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Ask Slashdot: What Are the Most Stable Smartphones These Days?
janimal writes: The iPhone used to be the smartphone that "just works." Ever since the 4S days, this has been true less and less with each generation. My wife's iPhone 6 needs to be restarted several times per week for things like internet search or making calls to work. An older 5S I'm using also doesn't consistently stream to Apple TV, doesn't display song names correctly on Apple TV and third party peripherals. In short, as features increase, the iPhone's stability is decreasing. In your opinion, which smartphone brand these days is taking up the slack and delivering a fully featured smartphone that "just works"?
Every phone seems to have this same issue, but it is not the phones fault. It's the fault of what the owner installs on it. My wifes galaxy mega was great at first, but now that she has all these stupid games installed it is buggy and needs to be restarted regularly.
Windows Phones (at least the Lumias).
I just use a bog standard Android, and I've never gad any strange bugs with it.
Maybe it's because I just don't install buggy/malicious apps, or maybe I'm just lucky.
Almost every Win Mobile phone refuses to work with my WiFi point (thought it sees it.)
Droid phones aren't fully featured. They're feature-creep.
iOs is so much more of a horrible piece of crap now than it was before. It has drastically dropped the performance of my fiance's 4S with the latest revision.
My old Nokia does everything I need. Still works. I can turn on and dial 911 faster than you can get past your splash screen.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It has crashed or had to be rebooted maybe five or six times since I got it two years ago.
Android has always been the superior technology. Why else do you think it has more global market share than Apple could ever dream about?
Apple's products are fanboi toys that put style over substance, brand recognition over quality, and which rely on artificially inflated prices to maintain the illusion of being "better quality."
There is nothing about any Apple product I have ever seen that justifies the price. It's just one big, grand fleecing of a gullible public by the best marketing campaign known to mankind.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Can't go wrong with a good old 746
No, seriously. Blackberry OS 10.3 is pretty damn solid. I don't have any issues with system stuff crashing on my Q10.
I do have some apps crash, but that's the app developer's problem. Not much the OS vendor can do about that.
I initially got a Blackberry because I wanted a hardware keyboard, and couldn't find an Android with a good one. However, after using the Q10 for a while, I would hate to go back to Android even with a good keyboard - I really, really like the Hub and the way gestures work.
Blackberry's voice assistant isn't as flexible as Google's or Apple's, so that might be an issue for you. It works well within what it's designed to do, though.
Apps can be an issue. Usually for anything I want an app for there's one or two apps, probably paid, versus thirty free ones in the Google Play store. I can access the Amazon Appstore for Android (comes with the OS) and sideload Snap, which lets me use the Google Play store, but the phone lacks some Android services so a good chunk of apps don't work. The Android runtime's pretty solid, so the apps that don't need Play Services work well.
What does "just works" even mean? Do you want it to be able to reliably make phone calls without having to worry about software failing? Get a non-smart phone.
If you want a "reliable" smart phone that doesn't need reset or suffer stupid ass software failures, get one of those $50 Samsung android smart phones. They are pretty reliable because they can't do much to begin with.
If you want a top of the line, super-newest-version, can-serve-as-my-PC smart phone, you are going to have issues, just like every other computer doing complicated tasks does.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Nokia Communicator 9000
Yes.. Blaming the user for shitty software...
Iphone is pretty well gardened up.. doubt the apps are causing the shitness
Is this a joke? Paid corporate fodder?
You spew some anecdotal crap about iOS becoming less stable over time and then an almost rhetorical question about an alternative "fully featured smartphone that just works". The iPhone and Apple eco-system is the fully featured system that just works. If you're having a bad time now, don't even bother with Android -- just give up and get yourself and your wife some flip phones because the problem is the user not the OS or device.
Not LTE but rock solid performance and Great camera for an 8 meg imager. I had to pass up the S4 and S5 because I could not justify the upgrade. I have now a LG G3, it's good but in some ways I think the SII was better.
Samsung galaxy s5
Iphone 6
Both are rock solid and work as advertised.
Do a factory reset and dont install the same crap ware.
I think your question is flawed.
Every phone seems to have this same issue, but it is not the phones fault. It's the fault of what the owner installs on it. My wifes galaxy mega was great at first, but now that she has all these stupid games installed it is buggy and needs to be restarted regularly.
I vote for stupid stuff. My Droid M works fine for two or three days after reboot but gradually gets slower and slower until the touch screen no longer responds.
But I don't play games, and the only games on the device are the bloatware installed by the carrier. I suspect that the device's entire problem is related to bloat.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What the fuck kind of question is this. You either have Android Vista Candy Bar that's five versions old and full of bloatware and glitches or you have an Apple product that they engineered both the software and the hardware on in one unified experience. What insight can be rehash from this seriously
It doesn't work like that normally. That's not par for the course. You have software on there mucking things up OR you've been restoring from old backups forever. Gotta nuke and pave at some point.
I don't have any of those issues with my device.
Millions of slashdot arguments flared up in Rage at that statement :) After all, Micro$oft security problems was well established on /. to be the fault of the OS - and not what the user did....
I've never had any issues with my Galaxy S5 - but then again, I shut apps off and discard them instead of installing stuff.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Why is an OS in 2015 allowing applications to make the whole UI unusable?
It has been the most useful smartphone that I remember.
It works well enough for me. Battery lasts almost two days. But I don't push it very hard.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm running an LG Google Nexus 5 with Cyanogenmod KitKat. I restart my phone...when I feel like it? I can't remember the last time it shut down on me. It's stable, fast, clean, and customizable.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
...the apple iPhone becoming less reliable still makes it more reliable than any POS garbage anroid phone.
I picked up my meizu mx 4 pro used for about $2400 a bargain as they go for over $4000 new. Anyways I like it, it's fast very responsive, and has a fantastic (sony) camera.
Sure it's flyme OS theme thing is very apple like, but I live and die with google translate, and it's ability to run offline, so no iPhone for me. I'll probably buy the new Samsung S6 curve though. Faster CPU and better display...
If you need to restart your wife's iPhone several times a week that is not right - you may want to get a replacement iPhone.
The only thing I've had to restart my wife's iPhone 6 for have been software updates - and I skipped a few minor point releases.
I'm an iOS developer, thus harder on the device - and even I only restart once a month or so.
I can't help but thinking you are restarting the phone to avoid doing something that's actually the responsibility of an app. Have you tried looking at all apps that location services and cellular data are authorized for? What about the battery and cellular data usage areas to see if some app is just too frisky with data/GPS?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How about not using the craptastic Apple ecosystem that's more locked up than a bank vault?
Odd. My iPhone 6 goes for months at a time without being turned off.
NT
Actually, I'm pretty happy with the iPhone6: it just works. I'm on T-mobile, and I doubt I've had to restart it to get it to work more than 3 times since I got it in September 2014. My wife has had the same experience -- she can't recall ever having to restart it to get it to work.
I've had a Huawei Ascend mate 2 since July '14. 6.1" 720p screen, snapdragon 400, JB4.e, 4000mAH battery. Factory stock, not one mod, flat out stable. Go for weeks without booting, 2-3 days, moderate to heavy use on one charge. If you aren't a bleeding edge spec type, for $380.00 it's a steal.
Your wife's iPhone needs to be looked at. Your 5S is streaming even higher res video to another device on a WiFi network (it couldn't be the home network - nah, impossible) yet here you are, putting a trend line on something with two data points. Yeah. That's how it's done.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
In my experience many problems can be attributed to networking. Most wireless routers have crap support for device discovery. I have some WNDR3700 routers are they were constantly requiring reboots. The only solution was to install a basic OpenWRT firmware - then they were great.
So when a device can not connect to another, or freezes when communicating over the network - check your wireless network. Many problems that are realized on portable devices can actually be tracked back to other devices entirely.
Same with my iPhone 5S.
- JR
Other than when an iOS update is installed, I have to reboot my iPhone (starting from the original, going through every model year, all the way to the 6 Plus) only about twice a year. IMHO you've got some other problem.
Maybe you're using T-Mobile and the wi-fi calling feature hasn't perfected yet by the carrier? Or perhaps your wi-fi router is getting a little janky.
Want to know what's wrong? Take your wife's phone to the Genius Bar and have them run diagnostics and check the logs. Furthermore, if you really think there's something wrong with the device, tell Apple you've tried everything and ask for a replacement under warranty. If the replacement has problems, really, the problem is your network.
My wife and I have Windows phones from Nokia, they do not crash.
Give it another 2-5 decades and that quality-level may be reached. At this time, the smartphone software makers are just making all the mistakes that have been made on desktops.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Seriously, I've had my windows phone nokia 920 for 3 years. every update the phone gets faster, better, and gains increased battery life. My wife uses hers a bit more than mine and on the latest update she gets a reboot maybe once every 2-3 weeks. Me personally, I reboot about once every 3 months normally for an update.
I have an HTC One M7 and have never had it lock up or require a reboot to work in the nearly two years of ownership (I do however reboot about once a month out of habit though as I'm a little OCD).
My previous Blackberry running BBOS7 rebooting / crashing was a daily and sometimes hourly experience.
The difference in stability kind of reminds me of running windows 95 with daily / hourly BSOD's and then upgrading to a 2015 Linux LTS distro (what is a crash?)
My friend's iPhones have anecdotally been more reliable than their Samsungs, however when the iPhone's have gone wrong, they have gone VERY wrong (as in couldn't boot without taking them in to the Apple store, which is kind of a big deal for a phone.)
P.s. BBOS 10 is now much more stable than the Blackberry of old, however of the four people I know who have used them, two have had no hassles and two have had reboot hell so YMMV. I like the swiping UI though, very cool but newbs get confused.
Windows Phones I've heard are quite stable, which makes a pleasant change from their desktop OS's which have improved dramatically since 95 still seem far more buggy and maintenance intensive than Linux based on my experience.
Why is an OS in 2015 allowing applications to make the whole UI unusable?
They don't, generally. They make a very solid effort for that not to happen.
Its conceivable that the kernel or watchdog is misbehaving, but more likely competition and increasing complexity has lead to:
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
I've had my 5S for close to a year now and it has never actually crashed. It's rebooted for OS updates and for a few dozen dead batteries but that's about it. I *have* had to reboot it maybe a dozen times in all due to lagging performance though when it hadn't been rebooted in weeks. My desktop computer's the same way though. Every 2-3 weeks it just needs a reboot to clean house.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I have an iPhone (5c) and a Samsung Galaxy (5s) for private use in different parts of the world, and both are pretty unstable. The phone I have that "just works" is my Blackphone.
The caveat there, though, is that the two private phones have a fair amount of crap installed on them, both by myself and the carrier. The Blackphone has just the basic corporate and productivity tools.YMMV though, as a couple of colleagues with Blackphones have had problems with them.
However, my overall view from fairly recent factory resets on both private phones is that my Blackphone in its current state is still a bit more stable than either the iPhone or Galaxy in anything other than default factory config.
Yes.. Blaming the user for shitty software...
"Fool me once, shame you on you. Fool me 1,387,406 times, shame on me."
It's not like the fact that nearly all apps are shit is a big secret.
You're not kidding about iPhones (or rather iOS) becoming less stable.
I've got an iMac, Macbook Air, iPad Mini 2 and iPhone 6 Plus, all in daily use, and it was a godsend to me when Yosemite and iOS 8 introduced handoff and full AirDrop support. Except... it only works randomly. One minute the iPhone can see everything but nothing can see it. Then it can only see the iPad but now the iMac can see the iPhone.
I regularly need to transfer screenshots from my iPhone to my Mac and I used AirDrop for about a week, but then it stopped working and hasn't worked since.
When it first stopped working, I started using Cloud Share and uploading all the screenshots to the cloud so I could then download them on the Mac... but there's always one file missing. No matter how many screenshots I transfer, if n>1 then only n-1 turn up on the Mac.
Honestly over the past couple of months I've lost confidence in Apple. There's no point adding these great features if they don't actually work. And in my experience, Apple features that don't work never get fixed. New features seem to be more about marketing than actual usability.
I am very happy with my LG Transpyre. It works on Verizon Wireless and I picked it up for a whole $76 at Wal-Mart. This phone seems to be super stable even though it is low budget. It actually has Corning Gorilla Glass and a quad core processor. It runs Android KitKat quite well and does everything I need it to. I've been using it now close to 6 months without any issue.
If Windows Phone has anything going for it, it's stellar speed and stability. My Lumia 930 and my wife's Lumia 830 are rock solid and fast - always. If the majority of your time is spent on the basics -- phone, text, email, web, facebook, netflix, games etc - it's the best platform out there.
That said, the OP's question of "Fully Featured" and "Just Works" are pretty tough to reconcile. Most iPhones I have used or see are less stable than the Lumias -- but they can do more, through their app catalog and integration across Apple's vertical ecosystem. [Insert favorite Android model here] is going to be more capable than anything else out there, but it's been a long time since I've seen an Android distribution that didn't lose control of background tasks and require a fair amount of overhead to keep the thing functional. Windows Phones are definitely more stable and consistent over time, but they don't today have the long tail of apps that Android has or the guarantee that everyone is going to support them that Apple has.
--------------------- -me, Crusher of those who are Foolish (don't be foolish)
Seriously, I restart my samsung a few times a day just to prevent problems from occurring in the first place.
If you can prevent problems, then you don't have problems. Stop complaining.
Port VMS to the phone. VMS runs on VAX, Alpha, Itanium (..and soon X86) for decades without need for rebooting.
With VMS, someone says they rebooted, you genuinely wonder "what for?"
Yours Sincerly,
VMS Bigot.
Due to all of the Linux and Mac shills that prowl around Slashdot this isn't going to be a popular answer but it's a factual one.
Windows Phone. Stable and gives better performance than any Android phone with twice the specs.
I run an iPhone 5S with iOS 8.3 and a Mac with 10.9.5.
I never have to reboot my phone- the only time it gets a reboot is when I let the battery drain before plugging in, which I don’t let happen very often.
I use AirPlay to play podcasts from my iPhone to my Mac connected to my amp and speakers- it used to take a couple of times to connect reliably, but lately it’s been more reliable than ever.
I don’t experience slow downs or apps getting crashy, and I use my iPhone a LOT, and have hundreds of apps installed.
iOS 7 wasn’t so hot early on, but iOS 8 has been great for me.
My Android (Nexus 5) is a tank; I regularly go a few weeks before bothering to reboot, and the reboot is because I let the battery die. (Battery life is 18-24 hours.) My wife's MotoX (the original one) is just about the same, except the battery life is better (presumably because it's a smaller screen?) 24+ hours.
Dude, your wife's iPhone is broken. Go take it to an Apple store and get it fixed you tool.
I have the s5 and it works great for me. I turned off most of its built in extra stuff like health monitoring and personalized magazine or whatever. Once everything is off that I don't want it even has a decent battery life. 2 to 3 days between recharging for me.
It has crashed only with firefox, and I assume that is a javascript thing. Usually firefox will crash, and the phone keeps on going.
I don't have any issues with my iphone6. okay I have one issue. at work and only at work I have to turn off and then turn on the wifi to get it to connect. At home, at a dozen other places no problems. but at work i have issues.
Then again it could be an app thing. there could be one app that is crashing her phone. I know if I am at work and I try to use a wifi only app it can crash the app. but if I turn off and on the wifi it works fine. But only with my works Access Point. Any where else I don't have that issue.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
That's my experience as well outside of updates. I don't really do anything fancy with my phone and don't have a ton of Apps running on it.
Yup, my 6 Plus (as every iPhone before it) just works. I think the poster has a network problem, most likely his wi-fi. And rather than seek support from Apple, he's dishing here.
Your vote and your actions don't line up. You blame "stuff" but don't play games (and likely don't randomly install new stuff every few days).
Isn't this obviously a memory mgmt/memory leak issue?
I see tons of this on desktops/laptops -- Chrome, you are currently #1 on the hit list. Why can't it be even more prevalent on the newer platform of smartphones? That don't make it easy to bring up a Task Manager and study the memory usage of applications.
I come here for the love
Allowing background app refresh and push notifications is going to shit up even an iPhone pretty fast. Source: App developer, forced by biz to include stuff that shits up phones
OP claims phones suck based on a few personal datapoints, extends his experience to all phones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
Show me some data about phone crashes taken from statistically significant sample populations and then we can talk.
I have the same problem with my WiFi at home when I try to launch the Pandora app. I'm not sure if it's the Pandora app or the iPhone 6 that causes the issue.
I've not had any issues on my iPhone 6 Plus either. iOS 8.3 solved a lot of nagging issues, it nearly perfect now.
I have phone that never crashes. It's the Bell Rotary Phones, the ones that weigh 10lbs and works through thunderstorms. You'd have to get it through Ma Bell though, and I think they charge you a fee each month to "lease" it. Very hard to make it crash, but I guess if you tried to slam the handset, it'll makes a good "crash" sound.
Upside: Unless those fancy "Touch tome" phones, they don't charge you extra to use it.
Downside: I don't think you can use those interactive phone menu things.
--sf
I'm about 6 months into driving a Passport.
I am pretty happy with it, I do like the larger screen when I need to read spreadsheets, email is well thought out, the "keyboard + touchpad" is clever.
Haven't noticed it crashing like my last android (HTC One).
Some Android apps easily available from the Amazon app store.
Built-in map navigation was hard to use, adding google maps helped.
The only thing I really miss is having the Uber app... but I'm getting by with traditional taxis (which is fine for work travel mainly, so I don't miss uber... much).
It does have a learning curve; worth taking an hour or two to learn ui-gestures and keyboard shortcuts.
*shrug* which is fine for me, I don't expect power tools to have zero learning curves.
I bought unlocked through Amazon, apparently you can see them in AT&T stores as of Feb 2015 (haven't looked myself, just passing the note along in case you are ever out phone shopping in person to try "look and feel."
As I don't know if I fall into the categorization at all, I'll say that I think their stance is, that the operating system has been developed for a considerable amount of time, such that, it should have more stability and features than it offers. Such as, the operating system should be able to identify harmful applications that are trying to install or run automatically, as well as harmful things that the user is trying to do. If this happens to the user, then users would complain about not being able to do things. No real fix unless there is a mind reading operating system, and the Mental Rift isn't even in the pre-design phase.
Aside from that angle, those in that category could be thinking that the operating system should be able to isolate and manage applications that seem to be going out of control and eating too many resources. This might be a good method going forward, but would require certificates from Microsoft to verify that those programs aren't malware. Not many would like to deal with writing exceptions for applications that don't bother getting signed.
It comes down to a matter of "did you try to restart the computer?" or annoying more devs. I'd think they would rather put the onus on the end-user as they don't have much of a choice in OS. The devil we know, after all.
Microsoft or not, it is the fault of the OS if it wasn't designed to sandbox everything. I have to reboot my Galaxy every few days. I do indeed blame the OS, and no doubt the hardware isn't so robust either.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
My dad (age 56) uses an iPhone 6 plus 16G. The screen may be too big and the storage may be too small for us, but for him, besides the basic phone and FaceTime, he can read news or check stocks and play one or two of those King games, and it works flawlessly. That is all his uses for the phone. I agree with comment parent, it is getting increasingly difficult for both Google and Apple to monitor every single app so it's better just not to install every app you think you "might need" on your phone. It's the same on Android, except Android's security model makes apps hog phone resources way faster than iOS.
Clarification: My everyday carry-around phones are iPhone 6 64GB and LG G Pro 2 16GB.
Why, the ones with the biggest lithium batteries, of course.
My iPhone 6 has possibly required rebooting a couple of times in the last several months.
Seriously - it really is.
Currently running an older Z10.
You assert you're going to be factual, and then you say an absurd thing like "twice the specs."
Galaxy Note 2 been going strong for about 3 years, I don't recall it ever crashing, I think I may have rebooted it a couple of times for obscure reasons - big OS update and me messing with phone. I've never noticed any slowdowns or quirkiness after time. Used lots to browse web and play games and use map apps.
Some people are jinxed I swear.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
and the Mental Rift isn't even in the pre-design phase
No, it's well beyond that phase; most users already have one. A huge one.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Fact: A Windows Phone with a dual core CPU and 512MB of RAM outperforms an Android phone with a quad core CPU and 1GB of RAM.
Even the octa-core Android phones with 2GB of RAM *still* have lag and stutter when displaying something as simple as a scrolling menu or a web page.
motoX 2gen. It just works.
Samsung Galaxy Note 4. I have had each Note version, and these are some of the best and most stable phones on the market. They just work. Next Version 5 of the Note will have a true UHD display (4K). The images from the camera are not the "best", but the present version DOES do UHD (4K) of resolution, and I have heard the Note 5 will even out do that. Get an extended battery pack like I did and you only recharge these things once every 2 weeks!
I've had an LG F3, for 18mos now - no intention of upgrading, because it does what I need it to, it's damn near indestructible, and I have had to "reboot" it no more than four times in ALL that time (not counting the times I had to reboot to recover past backups, to retrieve records for legal reasons). My LG flip-phone crashed more frequently. I only use ~6 3rd party apps, ISS Tracker, Battle.net [shush], Speedtest, Facebook, and, well, a couple others... While I'm no fan of Apple, I respect them, they have a fine product. The crashes and all are mostly 3rd party software, and the vendor mods and additions to the OS. (ok, I kid, I am thinking about upgrading, but only because I want something with IR).
A little less blame on the owner, and a little more blame on the carrier? How much genuine crap comes pre-installed on a carrier subsidized phone? I'm talking about genuine worthless crap, that does and gives nothing of value to the end customer, the owner who pays for the phone.
The phone is regarded by the carrier as a tool, with which to keep track of the chattel, or the sheeple. Again and again, the carriers are exposed for their overzealous data collection. And, for the most part, people aren't able to turn these "features" off, unless they are willing to invest some time in research, then risk voiding their so-called warranties.
Yeah, end users are mostly dumb clods, but the carriers are responsible for a lot of the problem.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
and blame Gracenote for the song and album cover screwups. that's who Apple uses.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I've been using a Samsung Galaxy S5 for about a year now and it never gave me any trouble. Battery lasts me through the whole day without any problems (of course you have to turn off non-essentials: GPS, Bluetooth, NFC, etc. when you're not using them) and it charges relatively fast. Never experienced programs crashing. Very happy with it.
Only thing I wish is that the camera program would open faster.
>Every phone seems to have this same issue I dunno, I bought a second hand Huawei G750 a few months ago and haven't had to restart it that I recall. I've probably powered it off and on again for other reasons a handful of times in that period.
In the three months that I've had mine, It's been rock-solid and I haven't had to reboot it yet even once. My previous phone was an iPhone 4S (running iOS 6) and I had to reboot it maybe once a month.
Fact: Putting the word "fact" before your sentence does not absolve you of the need to back it up with actual evidence.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Nope. I find that Cisco Enterprise Wireless Accesspoints are complete crap in regards to phones if your IT department doesn't update their firmware regularly.
Work recently ripped out all the Cisco junk and installed UniFi and all wireless problems, mobile and other went away.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm using an iPhone 6+ on Verizon, and have none of the issues you describe. It's rock solid and I never have to reboot it (other than for iOS updates). Maybe you've got some sketchy apps that are causing some of your issues?
In any event, your claim that "In short, as features increase, the iPhone's stability is decreasing" may apply to you, but it's not applicable across the board. I've had various generations of iPhones and Androids and I would rate my experience with the 6+ to be quite good.
Just try any Windows Phone. They are extremely smooth.
1. Apple's iOS compares quite well, but if you want to maximize stability be cautious about updates until there are some reports (some of the 7.x and 8.x releases were clunkers, though the current 8.3 seems quite good now), and turn off features you don't need, especially the privacy-invading ones.
2. Blackberry. They're still around, and they're rather solid -- provided the device is. (Some of their devices have been clunkers, others solid. Again, take a look at consensus reports.)
3. Nokia/Microsoft S40 devices. You can still find some S40 devices (unlocked and inexpensive), though they are not as feature rich and stretch the definition of "smartphone" downward. I've got an S40 device that, at least once updated to the latest S40 release, is rock solid -- and lasts a long, long time per battery charge. The S40 devices are not long for the world, though, so don't get too attached.
4. If you experiment with Android, I'd stick to the purest form of it: Google's Nexus devices. If Google cannot make Android work well on its own branded devices then nobody can.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Things change with each update. Each update can patch some bugs but introduce more. I have a Sony phone that worked alright at the beginning, but then had many random spontaneous reboots after a patch update they released (to the point where it was effectively unusable). It's finally become stable again after the latest release (Lollipop). To that end it seems that the phones that get the most regular updates would be the best bet, but you already have an iPhone that you don't like. So basically it's a crapshoot. I'd say the best rule is to not blindly update and wait and see whether the forums fill up with complaints about the new update introducing more bugs than it fixes.
I'm starting to think some of the faults lie on what the carriers install as well. Sprint pisses me off sometimes.
I've got the HTC M8 One running Windows, and quite honestly, I don't think I've ever rebooted it
I don't respond to AC's.
Where is your evidence to support your claim?
As for my statement, there is little I can do. It'd be like asking me to prove how good something tastes. It can't be done, you have to experience it for yourself. Stop being such a lazy, entitled little prick and go try one for yourself or look up some videos.
https://www.flashback.org/t255...
iOS Ãr apple fÃr folk som inte vet vad apple Ãr...
Har och anvÃnder idag.
Imac 27"
MBPr 15"
iPad Air 2 <-- skrÃp
Iphone 5 <-- skrÃp
Google Nexus 6
OSX Ãr apple fÃr mig.
He/she claim iOS is for people who don't know what Apple is and says he/she think that OS X is Apple for him/her.
But that's not the important part, the important part is what he/she uses today.
Imac 27"
MBPr 15"
iPad Air 2 <-- trash
Iphone 5 <-- trash
Google Nexus 6
The original post ask where Apple is headed today since the person feel the quality has dropped. He/she talks about the Macbook Air though. Which is a cheaper laptop.
It got stuck and needed a reboot two or maybe three years ago and has been rock solid since. Still nothing viable to replace it without having to use two separate devices.
"I've had my 5S for close to a year now and it has never actually crashed. It's rebooted for OS updates and for a few dozen dead batteries but that's about it."
A few dozen dead batteries within a year? I hope this isn't a typo because it speaks worse of Apple quality control. I'd rather have my smartphone crashing/rebooting every so often than having the battery replaced once a month.
My iPhone 4s (iOS 7.1.1) crashes when web browsing and sometimes when running VLC. I don't play games on it and it was basically wiped by itunes when it crashed during an update.
It's a Samsung Note 3. I didn't install 3rd parties utilities. I mostly use Samsung and Google software. I stream on my chromcast without problem.
Before this I had a S3, same good performance. I change it because of a broked usb port (don't buy cheap cable.) anyway I installed QI wireless charging... best thing to do.
My son have a Samsung ace 100$ with 1 mounth service from Walmart. not fast, but no problem so far.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
That's also the only problem I have with my iPhone 6: having to turn WiFi off and on to reconnect after a long period of sleep.
I have a Moto Razr Maxx HD, now working on its 3rd year. It's been basically perfect. I reboot it perhaps once every few months, and half of those reboots are due to an OTA OS upgrade.
With it's amazing battery life, and durable, sturdy case, it's a phone that feels like a "partner" that doesn't leave me hanging and even when I'm really putting the screws to it, (EG: on trips) it's "just there" for me.
It is no longer a "flagship" phone, it's not the fastest phone, and it doesn't have the biggest/brightest screen any more, but it's still a very, very good balance for a phone that I probably won't be replacing until it actually dies.
My only honest complaint is that its bluetooth reception seems weak. I use $20 wired headphones as a result.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"Ask Slashdot: What Are the Most Stable Smartphones These Days?"
What are the best titles, indeed.... Marketing Generator?
Anon.
I got this Android from an online catalog store for $167 about seven months ago. It came with a plan from Tracfone. As I mostly use Wifi, my plan usually runs $12/month, but it's easy to add minutes/data for the same price if needed(rarely). Actually, I bought two of them, the other for my soulmate. We've both been very please with this model. The only issue I've had was the wifi dropping and having to reboot to get it back. Found out it was a buggy app that did not play well with 4.4. Other than that, not a single fault. Tracfone never issues new Android OS updates, however. It's their scheme to get you to upgrade hardware. Fail.
Yeah, we are having issues with Cisco APs as well. Pretty sad.
My Droid S3 also had the similar problem of spontaneously rebooting every couple of days due to an incoming or outgoing call. And that reboot didn't clear the issue either. You had to Power Cycle it all the way off and then back on and then it would work for another couple of days. I am not in the habit of installing huge amounts of apps. I might have had 3 apps on that phone.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I just don't have issues with my phone, and I can't remember the last time I rebooted it. It was most likely the last time I updated the OS. It just works.
The only real complaint I have is that AirDrop isn't reliable, but I'm not sure if that's my laptop or my phone.
Is it you? Is it some collection of apps you have?
My desktop computer's the same way though. Every 2-3 weeks it just needs a reboot to clean house.
My desktop computer doesn't need to be rebooted every 2-3 weeks, and no I don't run linux. Its probably your applications and not your OS that needs the reboot.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
While I normally reboot all my devices at least weekly, I just noticed that, as of right now, and probably since I got the 5.1 update, my Nexus 6 has an uptime of over 624.5 hours, which is over 3 weeks. Color me surprised. My N7 2013 LTE crashed in the middle of doing stuff Thursday night, again with 5.1, so... I guess the N6 wins, in my book, for right now.
As reference, whenever things get really wonky, and nothing else works, I power the devices down (as much as that pains me as a *nix sysadmin), and it seems to fix the problems. 3.7 weeks (and counting) seems to be an amazing run for current hardware/software combos.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
My iPhone 6+ hasn't been booted in weeks, my iPad Air2 even longer. Occasionally an app will crash but the device itself doesn't have issues. Once upon a time I had an earlier piece of hardware that was giving me fits, an iPhone 4 I think. The solution sadly was to reload it from scratch and reload all of my apps - it ran perfectly after that. If this guy is having this many issues then he's got something dorked somehow and in my experience that will follow him even with iOS upgrades. Time to load it up from a scratch OS install! His supposition that iOS is somehow gotten less and less stable doesn't hold water as neither I nor any of my many friends running iPhones are having the sorts of issues he's describing...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Every phone seems to have this same issue, but it is not the phones fault. It's the fault of what the owner installs on it. My wifes galaxy mega was great at first, but now that she has all these stupid games installed it is buggy and needs to be restarted regularly.
Blaming applications for screwing up the system is not an acceptable answer in my book. The OS should be capable of gracefully withstanding abuse from user land without freaking out. If it can't it deserves to be called out for its failure.
To quote Dr. McCoy: "Now wait just a damn minute!"
I've had a Droid Razr Maxx for about two years now. I have only had two games installed on it ever (if you don't count what was required by whatever vendors were involved, and they haven't been reinstalled since my last factory reset). At this moment I have only six items in my Advanced Task Killer list. The apps I use most are Google Maps and Chrome.
Having said all that, the device is unresponsive on average. When I tap the home button from Chrome, it takes between 2 and 5 seconds (or 10 in extreme cases) to fully return to the home screen. Sometimes when I tap my Apps button, it actually takes 5-10 seconds to discover the whopping three screens worth of apps I have! Sometimes the battery drains when I don't use it too; usually the battery app blames the screen (which is bullshit because the screen is black the whole time I'm not using it) or the operating system.
I get the same advice from every "expert"...I've tried turning the phone off then on, factory resets...they don't fix the problem. I've outright rejected retarded advice like "don't use the apps you would use 98% of the time" or "root your phone and uninstall what you don't want." It's one thing to say "my phone works like a piece of shit..." but when I get blamed for causing the problem by doing what a phone should be able to do...it enforces my belief that "smart" people will never be smart enough to design for the needs of normal users.
My xiaomi phone never give me any problems software wise. It even have special security settings to prevent certain apps from having certain permission.
The only problems is that it seems to design to drop. But after being dropped like 20 times, it still works perfectly.
Your last point would be my question to the Original Poster: do you want a stable phone or a phone with lots of features? If you want an incredibly stable phone then it's easy to find and kill all of the bugs. But which is worse having buggy whizbang feature or not having whizbang feature at all? If I had to choose I would pick buggy whizbang feature. Because the only thing worse than doing something poorly is not being able to do it at all.
I worked with a company as an adviser and they refused to add whizbang because they didn't feel they could do it perfectly. Well... the outcome was that people needed whizbang and they picked buggy and slow over not-at-all. And they in my opinion picked correctly. I can tell someone that I can so that but it'll take 2 days and they might pick me. If I tell someone I can't do it at all they'll definitely pick someone else. So even if I'm slow there is still a chance I'll get the job. The end result was the product died because they refused lower their standards and compete.
This is taking place in the smartphone market. You have to have feature parity. The End. Full Stop. If you can't do what someone else is doing customers will jump ship. Android has taken over the market using this strategy and customers are generally pretty happy with the tradeoffs involved.
Was my favorite phone. Jailbroken iOS 4 and Lockinfo back when Lockinfo was still good. Best damn phone I ever owned.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Part of that is because Windows Phone allows very few background processes to run. For example try running a VoIP app like Zoiper and you will see real quick that it's not allowed to run in the background. Even apps from Microsoft like Lync don't work most of the time when you return to the start screen or some other app.
Windows Phone. Stable and gives better performance than any Android phone with twice the specs.
I can confirm. Microsoft gave me a free Windows phone. It now has Android CyanogenMod on it and it is super smooth.
Nicely said. Or as they say "perfect is the enemy of good". I thought it was Linus Torvalds that coined this phrase, but actually Google tells me it was probably Voltaire, a few hundred years before.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Android devices are superior these days. It isn't 2012 anymore. Faster, smarter, more features with less bullshit.
History consistency shows that in the features versus quality battle in consumer systems, features tend to win again and again. Same as it always was.
Table-ized A.I.
If you want to talk to someone, why not design a device that would allow you to "dial" a frequency, and then you could use your "phone" could contact that person, and then if they accept the connection, you can talk to them?
Like a radio that works as a transceiver.
If you are complaining about modern technology not working as expected, why not revert back to what is known to work, and has been tested successfully for decades? Everyone knows all the governments are listening in on our conversations, so there's no real point in expecting or wanting encryption.
If you want a portable computer that can browse the web, just get a tablet with a 3G connection or better.
Herpaderp! LULZ! (I added that because it's normal to act like an elitist fuckwit on slashdot)
The Nexus is pretty solid.
I've also had a Passport for a similar amount of time.
The two main things I love about it are:
- I get a keyboard, without having to compromise on screen size
- The battery lasts a really long time
On iOS8 third party frameworks can now be dynamically linked (system frameworks could be as well, even before iOS8).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Shill means paid to post. Do you have proof of that? Mac and Linux fanboys and zealots, yes.
do let me know. Just bought a JBL horizon bluetooth clock radio yesterday. Started streaming music from my Samsung S4 mini, then all of a sudden, dropouts. Unlistenable. Wife's Huawei worked fine with the radio, no dropouts. Found out there's an issue with the S4, bluetooth streaming, and wifi in the phone. Works fine if I turn wifi off, but I shouldn't have to do that, should I?
Well even when I disable background processes in Android it's still jerky and sluggish, so that's obviously not the whole reason. More likely it's because Android is little more than a hodgepodge of mismatched parts haphazardly slapped together.
Wrong. Shill means anyone who promotes something out of self interest. Payment is not a requirement.
Go back to school and pay attention this time, junior.
Actually even high CPU load doesn't seem to affect Windows UI at all. Both phone and desktop. I think Microsoft simply has more experience in making a responsive user experience. Taking care of fluid graphics goes all the way deep into the kernel.
1) No version of Android works on any phone made for Windows.
2) Downgrading Windows to Android would do nothing but make your phone slow and unresponsive shit.
Have fun with your stuttering menus, laggy transitions and unresponsive touch in Android though.
neither I nor any of my many friends running iPhones are having the sorts of issues he's describing...
Or they have found out the things (for example specific apps, settings or usage patterns) that make iPhone unstable and have just learned to avoid them.
The experience can be quite different for a newcomer that curiously tries unexpected random things and a guy that knows a platform and its pitfalls.
The basic UI may feel smoother, but the moment you run some software that needs to crunch numbers, no amount of OS magic will negate the limited SoC performance.
The question was on a "fully featured smartphone", so basic smartphones don't fit the bill. iPhone 4S was fully featured. Mind you, the Nokia N900 had more wizzbang, but iPhone had a good balance.
Both the wife's iPhone 6 and my 5S now take several seconds to *dial a number*, which isn't explained away with the apps I have installed.
Still faster than a SoC running Android.
Are you saying that you are immune to the bugs that got fixed in 8.3?
I do have some apps crash, but that's the app developer's problem. Not much the OS vendor can do about that.
I've written a somewhat popular Android app and most of its crashes are either the fault of the runtime or of vendor specific customizations.
The Developer Console provides excellent reporting on both uncaught Java exceptions and crashes in native code. Most often, the Dalvik VM crashes during garbage collection. The Dalvik class loader is also flaky and has issues with multithreading that only got worked around in newer versions. I've also seen the libchromium crash inside my app from adverts delivered by Googles Admob service, which is somewhat scary from a security perspective.
Another issue is that apps using Googles compatibility library now crash on HTC devices running Android 4.1 as soon as the user presses the menu key. HTC is no longer providing updates and Google simply states that it's not their fault and therefore not their problem. Now thousands of app developers have to independently find out about the issue and work around it.
So when an app crashes, there's a good chance that it's not the fault of the app developer. On a brighter note, the ART VM used in Android 5 and newer seem to be rock solid.
8.3 is the exception, not the rule. I'm not looking forward to the next update. What I'm looking for is a phone on which I can be excited about the next update.
My iPhone 6+ hasn't been booted in weeks,
Weeks?
I recently upgraded from a Samsung Galaxy II (finally dropped it and broke the screen) which hadn't been rebooted in almost a year. And that was only because of an OS update.
My Nokia 630 is very stable.
I have almost nothing on it, Skype, some mapping app.
That said Skype is awful on windows phone and the mapping app tends to forget to notify you.
Windows Phone, easy
Next problem
...I have an iPhone 4s (just because I don't want that "post Jobs shit"), my wife has an iPhone 5s (we are both IT profs) and we just rarely NEED to reboot our phones. We choose Apple because "it just works", we don't have the time for fiddling with a phone when we have users running on Windows 7. Yes, things got worse after Jobs because Jobs was the man guaranteeing that things were ready BEFORE they shipped but they are still quite good.
Just get a Google phone
Korma: Good
That's what I use: http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_core_lte-6099.php
I'm not saying it's the best smartphone out there, it could be a bit faster sometimes, but it 'just works'. No restarts required, no crashes, no problems.
I've had a Lumia 920. But then I got robbed and I couldn't easily get a replacement where I lived, so I just went for an Android run. After a Galaxy S3 and an Xperia Z1, I'm easily going back to the Lumias with a 1020. I've also had iPhones, but they're way too locked down and are losing their performance advantage. Though Android 5.0 is easily the slowest OS I've ever used. I actually think it's a java limitation. Nice try and all, but it won't work. Apple has a lot more effects but their native code has a huge performance advantage. As for Microsoft, they've created .NET optimizations which make their UI`s performance lightyears ahead of Java apps. Yeah, java may be nice for some things, but surely not for the bulk of an operating system.
I've been interested in Android since it's launch. My first phone with a touchscreen was the moto droid. Okay, I understood it was still immature and that explained some problems. But that is not the case anymore. Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. Android is more than half a decade old. Yet, the concept still doesn't work. Truly a shame. Too bad they were too afraid of exposing the Linux OS for native apps and high performance and wanted to limit the devices potential. If Android had been done properly, we'd be talking of iPhones today as we talk about iPods: a piece of history.
As for Windows Phone 8.1, it's got a very clean interface (the dreaded Metro UI, which sucks for desktops, actually works very well for phones) and very good performance. The 920 was built like it was meant to last forever. My Lumia's camera was simply the best phone camera I ever touched. iPhone users were easily impressed. There is, of course, the disadvantage of missing some apps. But really, I can't think of any app I've used more than a couple times which I could really miss. Besides, to add to my negative android experience, my 2-year-old nexus has just become a paperweight because Google's Android 5.0 turned it way too slow to do anything useful. At least Microsoft and Apple aren't doing that with their customers (the iOS 8 may slightly slow down an iPhone 4s but nothing compared to this).
Most of the idiots who are downvoting the posts who claim the Lumia phones are the most stables are the same people who have probably never used one. It's all very nice to defend open source, but I don't see these same people attacking the iPhone defenders, and the iPhone is an infinitely more closed platform than Windows Phone. Actually, whoever actually claims Android is in any way open, must actually study the facts.
On Slashdot, Microsoft is just the great scapegoat. Who cares if Google and Apple are greater threats to freedom. Nobody actually wants to examine reality.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
It's the millenials. They just chuck shit together (mostly copy-pasted from stackexchange) and if it compiles[1], they ship it.
Since many of the old guard who have a clue are retiring, either through age or just because they're sick of it, there's less and less of a restraining influence on them.
It'll probably get worse before it gets better. Like my lawn.
[1] or whatever the fuck the $languageDuJour equivalent is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Naturally the phone with the least Apps and the least Users will attract the Fewest Developers.. and hence the least instability.
aka Windows Phone
I think, the problem, is you're overflowing, the comma buffer.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Anything that does not run Android. Google unfortunately is focusing on fancy look but doesn't care about all the myriads of core bugs that are present in the system. Google is also removing critical core functionality in every new release of Android. Android used to be very good in 2010 but each new version becomes slower and slower and unusable.
oooh, could this be the right time for gnu/linux people to start posting their uptime?
The best solution is to get a phone with as little boat as possible and as much memory as possible. Something like a OnePlus One, which also happens to be about 1/3 the price of an iPhone.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yes, he got inoculated with Apple Kool-Aid.
Except it doesn't make you so much immune to as blind to iOS bugs.
Modern phones and tablets have thge same problem as PCs - they fall victim to loads of crap and bloatware. Don't burden your smartphone with shit and it will stay stable. If you're having trouble doing that use one with a smaller softewaremarket such as the Jolla. If you're unsure about which phone to take I'd actually recommend that one.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've got this Samsung S3 about 2.5 years ago. I did not unlock it, unlike my tablet. I decided to use it as-is. And I have not once had it crash, or lose any of its functions, since. Not one single time. This in spite me being a very intense user of this device, including its excellent GPS sensor.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I've had one problem with my 6 Plus which was annoying enough to care about, crashing Safari when rotating the phone from portrait to landscape once a certain amount of tabs were open. Googling the problem I found a couple of threads on Apple's support web site, so it appears not to have been just my experience.
The fix with the initial release was to close all tabs (an annoying task in Safari), as there is no "close all tabs" function. I don't know that it's been a problem in 8.3 so far, and it seemed to be better in 8.2.
I didn't experience the issue with Chrome or with other apps, just Safari. I suspected something wonky with the nitro js engine improvements and the 6 Plus display size as occasionally not long before crashing would occur, js-heavy apps rotated web pages would not respond to screen taps or would respond in the wrong place as if the running js code didn't have valid screen dimensions for portrait.
I theorized that closing tabs also nuked cached nitro-compiled js code so that subsequent page views didn't have issues.
Other than that, my 6 Plus has just worked. Historically, I've had to reboot my iPhones to fix a random issue with phone calls more than any other problem and that's been very rare and probably less often than power cycling it for other reasons, like airport security.
"Ever since the 4S days, this has been true less and less with each generation"
You just have to get the 7S when it comes out. That will fix everything that's broken in the old, out-of-date iPhones.
And I love the battery life!
Your post seems to indicate that you're turning your whole phone off & on to solve the problem. There's an easier, faster way- just cycle the wireless on & off. Procedure for those that may not yet know:
-At any iPhone screen, do a "swipe up" gesture. (Put your finger on the home button, and drag a line to the middle of the phone)
-At that pull-up menu, there are buttons to turn off & on wireless, bluetooth, etc.
And ya, what everyone else is saying. The phones are stable. It's the junk you put on them that make them unstable.
Between my family we must have 6 iphones and 3 ipads of different generations. My wife has a 5S and I have got a 5S in the past, and now a 6. All of the devices are stable and solid. More so after we upgraded our wifi to 5Ghz. All of our friends that have iPhones are very happy. Many people here due to being short of money bough iPhones 2nd hand due to their stable reputation. I would say either you are filling them up to the brink till exhausting their memory, or that you are paid to spread lies with nasty PR moves.
We have hundreds of Cisco AP around the world in our offices. We never had a problem that I recall that was specific to iPhones that came down to the AP or wireless controller being the actual problem. We've had cert and auth issues connecting to our corporate network (we use MS NPS and Radius), we've also had issues with Exchange certs and the iPhone email client caching the DNS and cert causing problems for when people went in and out of our wireless, and we have constant issues with people getting their accounts locked out because of Apple storing and syncing passwords across IOS devices but none those were a "Cisco AP problem".
I'm not defending Apple here, I've never had an iPhone or anything from Apple and probably never will, I just support them in a corporate environment.
The iPhone used to be the smartphone that "just works."
When was that? I seem to remember there was always lots of trouble with iPhones.
Fact: A Windows Phone with a dual core CPU and 512MB of RAM outperforms an Android phone with a quad core CPU and 1GB of RAM.
Outperforms in what sense?
Even the octa-core Android phones with 2GB of RAM *still* have lag and stutter when displaying something as simple as a scrolling menu or a web page.
Yet my relatively cheap mid-range Android phone does not have it. Neither did my previous Android phone. You must be doing something very strange.
And I can say that I've only had to restart the phone only once every couple months. Part of it is because I know how to kill an offending app on the phone.
I also have a Kind Fire HD6. That pretty much works the same way as the phone as it runs a later version of Android.
This isn't a slam to all the Apple fanboys and fangirls - its just that Apple perpetuates this myth that it just works. When that is far from the truth.
I've never used Zoiper (never even heard of it) but I've never had a problem with Lync or Skype on my nokia. I bought it for the 41 megapixel camera and the available battery grip because I hate having to plug a phone every day but overall I've been very happy with it for time I don't want to lug an SLR around. Assuming battery life keeps holding up I'll keep it for while. Now I'm not a power user and have only installed about a dozen extra apps, the Lumina and Miscrosoft ones that came on it have been pretty good at covering the base functionality you expect from phones these days.
~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/(your device here) or LemonJar or Settings > Privacy > Diagnostics & Usage > Diagnostic & Usage Data Gotta say, when working with Garmin to figure out how their iPhone app wasn't coping with iOS update changes (garbage collection issues) that first one was the most useful.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
You sound like Microsoft blaming device drivers for BSOD.
I truly understand what brand loyalty is. I also understand that people can be so loyal that they become blind to its faults. "Love is Blind'! I owned a 2005 Ford F250 with a 6.0 diesel, heard all the bad and still bought it. The engine in that vehicle was so bad I had to lemon law it. As far as phones go my family was Motorola people. My son switched to iPhones and every model (4,4s and 5) has battery life issues. He has to keep a charger at work, in his car, in his backpack and at home. Phone works good but I personally would not put up with battery issues! Recently my wife switched the Samsung Note 3. Absolutely no problems, also with her on facebook from 6pm to 10pm she still has more than half battery. I switched to the LG G3. We had LG phones before smart phones and always liked them. This has been a great phone and battery lasts me 3 days.
Jolla seems to need a reboot about once a month.
Windows phone is by far the most stable platform out there. This is thanks to the lack of applications. You end up using your phone for calls and whatsapp, and that's it, so you hardly ever get a headache because you never run out of ram nor those two apps crash.
I think that all mobile operating systems are suffering from this now. Mobile has matured to the point that phones now do just about everything we need them to do. So the problem now becomes, why buy a new phone?
I'm actually faced with this problem. My contract is up in September and my year and a half phone is still good. It has a 1080p display. It's fast. Lots of storage. The newer phones are better but only marginally.
So given that the hardware has matured the only other option is to add more things to the OS. Some of which will require a newer phone to use. That way, people have to upgrade the phone to use that shiny new feature.
Personally, I think this is part of the reason that so few phones now allow you to replace the battery. The battery is likely the first component to go so by making it non-replacable some people are likely to just get a new phone rather than a new battery.
Same with my iPhone 4S, this may have to do with I didn't install iOS 8. Given iOS 8 was built with a new chip in mind upgrading was not an option IMO.
I have also noticed a slight degradation in robustness on iPhones over the years--probably associated with the legalization of dynamic linking and background processes.
It's still pretty solid, though.
Unless your Apple. Then you release a a barely usable finder full of bugs with basic features. Or r,elease iOS such that connecting to an AppleTV is problematic at best.
The question was on a "fully featured smartphone", so basic smartphones don't fit the bill. iPhone 4S was fully featured. Mind you, the Nokia N900 had more wizzbang, but iPhone had a good balance.
Both the wife's iPhone 6 and my 5S now take several seconds to *dial a number*, which isn't explained away with the apps I have installed.
I'm guessing you upgraded to 8.x? That was your mistake. Apple totally screwed up something internally in 8.x that has affected all GUI components. For instance, look at Messages. Send a message and rotate your phone. If you time it while it's being delivered and go from landscape to portrait, you'll see that all your messages disappeared from the screen. Rotate it back and they appear. This is because the GUI messaging system is completely hosed, and this can even cause apps to lockup or react slowly. Unfortunately, iOS 7 was far far far superior to the pile that is iOS 8. And I say this owning quite a bit of Apple gear and having noticed the problems across iPhone 4S, 5, 5S, and 6.
The sentiment certainly preceded Voltaire.
It's very common in politics that a bunch of people will all be thinking along the same lines, and want the government to do something very similar to solve a given problem. If they can all agree on one concrete course of action to solve the problem they are much more likely to succeed then if they all come forward with slightly different proposals. Let's say the problem is nut imports driving local producers out of business, if the guy who wants a 16.6% (or 1/6) tariff on walnuts spends all his political capital ensuring the guy who wants 12.5% (or 1/8) fails then it's likely there will never be a tariff on walnuts. OTOH if they compromise on 14.3% (1/7) then they're much more likely to succeed.
While it's true that Android has crap user interaction. There are several Windows phones now that also support Android, you should get your facts straight.
Fact: I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 as a replacement for my iPhone 5 but have been disappointed. The user interface is okay, the responsiveness is crap, and that's stock out of the box. I'd expect a similar user experience to the iPhone from newer hardware. It's non-existent though.
oooh, could this be the right time for gnu/linux people to start posting their uptime?
Flag as Inappropriate
Or mac users. 60 days is normal for me on a hack, and I generally only reboot due to power failures or hardware/software upgrades. I once had 180 days on it. The laptops don't get rebooted unless an OS update requires a reboot. I could have given a longer uptime for the servers, but they recently got moved, so they were shutdown. One was upwards of several years. And then there's the decade plus of the AS400s and Sun servers we were running at a couple of previous jobs. None of those were Linux.
There are several Windows phones now that also support Android, you should get your facts straight.
Name them.
My nexus 5 regularly stays up for months at a time, however I feel that a boot cycle is beneficial occasionally.
That said, I was sitting at the kitchen table the other day, nexus 5 lying on it next to and it spontaneously rebooted. I noticed as the screen came and the animated boot logo sequence. It wasn't because of a pushed update either. I happen to know that it had been up for about 55d at that point in time as I took a quick look through the logs(via Android sysinfo app) the day before as Google Now launcher was complaining about placing a widget, or not being able to place one.
It may just be a case of flash memory becoming corrupted, and in this case I'm backing up photos/sms and doing a full factory restore, as I rooted it just before the last round of Android updates but don't really need it. To that end I think that I might see if there are any tools for android available to test the internal flash storage and possibly even the RAM/CPU.
Thermal dissipation is pretty poor in phones, and I especially notice this in the summer when they throttle just because of air temp already raising their temp close to normal throttling range, or another example having accidentally left the phone out in the sun for a several minutes-> insta thermal throttle, so it may just also have something to do with heating/cooling cycles-> mechanical work.
I've just never been a big fan of these completely enclosed cases for those reasons. At least on many phones you can pop the back cover off but not on the iphones or nexus 4/5/6.
Outperforms in what sense?
In every sense.
Yet my relatively cheap mid-range Android phone does not have it. Neither did my previous Android phone. You must be doing something very strange.
Yes, you've got a special magical version of Android that doesn't exhibit the stuttering behavior that all other Android devices do...
Get an Android phone with unlocked bootloader and install a custom ROM based on older/better debugged KitKat AOSP release and focused on stability rather than features. Think Debian of Android. If you can't find one to your liking, you only have yourself to blame. It's impossible for a release with hundreds of brand new features and UI refreshes to be stable for the simple reason that nobody actually tried it before. But if there is enough interest in the community, they can take a snapshot and focus on fixing bugs.
Data rules, but the only way one can resolve this debate would be for some insiders to "leak" the respective reliability telemetry to an infamous "wiki" site (and risk their jobs and livelihoods in the process) ... ain't going to happen!
As a hard core Penguinista for a more than 2 decade,
That windows lumia thing was far more stable than android. And much more durable than Samsung.
Perhaps it was related to nokia building quality.
Windows Phone isn't any faster. It's got lots of "pretty" transitions everywhere to make you look like it's very responsive even though it takes one minute to switch to the next damn screen.
However Android improved a lot recently. While I agree it was kind of slow in the earlier versions, the 2.3 era is over. Now we've got native applications with nice responsiveness and I can't remember the last time I felt my phone was underperforming.
Part of that is because Windows Phone allows very few background processes to run
Even if they allowed thousands of processes to run concurrently on windows phone, I doubt you could find more than 2 or 3 useful apps in the windows store. So they'd still be safe without enforcing the number of applications your phone can run at once ;-)
Blackberry is still a solid beast of a phone. Yes, no google apps, but 99 percent of what I need is there. I reboot my phone about once every couple of months if needed. The new OS is pretty solid and the damn thing just works. You can load google apps and the playstore if you really want to.
I have a 5C, very little problems whatsoever, nothing like you talk about. Most of the time I have problems with Airplay are things like streaming video from crappy web pages playing in Safari, not so with standalone apps. Haven't tried after the 8.3 update anyway. But then, I think 8.3 performance on the 5C is great, except the occasional visual hiccup. Tip: disable background execution for most apps, most don't need it, some even lie about needing it for push notifications, but actually don't.
I've got a Moto X 2013 that I love. It might not be the phone for everyone, but it does exactly what I need in the way I want it done. It's standard Verizon firmware, nothing too fancy, and fairly stable - maybe one crash or reboot needed every other month. My contract will be up in less than 6 months and the timing seems like it might be right to wait it out for one of the Project Ara phones - the modular Google phones. Part of that is because there will likely be a Nexus reference spec phone that I can just use on a pay-as-you-go plan. I think I'm ditching the whole contract thing - I think I'd be much happier with an MVNO.
----- obSig
1729 hours and counting... So it's been a little over 10 weeks since the last reboot. That's fairly stable, I think...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Sounds like you prefer to buy new instead of apply fixes. Cisco is rare in the sense that they fix items with regularity, but they cannot get some people to install the fixes.
So if you want first offerings in the market and it to work right and no software updates, in an environment where new possibly different devices are being introduced after release, just replace your entire infrastructure every few years. It only does wonders for your budget and speaks volumes of your teams skills.
I am using a Leagoo Lead 2 for about a year now, it costed USD 110 incl. shipping, and it has been very stable from the start.
I recently rooted it (with KingRoot) to get rid of some concerning background processes, but mainly to find out if I could use it make it last more than one full day on a single charge, which it now happily does. (it has a small battery)
Family members use a Doogee Valencia DG800, USD 85, which also works really well.
Another one still prefers her Huawei Ascend P6, because it is rock solid.
Total costs are about USD 25 per person per month.
(including phone and plan, but no insurance as that would be stupid)
The penultimate my dad is better than your dad argument.
They all "just work" for a lot of users. However, you can't make something as complex as a modern smartphone without bugs. Enormous amounts of testing are done on these devices prior to shipping trying to ensure a good user experience but they will never be bug free. The ultimate test is always millions of users.
Then add flaky wifi/cell networks and 3rd party apps into the mix, just to complicate matters further.
Your case sounds extreme though.
Try the One Plus One -- its the best phone you can buy. No contract, great price, almost 2 days of battery life, great camera, and very stable -- I reboot once a month or so. No complaints.
I agree. My Passport running 10.3 is extremely stable. I haven't had it crash since I got it about 3 months back. The only issue I did have was the odd screen flicker glitch that would pop up occasionally but the latest 10.3 update fixed that.
The Passport is a wonderful phone. Love the large screen and the clever touchpad/physical keyboard. Best phone I've ever had.
That.
DOS or Win 95 had the same issue.
But if you read it with Shatner's voice, it totally works!
The phones are stable. It's the junk you put on them that make them unstable.
If an OS lets the apps make it unstable, then the OS (and phone) is bad. A well configured OS shouldn't allow instability caused by apps.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'd agree except that at least one of my friends is about as non-techy as it gets and I've been much relieved at the lack of bitching since he switched from Adroid. It's been a serious relief!
This guy is techy enough to be getting articles posted to Slashdot but not good enough to figure out the things you describe? Certainly it's possible he's got an issue, and I ran into one myself I couldn't solve. I went to the Apple store, asked for help, and they provided me an answer that solved the problem. It wasn't without pain mind you but I'm simply not willing to have to become an expert at every single thing I run into issues with. I'm not willing to be baited by his stalking horse, not without a great deal more evidence by many more people that the platform has somehow deteriorated.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Something is wrong and it's not your phone.
SW is a big blame.
My Z1C has an uptime of 1-2 months (for those who don't know, that's the period between reboots), and a battery life of 3-4 days.
My usage: nova launcher, occasional phone calls (less than 1h/week), gmail+calendar sync, Bluetooth LE watch (Casio), net, some music (poweramp).
My NEVER usage: facebook, twitter, any other social-media stuff, games.
FFSIIwhen did shit software so acceptable!? People hated win9x due to its instability, and we're basically back to that. The is is shit if running programs causes other programs to misbehave. PERIOD. It's the whole ducking point of an OS!
Then I wonder why a Windows Phone with half the specs still outperforms an Android phone with double the specs.
Oh and Android has WAY more transition effects. I guess it's to hide the fact that it's slow as shit for doing anything. Even scrolling the settings menu in Android has little jerks and stutters.
When Windows 10 hits, Microsoft will have phones powered by Intel CPUs. That means the Windows Phone application library will dwarf the combined Android and iPhone application libraries overnight.
Enjoy gloating while you can. Your time is running out.
OK sorry, but what makes you think these people are "smart". They can code. They can sometimes draw guis.
Then what is the final argument?
Every phone seems to have this same issue, but it is not the phones fault. It's the fault of what the owner installs on it. My wifes galaxy mega was great at first, but now that she has all these stupid games installed it is buggy and needs to be restarted regularly.
Time for divorce.
You're not holding it right.
My Nokia 3210 is faster and more stable and gets 50x the battery life of your Windows phone. Does that make it better?
Super low screen resolution certainly helps MS compete somewhat, though my Nexus 6 is smoother and better at everything than any Windows phone. If you don't offer much in the way of features then you can get away with junk hardware like the Windows guys expect. For my money the ability to keep a real, performant computer in my pocket with battery for days is an advantage tough to let go of.
No such problem with my iPhone 6. Just saying. As always, YMMV.
-- "I'm not in a hurry; I'm in Hawaii." The Homeless Guy
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lumia+wit...
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lumia+wit...
at work and only at work I have to turn off and then turn on the wifi to get it to connect. At home, at a dozen other places no problems. but at work i have issues.
I have the opposite experience. Instead of getting a seamless Wi-Fi network going with proper equipment our workplace has cobbled together its own version with a mixture of 2.4 and 5GHz gear from Cisco (Linksys) and Netgear. My iPhone 6+ seems to have no problem with this but my older TF101 needs the Wi-Fi stopped and restarted to get a decent connection.
Uh huh. Try opening a folder with 30,000 or so files in it and see how "responsive" it becomes.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
In some ways, that's why we have the problems that we have in the software industry to begin with. Everyone wants new features and they want them fast but at the same time they want it to be stable as well. Code that's developed rapidly and is stable is an oxymoron, especially if you have project managers hovering over you asking you why the software hasn't been released yet.
iOS 8.3 is an exception, yes, that's because Apple has decided that perhaps packing everything in including the kitchen sink is maybe not a good idea. Apple has already stated that iOS 8.4 and the future iOS 9 is concentrating more on efficiency and stability than past versions of iOS.
If you have ATT or Verizon, buy the international variant Android That supports 4G. No bloatware or issues super stable, lower bill and if you download dumb apps you can reset it. 9 out of 10 times it's the apps/bloatware when it comes to android. I have run GPE, and debloated roms for months without any restarts, when i do restart its for a uplate, backup or rom.. G3 G4 and G5.
blackberry
alive to the universe, dead to the world
The only thing I really miss is having the Uber app... but I'm getting by with traditional taxis (which is fine for work travel mainly, so I don't miss uber... much).
BlackBerry has one of the best mobile browsers going. Have you tried https://m.uber.com/
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Not true. I have an iPad with practically nothing on it (certainly no games), which I use very little. Mostly it's just used to access websites. As far as I can see, it's about as close to factory original as you can get without leaving it sealed in the original box and never using it. Yet, it seems to me that iOS is riddled with bugs and instability.
A recent update from Apple made it so that part of the keyboard on the unlock screen is missing until it has fully slid onto the screen (I thought Apple was all about visual polish). The keyboard has also become really laggy recently. Safari regularly freezes up or crashes simply from loading web pages. I've been told by people who use iOS more heavily than me that the usual thing to do is just to install Chrome. Is there a rule somewhere that says that web browsers that come with operating systems have to be really shit?
In any case, your point seems to be that people should expect the phone to be unstable if they install unstable apps. I say that if a single app can cause the entire OS to become unstable, then it's the OS' fault, not the app's. Especially if the app isn't running at the time. It's not 1995 any more. When my application software goes wrong, I don't expect a BSOD and a reboot. Contemporary desktop OSes manage to avoid that. That said, in my experience, iOS doesn't, in general, actually let individual apps bring down the whole system, but you appear to be suggesting otherwise.
I think it's one of three things, each of which may or may not have been influenced by the passing of Steve Jobs:
Everyone knows exactly what is causing the shitiness, douche bag lawyers, writing crap non-warranties, so manufacturers don't give a crap how bad their products are as long as those same douche bag lawyers can fend off enough angry customers to generate a good profit, selling shit likes it gold. PR=B$ (public relations lies) can also work to convince customer they are the only ones, by flooding every media channel with lies about how good the products are and how they are the only ones with problems, including and especially fucking forums. Corporate douche baggery is the problem, companies run by psychopaths is the problem, companies running governments in order to block government management consumer protections from working properly is the problem and those shitty products and shitty software is just a symptom.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Every phone seems to have this same issue, but it is not the phones fault. It's the fault of what the owner installs on it. My wifes galaxy mega was great at first, but now that she has all these stupid games installed it is buggy and needs to be restarted regularly.
But isn't that supposed to be one of Apple's big points; curated apps? Nothing that breaks the machine?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The phones are stable. It's the junk you put on them that make them unstable.
If an OS lets the apps make it unstable, then the OS (and phone) is bad. A well configured OS shouldn't allow instability caused by apps.
In the interests of stability, I have removed everything from my phone, including the phone capability, so now it just runs the OS. It's much more stable.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Every phone seems to have this same issue, but it is not the phones fault. It's the fault of what the owner installs on it. My wifes galaxy mega was great at first, but now that she has all these stupid games installed it is buggy and needs to be restarted regularly.
I vote for stupid stuff. My Droid M works fine for two or three days after reboot but gradually gets slower and slower until the touch screen no longer responds.
But I don't play games, and the only games on the device are the bloatware installed by the carrier. I suspect that the device's entire problem is related to bloat.
I'm not experienced inside my phone's OS much, but in the past I've hacked up installations of CP/M, etc. so it's not like I'm incompetent; so are there tools I can use to find out which app blows up my phone? Or eats the battery? Or seizes the screen and won't relinquish it?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
And in fact it doesn't. The iPhone 6 is perfectly stable. It's his wifi that needs fixing.
I totally agree, the Windows Phone stuff is solid and really quick on dual core 1GB RAM devices when it takes four or five cores and 3GB of RAM to manage the same thing on Android in my experience. That said the platform is under constant attack by google continually blocking and changing APIs and sites to break stuff for it along with less support for apps for stuff like exercise watches and GPSs.
Roll on Windows Mobile 10 with unified apps which will hopefully fix a lot of this and make it a much more difficult target for Google to discriminate against like the petty trolls they are.
MS do NEED to hurry the fuck up though when it comes to distribution of updates, it can still take months for the shitty network vendors to let updates through.
Or you could have given it to someone who would actually use it for its intended purpose instead of being a dick about it.
I can't notice those glitches on my Android phone. BTW, what model do you have?
Shut down the apps that you are not using or else the iPhone gets slower and slower. That's why there is a difference between older non multitasking phones and new ones. Double click the button and see how much crap is still running. Better than restarting every few days.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Your Nokia 3210 is not a smartphone, hence it does not even qualify.
I realise that not reading the article is the norm around here, but you could at least read the fucking headline.
The reason you posted that link instead of actually providing names is because you know you're full of shit. Searching for "Lumia with Android" simply pulls results for Lumia phones that run Android, it does not show any Windows Phones that run Android.
You utterly fail.
I have an iPhone 5S and other than the iOS updates, I don't ever have to power it off/reboot. It runs great and has no issues that I know of at least. Of course I don't really install a lot of apps and I never use it for games. I mostly just use the built-in functions, a banking app, Disconnect.me for privacy, and Workflow with Launcher to create my own "customized apps".
My wife has the 6 and she runs some social networking apps, but like me she never needs to power it off/reboot except for iOS updates. She uses hers constantly and has no issues, whereas I use mine only when needed for specific communications or purposes.
I have friends with Galaxy S3's and higher. They all love their phones and never report any issues.
This is Slashdot... You don't think toggling or manually forcing a connection wasn't thought of already?
Buggy WiFi is buggy. People have been complaining about problematic WiFi on I things for some time now.
Yeah, the OS should allow for startup/shutdown only. That'll keep those pesky users at bay!
Google Play Edition devices IMO. Regular updates, no bloatware, well-written code.
I have a Nexus 4 Running 5.1 Lollipop. I have numerous apps installed, though I some mostly careful about installing things I don't need.
I have minor issues, however I can often go a few weeks at a time before rebooting enters my mind. I find it quite stable.
Or you could have given it to someone who would actually use it for its intended purpose instead of being a dick about it.
Sure, I was a dick, but I didn't do anything Microsoft didn't do itself.
What helps MS the most is not having a shit OS. Android is a kludge that was randomly thrown together and runs an emulated Java environment. That's why it crashes and lags so much.
Mayhaps you need to purchase a stable wife? My iPhone 6+ is fine.
MrLogic cannot read.
"I have to turn off and then turn on the wifi "
"I turn off and on the wifi it works fine"
Nowhere in that post was rebooting the phone even implied. You are clearly just cheerleading Apple. There are pages and pages and many personal anecdotes that will clearly show that your precious eyePhone is garbage.
I'm glad Linux fixed that problem years ago. I've not had a single crash -not even hardware related- since I've started exclusively using Linux. Not only that, but my 1996ish Packard Bell 286 runs as good as your $3000 gaming rig and it's because of the miracle that is Linux! I don't believe a program exists that can make the Linux OS unstable. Why? Because it is a GOOD OS(tm)! As you said, only BAD ones allow the system to crash.
You sound like that one guy who is always making excuses for everyone else's poor performance....
[CITATION NEEDED]
Stomp your feet all you want, geek, but society has determined that, IN FACT, the multiple of anecdote is data. If you don't like that data, make your own up and present it to us as a counter argument. Otherwise your bitching is just childish.
I don't care how awesome that phone might be. I cannot buy something that had to stretched to ridiculous spellings just so they can get a trademark on it. I don't care if it gave blow jobs while showing non-stop Scarlett Johansen porn. I can't watch the formerly-known-as Scifi channel anymore either. I've even been told they show non-stop Scarlett Johansen porn right after WWE but I wouldn't know- I despise greedy marketing folks so I don't watch it.
Clearly he's holding it wrong.
Really? You're implying that slashdot readers are properly technically savvy? Those days are long gone. If that were true, all these arguments would be presenting reproducible and well explained cases (like proper bug reports!) not vague anecdotal stories that can't be proven... Just sayin!
I have had really great experiences using Samsung devices, ever since the flip phone days. I am currently on a Galaxy s5, and I have found it to be remarkably durable, stable, and an all around solid phone.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
oooh, could this be the right time for gnu/linux people to start posting their uptime?
Yeah, I'd love to get free info on computers with unpatched vulnerabilities.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
neither I nor any of my many friends running iPhones are having the sorts of issues he's describing...
Or they have found out the things (for example specific apps, settings or usage patterns) that make iPhone unstable and have just learned to avoid them.
Ahh, so when Android seems more unstable, it's just because Android users are too stupid to find the apps that make it so?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.