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Ask Slashdot: What Are the Most Stable Smartphones These Days?

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-dad's-flip-phone-is-pretty-stable dept.

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"?

3 of 484 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is it the phone or the stupid stuff installed o by jblues · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    • * All the major SmartPhones (Apple, Vanila Android, Windows, Forked Android) are running pretty decent Kernels under the hood, its not like Windows 95 where a rogue memory leak can bring the whole system down.
    • * All but system libraries are statically linked.
    • * There's a watchdog that scans for misbehaving apps - ones that are using too many resources for too long, and kills them before they prevent overall responsiveness.

    Its conceivable that the kernel or watchdog is misbehaving, but more likely competition and increasing complexity has lead to:

    • * More software services and apps running on top of the core OS. And marketing cycles that mean these are released with bugs.
    • * Devices capable of running a whole lot more apps. Some of which will have bugs. If your early phone had 10 apps and one bug, and your new one has 100 apps and 10 bugs, the latter will be more noticible.
    --
    If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
  2. Re: Is it the phone or the stupid stuff installed by v1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:Is it the phone or the stupid stuff installed o by chr1st1anSoldier · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.