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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"?
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.
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 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.
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.
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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.
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Most of the stuff you highlight can be handled by a feature phone, though, except reading books. I use my 6-year-old Android, doesn't seem to crash or need to reboot unless the battery is on empty (and shocking the battery still works pretty well after 6 years - will go 12+ hours between charges). You don't need anything fancy - what you want is something stable.
I'm really struggling with what to get next - the screen on my phone has been cracked for a couple of years now, so I should probably replace it one of these days. But now it's all these damn giant phones that don't fit in my pockets, don't have replaceable batteries - what ever happened to cell phones getting smaller?
When someone sends me a text or an email, there's no "he said - she said" disputes over what was said. Try doing that with your home phone.
If you have that problem often enough to care, you need better friends, not a better phone!
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