of the keyboard keys (so that you can type the "@" symbol by first hitting the "Fn" key to access special characters, and then pressing the "2" key). This means that since I can't type the "@" symbol, I can't log in to any form that requires an email address as a username. (The workaround is to open the Gmail app, find an email address in an email message, copy the "@" symbol from the email address to the clipboard, and then paste it back in the browser form -- yes, I have to do every time I log in to a mobile site that has this problem.)
In my previous phone-suck article about the Samsung Stratosphere, I listed as many problems as I could think of at the time, and I completely forgot the fact that the phone recorded videos without any sound. (I know it wasn't a hardware problem with the microphone, since the phone app picked up my voice fine.) As part of my research into how to ruin Burning Man forever by telling "tourists" how to get there easily, I wanted to post a video of the quintessential Burning Man spectacle that makes all the dust and thirst and heat worthwhile -- and I had to post it with no sound recording, because Samsung's product testing is done by the same drunken bonobos that worked on the LG Optimus.
And both products raise the same question, not rhetorically, but seriously: How did this happen? More specifically, in a theoretical free market, any product improvement that costs only a small amount compared to the benefit it brings to consumers, should be implemented (and consumers will reward the company by paying additional dollars for the improvement, in proportion to the benefit it brings them). While it doesn't always work out that way in practice, it's hard to believe LG couldn't spring for a few English-language testers to point out that the phone shouldn't be correcting you're to you"re.
I think the answer in both cases is that the free market optimizes mainly for things that are easily quantifiable, like camera resolution and network speed, because those can be listed on the packaging and compared against other products. But the amount of stupid s*#t you run into while actually using the phone, is hard to define on an objective scale, so that's the first thing that companies will cut corners on, even if it's something that consumers would be willing to pay money for.
So my solution is still essentially the same as what I proposed after trashing the Stratosphere: Some Consumer-Reports-type outlet should rate phones on a Stupid S*#t Index (along with speed, reception, etc.), based on how much stupid s*#t they run into in a week of typical usage. Ideally the Stupid S*#t Index should be reduced to a number so that you can do a quick comparison between different models. If a cheap phone has a lot of stupid s*#t problems, but you don't mind because you want to save money, that's a valid choice, and if you want to pay more for a phone with less stupid s*#t, that's fine too. But people should know what they're buying.
More generally, I think people vastly overestimate the ability of the free market to meet consumer demand, in cases where the demand is for something that can't be easily quantified. I've spent a fair amount of time in "entrepreneurial" circles (while bouncing back and forth myself between entrepreneurship and regular jobs) and have heard the faithful reciting a lot of platitudes like "The market rewards the best product," or "Focus on building the best product you can make, and the customers will come." But most of them evidently didn't even believe it themselves -- they spent most of their efforts on search engine optimization, running content farms, networking with important business contacts, and other activities that didn't directly relate to the quality of their products. And who could blame them? Since their products weren't competing on qualities that were precisely quantifiable, there was no reason for any of them to try to create the "best" product, or even a particularly good one. And that strategy worked quite well for several of them.
On the other hand, when you're competing on a quantifiable metric like price, the best product or service can shoot straight to the top without wasting any time on zero-sum games like SEO or networking ass-kissery. If you're selling external hard drives on Amazon for $0.01, you'll make a lot of sales. You'll go broke, but in the meantime, the free market will connect you quite effectively with your customers.
So, make the mobile phone Stupid S*@t Index into something quantifiable, and maybe we'll have less stupid s#*t. One review body could publish the average rating from several different reviewers, or several different review bodies could publish their ratings and consumers could weight the averages themselves.
Not that it's a panacea -- I bought the LG Optimus not because it was the cheapest or because I didn't expect it to have bugs, but because it was the only offering with a slide-out keyboard, and I've become addicted to the precision of physical keys. (It is so much easier to let your fingertip feel its way to the right key first, and then actually press the key in a separate motion, rather than having to hope your fingertip lands on the right spot in the first place.) So I never returned the phone, they kept my money, and I suppose that makes me part of the problem.
Because unlike other Slashdot posters, we're actually forced to listen to him every time we glance over stories on the front page.
Why is this on Slashdot?
For example sucky custom keyboards with slight misbehavior really upset me.
Also, the fact taht all keyboard phones seem to be low end is frustrating too.
Splitting internal and external storage is annoying, since a phone data dump is easy enough, and if the DRM is cracked, it'll still rpevent casual copying.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I certainly can type more than that Mr Filter.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
It's well known that cheap android phones have always been bad, and will always be bad. If you want a cheap, reliable phone, Nokia is more than willing to sell you one of its lower end Lumias. And if you want to have a contract, you can even get a high quality iPhone for "free". Why waste time with bottom of the barrel junk?
hey!
1. Buy crappy cellphone.
2. Complain that it's crappy.
3. Profit.
Enjoy having paid for the privilege, and buy an iphone next time.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
where SW has to work and most people will never exhaust all of what it does and uncover all the bugs. Too often people just figure (a) tech is hard and (2) i'm not a computer geek so there's no way I'll ever work this thing right anyway.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
QQ
Phones suck in ways that make them suck, not in any specific way by design. Quality is shit because it's shit borne of laziness and cheapness and not the extra amount of money they'd have to spend planning out their shittiness. Cheap shit phones have no reason to try to upsell you because those are two different markets. The shit market and the poser market. And never the twain shall meet.
What IS interesting though is the razor thin differences in the quality between the shit phones and the more expensive phones. More expensive phones spend all their money on 'me too' features. Not quality.
It's 2014. Or hey, if you want to stay in the past, I hear BB's new square screen phone has a touchpad with keys.
Are the mods drunk?
So my solution is still essentially the same as what I proposed after trashing the Stratosphere: Some Consumer-Reports-type outlet should rate phones on a Stupid S*#t Index (along with speed, reception, etc.), based on how much stupid s*#t they run into in a week of typical usage.
It sure sounds like he's talking about Consumer Reports here. But the solution already exists, and he got burned anyway, so maybe the real solution is complaining about it on Slashdot. That gets things done.
This is why I hated the first generation of "almost smart phones".
Instead of being just a phone, they added half-assed features that got in the way of the phone being a phone.
Strangely, this is why I first went to an iPhone - it was the best at letting me get all the other crap out of the way (out of sight, out of mind, just wish I could delete more crap) and being just a phone.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
My "high end" LG fridge that's supposed to be quiet but grunts along like a 15 year old no-name "white" fridge, with the added bonus of making knocking noises, like the Chinese kid that assembled it is stuck in the compressor.
My LG washing machine that doesn't really check if the door is really closed and will happily pump water out the door like a drooling infant. And when it works, if you use the highest spin speed, be prepared for the smell of burning something or other.
And that's when it doesn't throw you an error message like TcL on its display, but that message doesn't show up anywhere in the manual. Did I have to install TCL/TK to clean my socks? Who knows?
And my LG phone... Oh boy....
Why did I buy so much LG crap? Bad decisions. Oh well.
I have purchased most of the Samsung Galaxy series (S1, S3, S4) and they all are completely unusable with stock software. The bloat and excessive nagging crapware that they put on the phone is plainly ridiculous. And good luck with any aftermarket roms, they all have huge issues with random force closes, the cameras deciding to close or not working at all, or the wifi not working at all. I wish there was a better alternative, but the Nexus 5 and HTC one suck just as much, but in different ways (non-removable battery, no micro SD card, etc).
Please stop. They're annoying.
I'm a cheap bastard and I want affection.
I mean say what you want about their current products, but their entire deal has been putting software on devices that for the vast bulk of users doesn't suck.
So you want to go around saying things like
raise more interesting questions — about why the free-market system rewards companies for pulling off miracles at the hardware level, but not for fixing software bugs that should be easy to catch
Well it does reward companies for doing just that. What the author really wants to complain about is either his inability/lack of desire to do basic research before buying a piece of crap phone (How free markets punish people for not making informed decisions) or That LG isn't sufficiently punished for doing what he things is a bad job. The latter is a case of his overgeneralizing what he feels is important to what everyone else feels is important.
Should not be part of the quote
Well it does reward companies for doing just that. What the author really wants to complain about is either his inability/lack of desire to do basic research before buying a piece of crap phone (How free markets punish people for not making informed decisions) or That LG isn't sufficiently punished for doing what he things is a bad job. The latter is a case of his overgeneralizing what he feels is important to what everyone else feels is important.
That's kind of insulting to the submitter. You can easily just skip this article.
The reason is simple. Software is getting more complex and featureful, but companies are not investing enough to get a matching amount of quality assurance.
http://get.cm/
"The phone's auto-correct changes single-quotes to double-quotes in contractions -- for example, when you type you're, the phone auto-corrects it to you"re ."
That's because your spelling it wrong.
That's kind of insulting to the submitter.
Good. You gonna go cry to your mommy about it?
If you say so. However, I got rid of the stock OS and installed CyanogenMod and am very pleased with its performance. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
drivel, DRIVEL!!!
Would that have made your rambling screed less boring and stupid? Doubtful.
If you want a good lg phone, buy a Nexus 5 without a contract (~$350) and get monthly plan with unlimited everything plan ~$45.
There's an easy solution.
ONLY buy phones that receive updates from your OS creator, not from a 3rd party manufacturer hackjob who will leave you high and dry with bugs and old software.
So this ends up being ONLY a Nexus device, any Iphone, or any Windows Mobile phone.
I've seen it time and time again, even Samsung can't get the software bugs out of their S-line phones, and other vendors like HTC and LG are much much worse. My boss complains all day and night about the bugs on his LG G2, and my Nexus 5 which runs basically the same hardware is great on all counts.
Then post your bullshit on your own websites. No one wants to listen to you ramble on about crap that you utterly fail to understand and whine like a little girl.
Go back to your hole and whine about what network providers blacklist your retarded lists of open proxies.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
yeah, and they bleeped it wrong. should be "s#!t" :)
Buy a cheap phone, you got what you paid for. Android is awful, so you have to take that bitter pill already. The entire choice of cell phones out there is basically "Nice iPhone, not-so-bad Samsung Galaxy phone, maybe-not-too-bad-Nexus, and a bunch of other OEM trash running Android that will never be updated"
Basically the people selling you the phone earn larger commissions if you buy shittier products.
With android phones, the phone manufacturers along with the carriers will ship out a ROM that barely works, then completely abandon it a month after initial release.
You expected bug fixes and security updates? Ha! Sorry. If you wanted security updates and bug fixes, you might as well have bought a PC or an iPhone. The only device updates you are going to see with android phones are ones pushed by the carriers to add more bloatware. They are hoping you'll simply buy a new phone 2 years from now, and the new phone will contain the bug fixes you want.
I think people vastly overestimate the ability of the free market to meet consumer demand, in cases where the demand is for something that can't be easily quantified.
Oh no sir, the market filled your demand perfectly here. You asked for a cheap phone, and that's exactly what you got.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
He takes an (1) example of a company with obviously poor QA, and turns it into a critique of the free market. ? Sorry, but to make this argument stick, you'd have to show that ALL (or, at least, most) of the companies selling phones operate under this MO. Additionally, you'd have to show that these same problems wouldn't plague a product line in a regulated market scenario. Good luck.
sig: sauer
But why buy a phone without looking at reviews? Potentially looking at xda if there is a community for it? I once had a real cheap android phone, but because of XDA, got more space, and had it running much faster/better then the way it came.
I'm not saying that XDA route is for everyone, but you're posting on a Tech type website about this. You would think you would at least do the bare minimum research before dropping what $280+ for this? (that's min with out contract that I saw, most of times it was 300-400)
But I mean did you want a full blown hardware keyboard? Cause a 16gb Nexus 5 is only $350, new. I'm sure there are some other models out there that are cheaper but better then your complaints.
I mean if you really want a hardware keyboard, you really don't have many options because they aren't that popular. Plus with the Google swype thing built into the software keyboard, I type way faster doing that then with a hardware keyboard. Takes like 5 minutes to get used to it.
You can discern between shoddy work and just plain cheapness much more than the average buyer can. To them it's just "doesn't work, let's get something different". In fact, I don't think they finesse the result all that much. It's more of a "let's fill this slot" type of thing. You know, a bunch of executives hearing from marketeering that there's a market slot to fill, and ordering something to fill that. The hardware development analogue to "it compiles, ship it".
As another example, I got myself a nokia E52 to replace the 6310 I had been using up until then. I still have the sodding thing but it no longer works due to aggravating the user too much, and certainly is no longer in use. I'm back with the 6310, because as little as it does, at least it does so acceptably most of the time; it actually works and it's not outright trying to kill me. Not so much the E52, even though it has a much longer list of ticked features. The thing is, most features only work in really limited senses, just enough to tick that box and not enough to actually work. I can't be bothered to do a write-up or even dig up the list I once compiled of all the crap it pulled. Suffice to say that nokia is now thorougly dead to me. But the bigger point is that the E52 is supposed to be an enterprise model. Ought to work, right? Well, no.
What I now rather want is, say, a phone with all the interfaces of the 6310, it can be a 6310 for all I care because that design is pretty solid, though more modern, energy-saving, and thinner hardware would be welcome, as would a dual-sim feature and usb charging. But most important it should come with open source everything. That includes open source hardware for long term supportability, open source case design because 3d printers are a thing these days, open source firmware on the radio interface so that all those hidden holes and outright factory built-in security problems can get fixed, and open source firmware so I can customise menus and do new and exciting things with the available hardware. Such as using it as a remote (it has an IR interface), or tether it to a laptop for uplink, or hey, fax, why not, or perhaps use it as a bluetooth dongle, or turn two of them into a bluetooth-based walkie-talkie set, or whatever else I might want to do with it. Maybe the hardware is fast enough to do voice crypto but at least I'd want close control over which radio interface is talking to the world, when. I want the thing to serve me to its fullest potential, not be a vehicle for a telco to squeeze a few extra bucks out of me. Because I'm indeed a nerd and/or geek and it's just saddening how little actual use you get out of all this programmable but closed source hardware.
You're holding a device in the palm of your hand that has access to the entire history of human knowledge, but you still find a way to complain about it??? Fuck off people. An asteroid needs to come and give us the dinosaur treatment.
Telephones are devices that let you speak to someone (tele-, far; and phone-, sound).
The real mystery is why anyone who has the slightest clue about technology, would buy or wish to use a computer that runs software you cannot control or replace. Even the TRS-80 let you shut off the built-in Microsoft BASIC ROM, and the Apple ][ let you run something other than Integer BASIC. These allegedly "smart" so-called "telephones" seem quite brain-dead.
on low end phones and you will have the fewest issues.
Moto G on them!
The submitter deserves to be insulted.
T-mobile's site says that phone is $324 full retail price. You can get a Moto G for $199 or a Moto X for $299. If you bought that phone you simply didn't do any research.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
And therein lies your problem- YOU !!
I rather like my AT&T-supplied E970.
The subject line isn't actually true, of course. It's the package as a whole on which users generally base their decisions. But I suspect that people in decision making capacity in companies who's primary product is hardware tend to think in these terms. Hardware needs to be cool and compact and capable because that's what differentiates this new model from last year's model or from competitors' models. Software is just... stuff that you use. It's overhead, a necessary evil. And much more likely to be outsourced. For a manufacturer of phones, hardware is their core business, software gets relegated to the LCC (least cost country) and there is a presumption that the customer base will serve as unpaid QA, so funding for testing is an afterthought. And so, the products are cool looking and suck to use.
Some companies try to differentiate on software, and tend to do a better job, but even then, you can get stubborn "we know better than you" decisions that detract from the user experience.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Nobody's modding them up, I think ol' Bennett and Timmy have some sort of quid pro quo agreement going on.
Probably has something to do with blowjobs. How else would these masturbatory B.S. BH blog posts, which obviously annoy the living shit out of the majority of the people commenting here, keep making their way to the feed?
Somebody should kick Bennett the $10 needed to register a domain so he can blog like a normal douche-nozzle and stop treating Slashdot like his own personal soapbox. I'll bet masterdouche.net is probably still available.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
When it priced this phone as the cheapest one in the store. When I go to Lowes and I see the cheapest screwdrivers, I know they aren't going to last. Thanks for the heads up free market.
Sad, what's happened to slashdot.
Back on topic, I'm truly amazed at what crap people will buy.
There is not a cellphone on the market that I would pay money for right now, yet people just keep buying this crap, and as long as they are selling why would anyone spend money to fix them?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You mention a "free market". What is a "free market" and where exactly does one exist? I ask because there certainly isn't one in America, unless you're redefining the term.
You bought the crappiest phone in the store, and the fact that it sucks 'raises questions about the free-market system'? Really? Had LG put more effort into it, it would have cost more. And if you had done you research and/or paid a bit more to get better quality you would have gotten a better phone. THAT's how the market works...
This is like going to a supermarket, buying the cheapest possible processed frozen dinner, and then blaming capitalism because it didn't taste like a dry-aged premium rib-eye steak...
. . . but this would require the trade-press to do actual work, instead of copying/pasting the vendors' marketing literature in a side-by-side comparison.
This has been a problem with in the software industry trade-press all the way back to the 1980's. Maybe even longer.
The "feature" phone (in that case, a phone with hardware keyboard which is a real oddity nowadays) is not intended to make any money for the company by itself and nobody really gives a damn if it's even working, to be honest.
They are perfectly aware of it and if you bring it back to the store a few days later because you have found out how much it actually sucked, they will be extremely glad to exchange it for a higher priced model.
On the other hand, the issue is compounded by the fact that most Android phones are hacked by the phone service provider. They are not content to let you have the Google Android experience, they have to "differentiate" themselves from the others, and too often that means adding ill-conceived, substandard, undertested apps that ruins the experience.
In that case, Google may not be entirely clean as I am not sure if Android is even supposed to support a hardware keyboard. I have used several Bluetooth keyboards on my Nexus 7 and they do not all work the same.
It's well known that cheap android phones have always been bad, and will always be bad.
Errrm, no!?
Just bought a Huawei Y530 for 113 Euros for my SO. It runs Android 4.2.x. The camera is sub-par for todays standards and even weaker than on my 3-year old HTC Desire HD, but with 5MP more than sufficient for taking shots of cats or the family on a trip. Or videos for that matter. That aside, the screen is awesome, the processing power is more than sufficient, Chrome works like a charm and so does hangouts, email and such. No problem with special apps so far. Video playback works as intended. The widgets look fine. The UI is dumbed down a little - installed Apps are automatically placed on the UI, there is no seperate "installed apps" drawer - but that simply makes things less complicated for normal users.
The battery is replaceable and the case looks cool (designed by the fin who did some Nokia cases and the case for the Jolla, IIRC).
Bottom line:
If you take your time searching, you can get cheap Android phones that have an amazing price/performance ratio and do their job just fine.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
these type of comments are beginning to mystify me.
used, powerful android phones on swappa.com, ebay, or even you local pawn shop are plentiful.
in fact, i just bought a google nexus (verizon) for $80 at a local pawn shop...the same store was selling a almost new galaxy note 3 for $200...which i plan today to go buy and resell on swappa for a tidy profit.
life is too damn short to fuck around with a worthless handset.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
that they could have just used stock Android and not have most of these problems.
I have an old Samsing Galaxy S (1) that runs perfectly fine with CM 11 (Android 4.4). Yes, it's slow, which is why I bought an S3 later on, but it's still a good spare phone. I will NEVER buy an Android that's not CM-supported or has no SD slot. For some reason this means I have to buy Galaxy phones, even though I don't like Samsung and would rather buy something else.
I used to have this old flip-phone which had a buggy power-save setting.
It dimmed the screen backlight alright... but what it forgot to do was turn off the screen when you closed the phone.
Result was that the power-save would take your battery life from about 12 hours to about 0.2 hours.
I had that phone for probably 10 years & never once saw a firmware update to fix this simple coding error. I couldve fixed it in 20 min if id had access to the code, but nooooo.
The free market is working. You paid for a cheap phone, and you got one.
If you want a good phone, don't buy a cheap one. This doesn't mean, "don't buy a low-feature phone"-- it means, don't buy a smart phone for a dumb-phone price and expect it to work well.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
on behalf of a math student (myself), i will mention that there are literally an infinity of statements that are not "incorrect". some very basic software can enumerate millions of "theorems" within a few hours given appropriate axioms.
this list of facts will not, however, have any point; it will just be a list of correct statements.
simply because something is correct, doesn't mean that it is worth reading. this is the problem people have with you. your slashdot articles are vapid and narcissistic, and you doggedly persist in ignoring (or pretending to ignore) this. that is the point and it's been made ad nauseam.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I was in the market for a qwerty phone myself and the F3Q seemed like the best one in the market besides the Photon Q and Droid 4, but those phones only work on Verizon I never rely on the software that comes with the phone, but what the community provides on XDA-Developers. If hardly anyone owns those phones, then don't expect too many roms. Then you're stuck with a dysfunctional phone.
Right now you have to stick with popular phones like Samsung Galaxy S2/S3/S4 and etc. Mainly because the community there is just thriving. I'm sticking with MyTouch4G Slide which is essentially dead with the community. People have moved on.
He made his point. Whine on your own blog.
Get a Moto G if you want a cheap-ass phone. Much better.
the phone's shortcomings actually raise more interesting questions — about why the free-market system rewards companies for pulling off miracles at the hardware level, but not for fixing software bugs that should be easy to catch.
It doesn't. Apple is taking over half of the smartphone profit share while LG is loosing money on smart phones. Apples hardware is good but it isn't so much better than its competitors. The differentiation that makes it so profitable is software.
Or is he just plain stupid?
So, in a nutshell, the answer to your question about why this stuff happens is "I want something so badly that I'm a captive market who won't explore decent alternatives (is the built-in slider on a 4" phone really that much better than an S5 bluetooth keyboard case or Swype on a phablet? Really?) and will stick with the phone in spite of it being a piece of shit"?
Honestly, I have to give kudos to LG for gauging how desperate the potential users of this phone would be for a physical keyboard and saving themselves a little cash on testing. It seems to have worked out okay for them.
Log in or piss off.
Okay, so the question becomes: What is a better QWERTY phone? He mentions T-Mobile by name, but even better if it runs on all networks. The single requirement is a hardware QWERTY keyboard.
Yeah, I know, almost no one uses a hardware keyboard anymore, it's all on-screen and autocorrect now. But some of us don't like on-screen keyboards and some people do more than poke the Like/+1/retweat button.
... And so it comes to this.
to my current Samsung S2 and Sprint.
Since I retired, I've examined various expenses with an eye on optimizing them. If they make sense, I can afford them but since I have the time why not check them out?
I'm currently paying $100 a month for "unlimited" data, 1500 daytime minutes and 1500 text msg with an aging S2.
My new plan is $53 a month for 1gb, unlimited talk, unlimited text, unlimited music data.
The S2 is an android phone while the Nokia is a windows phone.
After 20 days, it looks like I'm going to transfer my number to the Nokia and retire the android phone.
The actual service has been better on T-Mobile than on sprint which was a surprise. Sprint has so many dead areas off the high way that text to speech, pandora , etc. are painful to use. The GPS after only 2 years has become very flaky. GPS Status only works a quarter of the time- the rest the time I have to reboot the phone. Sometimes, it seems to have trouble with metal car roofs. I'm assuming the antennae is aging fast.
The "feel" of having a limited data plan is constraining but in actuality, I've only used about 200mb of data on the new phone and most of that was from doing some app installations at home when the wifi was turned off.
Voice quality on the Nokia is stunning with other Tmobile subscribers but slightly below sprint for other people. One of my friends said of a landline call, "it's not as good but it's not bad. I'll get used to it." Other Tmobile customers sound like they are in the same room.
I personally hate windows 8 on my laptop (which is not a touch screen) but I've gotten used to it really quickly on the phone.
I've replaced most of my apps with native apps-- some of them better and oddly not available on android devices. Oddly, some "official" apps have different features and behaviors on the two phones. Notably lacking was Scotttrade. There is a third party app which claims to interface with Scott trade but I'm leery of that for my money.
My biggest struggle to date was having to use the Office App to open pdfs which were then sent to the PDF app. This was seriously confusing-- the apps themselves had no way to open PDF's. But that's more of a windows issue than a phone issue.
The lack of a flash has been less of an issue than I thought and the picture quality is good.
---
Bottom line is- going to this phone is going to save me about $570 per year, I have improved gps, music. I technically have less data but it's more than I need and the reality of better coverage means I can use data driven features of the phone in a wider area. WIndows vs Android has turned out to be a surprisingly tiny learning curve.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It maybe a bit slow, but I don't care much. It runs all the apps I care, and was so damn cheap (150 € unlocked). I does exactly the same things as my wife's iphone 5s, but my screen is a bit larger so I have less problems hitting the buttons.
I was even able to update it from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean with an official ROM from LG.
Hardware is expensive to fix once it's manufactured and released - you have to recall all your shipments and fix them which is a logistical nightmare. In general you want to get your hardware exactly right (or at least as right as you can possibly make it). Software, on the other hand, can be fixed after the fact with patches so most companies will accept some level of software defects at launch. ...except fixing bugs isn't fun so most likely these bugs will be fixed for the next hardware release or never. It's like homework; we'd all rather be playing football or getting some nookie behind the bike sheds. Now, if the software defect was to somehow impede said football or nookie we'd give a crap about it. I really think the industry is testing us to see how much hassle we'll deal with before we refuse to buy their products. These days you have to have a cellphone so maybe we'll put up with infinite hassle...who knows?
No. He asked for an *inexpensive* phone. What he got instead was a *cheap* phone.
Decent Hardware, rubbish software
* sometimes, the launcher freezes
* sometimes, phone just simply does not connect to one of the selected networks
* sometimes, it tries to connect both SIM cards to the same
* the dreaded android lag when surfing interwebs
I don't know.... I used to have an iPhone 4 3G and 4S and I also tried another crappy android (something from HTC). I've heard the same stories from my friends with various Android phones and it looks like that this is a general problem with android phones quality... On the other hand, I'm not going to pay 600+ USD for a phone... so I'll probably switch back to a feature phone when this one breaks completely
simply because something is correct, doesn't mean that it is worth reading. this is the problem people have with you. your slashdot articles are vapid and narcissistic, and you doggedly persist in ignoring (or pretending to ignore) this. that is the point and it's been made ad nauseam.
Couldn't agree more. We should definitely introduce Bennet to APK ...
The phone's auto-correct changes single-quotes to double-quotes in contractions -- for example, when you type you're, the phone auto-corrects it to you"re .
Neat. Thanks for your informative review. Can you be bothered to take a moment and tell us WHAT KEYBOARD WERE YOU USING that included this behavior? It's obviously not the stock android keyboard, since it doesn't behave that way, and LG has clearly bundled some other keyboard, but for the love of the FSM, don't tell us which one...
When you backspace over part of a word that you've typed and then type the rest of the word, auto-correct corrects based on the letters that you type after you've finished backspacing, rather than the letters in the entire word that you've just completed. [SNIP!]
Ditto.
Taking a screen capture still doesn't work, just like it didn't work on the Stratosphere 2. There are official directions on how to do it, but you can follow the steps and nothing happens.
Fair.
The first time I launched the voice mail application, the app prompted me to freely choose a new PIN code, and then sternly warned me, Mao-like, that my supposedly freely chosen PIN code was "incorrect". (I never got it working, and just called in to the voice mail number manually whenever I wanted to check my messages.)
The LG Optimus voicemail app, or the TMO one? I assume you're not talking about shovelware. Before you wrote this awesome article, and you talked to TMO about this, what did they say?
When I bought a movie on Google Play and wanted to "pin" it to the phone -- i.e. download a static, non-streamed copy so that I could watch it offline, e.g. on a plane ride [SNIP!]
What you're describing may not be what you want, but it certainly sounds like the software is working as intended - that offline movie downloads aren't supposed to be saved to removable storage. It's hardly a "bug."
Unlike the other bugs
Yeah. Not a bug.
In the Messaging (i.e. texting) app, you cannot search for messages by the name of the sender.
Also, not a bug. Simply a feature that you'd like in your text messaging app.
On certain mobile website forms (the Fandango site, for instance, and some others that I don't remember -- it's not clear why this happens on some website forms but not others), the phone won't let me type "special characters"
FFS. First, how about some article organization. Maybe we could discuss the keyboard first AND last, since it seems like your only real gripe...
Here's a concise version of your article:
I bought a low-end smartphone from TMO. The stock keyboard was a bit wonky, and the shovelware voicemail app didn't work right. I couldn't be bothered to call TMO about the voicemail app, but I did do a Google search before writing this article.
I made the mistake of buying an LG Optimus 2X, supposedly a flagship phone. My best uptime was 200h, at which point it was so slow, I had to reboot. I'm almost certain LG has a thousand monkeys writing their software. CyanogenMod was my saviour. Unfortunately, not even CyanogenMod could not fix everything. Also, NVidia was apparently a huge part of the problem. So my rule is, no LG Software (I have a LG Nexus 5 new, it's awesome) and no NVidia CPU (stick with Qualcomm).
its not supposed to work good — that's why its the bottom of the line.
if you want it to work good, you gotta buy the good model..
Yes, he does. If you are a psychopath, that is.
But is Bennett worse than Jon Katz was?
Sure, Bennett.
You do realize we know it's you when you use AC to defend yourself, right?
The issue is that no one cares. They just don't. I once bought an MP3 player that would not play MP3s. Really. I had some of the best, cleanest MP3s ever encoded that played on a stack of other devices, but this one would not play them. I was astounded that a device would not do what it was supposed to do. I mean, whoever made this thing could have just put rockbox on it. Why did they write software that didn't work?
yes, buy an iPhone - get free backdoors! Yay!
I have one of these phones, and I love it. It has a physical QWERTY keyboard, which basically no other phones released in the past year or so have. I have not run into most of the problems the poster has, but mostly because I don't do most of the silly things he does. For instance, I turned autocorrect off on day one and leave it off. Problem solved. Messaging app? That crap is for teeny-boppers.
I think the web form problems are actually due to silly things the web site is doing rather than the phone itself. I've run into that problem myself, but only on some sites. To conquer the special characters problem, try holding down the fn key while pressing the second key instead of pressing one then the other.
-- Elliott C. "Eeyore" Evans
I don't think it was the "profanity" that was wrong with the headline and instead it was the grammar. A preposition is not what you're supposed to use to end a sentence with.
You say your Lesbian Gay phone sucks?
Last time I checked, iOS didn't have anything remotely similar to AIDE or MozStumbler.
No. The solution isn't that somebody needs to rate phones. It's that the rating needs to be obvious and visible. If I go into a store and look at a line of phones, they'll all tell me their screen size and their CPU speed and usually what OS version they have, plus usually one distinguishing feature, but that's about it.
Compare that with, say, buying a game or other piece of software. There will be review scores (and actual reviews, if I go looking, but the scores are prominently displayed), there will be awards given, there will be indications of the actual *quality* of the item. Not flawless ones, of course, but a hell of a lot better than getting nothing but a short list that tells me this is a RTS game, supports up to 8-way multi-player, runs on Windows XP or newer, requires 20GB of storage, and features a campaign with multiple endings depending on the decisions you make in game (or similar "cool but you have no idea how well that works" feature).
Of course, nobody *wants* to display a bad score on something they're trying to sell you... but they'd happily display a good one. The idea is to make such review scores sufficiently widespread and usable (which requires decent accuracy) that people will actually A) pay attention to them, and B) notice when they are missing.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I too type well with Google's Swype-alike on my Nexus 7 tablet. But I'd think a hardware keyboard is better for certain kinds of games because your thumbs stay centered. The ridges on the keys help you feel whether your thumbs are over a particular key without you having to look down at on-screen controls. It's a lot harder to accidentally slide the thumb from one key to the next than to slide the thumb a short distance over a completely flat sheet of glass.
The real mystery is why anyone who has the slightest clue about technology, would buy or wish to use a computer that runs software you cannot control or replace.
Nobody with a clue "wishes" to use such a computer. They instead suffer through it because such computers are the only affordable ones, possibly because people without a clue are a bigger market. Even on PCs, which computer lets you replace the BIOS?
He should have just bought a BlackBerry Q5. Keyboard experience satisfied. One of the better learning keyboards as well (learns my phrases).
There, shortened up Bennett's Blathering
Don't know about phones, but an Android tablet, the Asus Transformer, works fine with a real keyboard.
Confusopoly
Thats why
Get.
The.
Fuck.
Off.
Slashdot.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Samsung has a KeSPA Starcraft team, but LG could only afford an ESF team.
LG is just inferior.
Your writing is incorrect, and therefore not worth reading. If you can't be bothered to write with respect to the audience, then don't bother to write.
huh? your point got lost somewhere, if there ever was one.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
If you're taking it as a given that the article statements were correct, my final statement was that we could improve existing phones by methodically testing them for idiotic problems (the Stupid Shit Index), so that consumers know how to find phones that have the least stupid shit wrong with them, the makers of those phones are rewarded, and the next iteration of phones has incrementally less stupid shit as a result. Since this is a big reward for relatively little effort, isn't it worth doing?
No idea. Why the hell would someone buy a cheap ass android? They suck donkey balls. If you want a cheap phone go buy Nokia while you still can. They actually focused on those, and the cheap ones are amazingly great in their cheap ass category.
You guys are really playing the hard game today. :D
No. Niche markets are always full of stupid shit. Slide-out keyboard phones are a niche market. No amount of Stupid Shit Index is going to alter that fundamental reality.
"Pretty" water bottles, with a lot of attention paid to their looks, leak. Braille books have typos.
For non-niche markets, Moto G and Moto E are available, much cheaper than your phone and with zero stupid shit.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Why are you so angry? The guy did a fair amount of work to provide a detailed analysis of his user experience and raised a good point about quality control of today's gadgets.
What about the Stratosphere, which I wrote about previously? That didn't have a slide-out keyboard and so presumably wasn't serving a niche market. That was the one where the calendar app highlighted the wrong date as "today", because it (apparently) computed "today" based on GMT rather than the phone's current time zone.
In this case, the conclusion is just plain wrong. Someone sold him broken merchandise. If you buy a phone in the US, one should expect it to be suitable to input english text (and possibly be switchable to spanish). However, he should be able to take it back to the dealer and have it fixed (the dealer should be allowed a limited, reasonable number of attempts (2-3) to repair it within a reasonable timeframe (14 days at most)), or get his money back. If enough people did that, the dealer would hopefully stop carrying sucky phones and implement some kind of quality control. In the worst case, the phones would stay sucky, but the customer would be well informed in advance by the seller which functions are actually of acceptable quality.
As someone who tests hardware / software I took exception to the assumption that testers didn't find a long list of issues. I'm working on a shipping product that has hundreds of open software issues. These bugs have been documented in detail but were skipped to make ship dates, then skipped over and over again when updates were released in lieu of new features to lure in new buyers. Most bugs are seen as something not sexy enough to spend time on. If the problem they can create is considered an annoyance and not crucial to the product's operation they are skipped over.
So don't assume that bugs weren't found in testing. It's entirely possible that they were found, and the product shipped anyway.
There you were the problem for not buying Nexus. Or any other phone after reading reviews and some space to install alternative keyboard / calendar / messaging applications. Free.
And if you claim ignorance, you cannot claim benefit of free market anymore because free market needs informed participants for functioning properly.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Most of them. I have installed a modified BIOS on many motherboards from many brands. (See BIOS-Mods.com for more info)
The challenge is finding a working replacement.
i never said that your statements were correct. i was being rhetorically generous.
as for the rest, i don't see why i should give advice on a business plan, for free, to a self-described "entrepreneur."
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
If you don't think the statements are correct, then it's incumbent on you to say what you think is incorrect.
If you do think they're correct but you "don't see why you should comment on them", what on Earth are you doing in the comments section?
On the plus side looks like he hasn't figured out as yet that a bunch of /.ers paid LG to ensure his phone was borked. Sweet revenge: A Burning Man video without audio! Oh, the humanity!
you know, I am not buying another LG phone ever.