Then nobody should be bitching about the price. Maybe they just don't notice they're paying for the subsidized phone when they pay $80 a month... I"m assuming you bought one outright?
This seems to be pretty much limited to the US. Here in Germany you can get a 5GB data package for 15€ a month - prepaid. It's the texts and calls that are expensive - calling and texting flatrates start at about 40€ a month.
However, with my usage, VoIP being allowed on my carrier, I hardly ever spend more than 1€ on calls and texts. IM & E-Mail take care of most of it, and the SIP voice flatrate included in my home DSL package takes care of the rest. I'm spending about 30€ (my roommate covers half of the DSL package) a month for all my connectivity needs, and that's with more or less all-I-can-eat in al the relevant areas.
I'm already dreading my next visit to the US though. Your prepaid data plans are pretty much unusable, and renting a MiFi is crazy expensive...
The Android bootloader lockdown? What? Just stop buying Motorola devices and all will be fine... you've still got HTC and Samsung building decent phones with completely open bootloaders.
So what happens when you've wiped your device (i.e. when installing a new ROM)? How do you connect your phone to Google when you don't have access to the authenticator app until you've logged in, downloaded Titanium Backup from the Market and restored your apps?
Correct, the "death grip" everyone is confused with is present on nearly all handsets... It's only the short-circuit due to the external antennas on the original iPhone4 that was new.
And the actual deathgrip issue (without the short circuit) is actually quite mild on the iPhone 4, as far as I can tell. The only people doing better in that department are Motorola (couldn't get my old Milestone to drop further than 2dB, no matter how I held it), while HTC are more or less the worst offenders (My Desire's signal strength will drop by about 20dB depending on how I hold it)...
backgrounds and animations because that looks to be the golden ratio of where it's worth it for a developer to make a $.99 game and for it to sell enough copies to people who want a game to play on the toilet.
Isn't that exactly where the money's at? People that work all day and have friends don't have time to play games except on the toilet...:(
How're you liking Subsonic? I tried setting it up (the trial) a while ago, but never got it working correctly... is it worth the trouble and the cash?
Will it handle MP3, FLAC, AAC and WMA as input? Embedded album art? Rating (writing to the POPM tag) from the Android app? How about ReplayGain? Audioscrobbler (Last.FM scrobbling) support? How well does it handle music on network drives?
Currently I'm using Audiogalaxy, which more or less works, but it's buggy and quite clunky, and there's no support for ratings.
"We're Sorry Slacker Personal Radio is not available in your area. Unfortunately, Slacker Personal Radio is currently only available in the United States. While we are working to extend our licenses to other parts of the world, at this time we can only play music to our listeners within the United States.
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Are you sure that makes Slacker a viable alternative for non-US people? Who the hell modded this informative?
Can't quite agree with your statement about plain Android being slow in general... pure AOSP (which is basically what the Nexus phones come with) absolutely flies.
As for your power problem:
1. Install Battery monitor widget from the market - idle/standby drain higher than 10mA means you're not done optimizing.
2. Check partial wake usage in battery history (you might need to Google that, unless you can get Spare Parts installed on your phone... the battery history menu in the advanced phone info menu seems to have been removed as of gingerbread). Basically any app using partial wakelocks longer than a few minutes over an entire discharge cycle are behaving rather badly - uninstall and find better behaved alternatives.
3. Check the battery usage info in the Android settings dialog.
Strange, I've found that the Samsung Galaxy S units (Friend has a Captivate) seem smoother in terms of UI responsiveness than the HTC Evos I've played with. Also the Captivate and Nexus S were definitely smoother than the Motorola Atrix I played with at CES.
You've got to consider that Motorola are just bad at Android software (which makes the locked bootloaders all the more sad). My Dream/G1 with a decent custom ROM is about on par with my old Milestone in terms of general UI performance - slow as balls. Without custom ROMs like on the OG Droid, all Motorola devices will be more or less crippled:(
Hence why I'll never be buying another Moto device...
My problem actually hasn't been the AMOLED display, it's the OS' incessant need to use the radio when it's in my pocket. (But yeah, the display does eat batteries too)
If I leave the phone on a desk idle without touching it (display off, bluetooth off, wifi off, cell on) for 8-9 hours, I got 20% of my battery remaining. If I leave the phone mostly idle (did play mp3s for my car for 3 hours) but all the radios off, I got 90%+ remaining.
Friends with Moto Droid 1s and other Nexus S units I've talked to are unsurprised, so I could only conclude that this is considered normal. (while I didn't get mine free from google, most of the people I know with Nexus S units got them as their employee holiday gifts)
Sounds like you've got a runaway app. That's definitely not the radios, unless they're actively sending and receiving data ALL the time... with all radios on and the device idle in standby with just Gmail sync and Sipdroid receiving calls, my Desire gets about 5mA of power drain (you can check with Battery Monitor Widget if your device's power management provides the necessary output files). That translates to about 280 hours of battery life with a 1400mAh battery.
Over night (8 hours on average), with Sipdroid receiving calls and Trillian connected to a few IM services, Facebook, Google Reader, Gmail, Twitter and so on all syncing at least hourly, my Desire will drain between 5 or 8 percent of the battery, depending on how much there is to sync (if my Gmail account gets 20 or 30 more e-mails than usual over night, it'll use a %-point or two more).. Extrapolate that and you're looking at about 100 hours or more of standby... with EVERYTHING on and syncing.
With my use (quite heavy - at least two or three hours a day of web surfing, half an hour of calls, music nearly constantly... probably an estimated 4 or 5 hours a day) and those sync settings, I get about 18 hours of battery life (up at 6AM, and at 8PM I've got about 30% left).
As far as I can tell, those figures or better are more than possible with the Nexus S. In your first post I was under the impression that you were referring to active usage time, for which 8 hours is actually not that bad. I'm pretty sure I could drain an iPhone battery in less than that if I wanted to:)
Are you joking? Don't get me wrong, I love Android and custom ROMs, precisely because with the right hardware I can enjoy all the newest features of Android for a long time to come, but pretending the situation with official updates is anything other than abysmal is, well, insane.
Froyo: HTC has updated most of their devices. Samsung is halfheartedly lagging behind, and Motorola, well, they've updated like one device (the original Droid), while deliberately sabotaging any chance other handsets had at home-cooked updates by locking up their bootloaders.
Gingerbread: Nothing to see here, folks. Even the Nexus One hasn't been upgraded yet, and I'm guessing most Nexus One owners are pretty pissed about that, what with having expected to buy a device that would be a supported Android dev phone for a few years (let's say two).
Sure, I'm enjoying Gingerbread (CyanogenMod 7 nightly builds) on my Desire right now, and I'm sure Honeycomb will be along soon, but Joe Sixpack is up shit creek... and outdated smartphones don't make great paddles.
Don't blame others for your mistakes. I could have told you that SAMOLED display would drain power like crazy (AMOLED saves power, yes - when displaying mostly dark images... uses up to 3x as much as a decent LCD when displaying anything moderately light) and that the system-available RAM is woefully inadequate at a smidge over 300MB... and that Samsung has quite a poor track record when it comes to Android handsets and stability/fluidity and buggy software.
Of course, Google endorsing the (Galaxy-in-Disguise-) S as a Nexus phone is entirely their fault. Shame on them...
First, are tablet PCs *REALLY* the future of computing? I mean, PADDs were cool on Star Trek and all, but are they really more desirable than either smaller form factor laptops and/or the iPod Touch and its ilk on a grand scale? I realize that not everyone is like me and needs to carry around an 11-pound laptop everywhere, but despite the current iPad/Galaxy Tab craze, is it really likely that tablets will be the de facto laptop replacement in five years?
For the average consumer, who doesn't do a lot of text entry? Very likely.
Hopefully this will lead to a world in which only tablets and Thinkpads/EliteBooks/Dell Precision are available. No more crappy consumer laptops with incredibly bad keyboards, super-glossy screens and mediocre battery life.
Actually, as far as I can tell from the comments made by developers in the hands-on videos from after the Feb. 2nd show, all phone apps will run on tablets, aside from the obvious restrictions (phone dialers and such probably won't run on tablets without a phone function). It's the other way around that's going to be a problem - hell, browsing the new online Market yesterday I already discovered the first app that's a tablet exclusive: New York Times something or other... my Desire is shown as not compatible.
While you or I may not have a problem with using a tablet-optimized UI on a small screen, the average person might have trouble with the small fonts and buttons. Fragmentation is an absolute necessity if both form factors are to be utilized to their maximum potential...
Personally, I'm torn between wanting to have Honeycomb on my phone (I run a custom LCD pixel density anyway, which makes screen elements about as small as they would be with the Xoom Honeycomb build scaled directly down to the smaller screen) and "doing it right" for everyone. To be honest, I'll probably be satisfied if we get the most important features on phones:
-Tabbed default browser -Rich notifications (WHY for the love of God do persisten notifications not have buttons, like play/pause/FF/RW on music app notifications?) -Hardware acceleration -Renderscript
Slashdot Mirror
Then nobody should be bitching about the price. Maybe they just don't notice they're paying for the subsidized phone when they pay $80 a month... I"m assuming you bought one outright?
This seems to be pretty much limited to the US. Here in Germany you can get a 5GB data package for 15€ a month - prepaid. It's the texts and calls that are expensive - calling and texting flatrates start at about 40€ a month.
However, with my usage, VoIP being allowed on my carrier, I hardly ever spend more than 1€ on calls and texts. IM & E-Mail take care of most of it, and the SIP voice flatrate included in my home DSL package takes care of the rest. I'm spending about 30€ (my roommate covers half of the DSL package) a month for all my connectivity needs, and that's with more or less all-I-can-eat in al the relevant areas.
I'm already dreading my next visit to the US though. Your prepaid data plans are pretty much unusable, and renting a MiFi is crazy expensive...
Just out of curiosity... why an N900 and not, say, an HD2? Do you require a hardware keyboard? Or is it Debian you're after?
Yup, either they sink and take WinPhone7 with them, or they swim and turn WinPhone7 into a viable competitor for Android and iOS...
The Android bootloader lockdown? What? Just stop buying Motorola devices and all will be fine... you've still got HTC and Samsung building decent phones with completely open bootloaders.
So what happens when you've wiped your device (i.e. when installing a new ROM)? How do you connect your phone to Google when you don't have access to the authenticator app until you've logged in, downloaded Titanium Backup from the Market and restored your apps?
Chicken or egg?
Correct, the "death grip" everyone is confused with is present on nearly all handsets... It's only the short-circuit due to the external antennas on the original iPhone4 that was new.
And the actual deathgrip issue (without the short circuit) is actually quite mild on the iPhone 4, as far as I can tell. The only people doing better in that department are Motorola (couldn't get my old Milestone to drop further than 2dB, no matter how I held it), while HTC are more or less the worst offenders (My Desire's signal strength will drop by about 20dB depending on how I hold it)...
That's because it's one of those fantabulous devices I mentioned... you know, the ones with AGPS.
Time to upgrade. Devices with AGPS usually get a fix within 10 seconds or less...
backgrounds and animations because that looks to be the golden ratio of where it's worth it for a developer to make a $.99 game and for it to sell enough copies to people who want a game to play on the toilet.
Isn't that exactly where the money's at? People that work all day and have friends don't have time to play games except on the toilet... :(
How're you liking Subsonic? I tried setting it up (the trial) a while ago, but never got it working correctly... is it worth the trouble and the cash?
Will it handle MP3, FLAC, AAC and WMA as input? Embedded album art? Rating (writing to the POPM tag) from the Android app? How about ReplayGain? Audioscrobbler (Last.FM scrobbling) support? How well does it handle music on network drives?
Currently I'm using Audiogalaxy, which more or less works, but it's buggy and quite clunky, and there's no support for ratings.
Problematic for mobile devices, where Flash players on web pages will stop as soon as you minimize them. :(
"We're Sorry
Slacker Personal Radio
is not available in your area.
Unfortunately, Slacker Personal Radio is currently only available in the United States. While we are working to extend our licenses to other parts of the world, at this time we can only play music to our listeners within the United States.
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Are you sure that makes Slacker a viable alternative for non-US people? Who the hell modded this informative?
Have you been asleep the last year? This is Motorola we're talking about.
Root, as in running as SU, yes. Non-crippled OS versions via custom ROMs? Signed kernels and an encrypted bootloader say NOOOOOO! :(
Can't quite agree with your statement about plain Android being slow in general... pure AOSP (which is basically what the Nexus phones come with) absolutely flies.
As for your power problem:
1. Install Battery monitor widget from the market - idle/standby drain higher than 10mA means you're not done optimizing.
2. Check partial wake usage in battery history (you might need to Google that, unless you can get Spare Parts installed on your phone... the battery history menu in the advanced phone info menu seems to have been removed as of gingerbread). Basically any app using partial wakelocks longer than a few minutes over an entire discharge cycle are behaving rather badly - uninstall and find better behaved alternatives.
3. Check the battery usage info in the Android settings dialog.
Strange, I've found that the Samsung Galaxy S units (Friend has a Captivate) seem smoother in terms of UI responsiveness than the HTC Evos I've played with. Also the Captivate and Nexus S were definitely smoother than the Motorola Atrix I played with at CES.
You've got to consider that Motorola are just bad at Android software (which makes the locked bootloaders all the more sad). My Dream/G1 with a decent custom ROM is about on par with my old Milestone in terms of general UI performance - slow as balls. Without custom ROMs like on the OG Droid, all Motorola devices will be more or less crippled :(
Hence why I'll never be buying another Moto device...
My problem actually hasn't been the AMOLED display, it's the OS' incessant need to use the radio when it's in my pocket. (But yeah, the display does eat batteries too)
If I leave the phone on a desk idle without touching it (display off, bluetooth off, wifi off, cell on) for 8-9 hours, I got 20% of my battery remaining.
If I leave the phone mostly idle (did play mp3s for my car for 3 hours) but all the radios off, I got 90%+ remaining.
Friends with Moto Droid 1s and other Nexus S units I've talked to are unsurprised, so I could only conclude that this is considered normal. (while I didn't get mine free from google, most of the people I know with Nexus S units got them as their employee holiday gifts)
Sounds like you've got a runaway app. That's definitely not the radios, unless they're actively sending and receiving data ALL the time... with all radios on and the device idle in standby with just Gmail sync and Sipdroid receiving calls, my Desire gets about 5mA of power drain (you can check with Battery Monitor Widget if your device's power management provides the necessary output files). That translates to about 280 hours of battery life with a 1400mAh battery.
Over night (8 hours on average), with Sipdroid receiving calls and Trillian connected to a few IM services, Facebook, Google Reader, Gmail, Twitter and so on all syncing at least hourly, my Desire will drain between 5 or 8 percent of the battery, depending on how much there is to sync (if my Gmail account gets 20 or 30 more e-mails than usual over night, it'll use a %-point or two more).. Extrapolate that and you're looking at about 100 hours or more of standby... with EVERYTHING on and syncing.
With my use (quite heavy - at least two or three hours a day of web surfing, half an hour of calls, music nearly constantly... probably an estimated 4 or 5 hours a day) and those sync settings, I get about 18 hours of battery life (up at 6AM, and at 8PM I've got about 30% left).
As far as I can tell, those figures or better are more than possible with the Nexus S. In your first post I was under the impression that you were referring to active usage time, for which 8 hours is actually not that bad. I'm pretty sure I could drain an iPhone battery in less than that if I wanted to :)
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/03/samsung-refutes-high-galaxy-tab-returns-says-rate-is-below-2-p/
Are you joking? Don't get me wrong, I love Android and custom ROMs, precisely because with the right hardware I can enjoy all the newest features of Android for a long time to come, but pretending the situation with official updates is anything other than abysmal is, well, insane.
Froyo: HTC has updated most of their devices. Samsung is halfheartedly lagging behind, and Motorola, well, they've updated like one device (the original Droid), while deliberately sabotaging any chance other handsets had at home-cooked updates by locking up their bootloaders.
Gingerbread: Nothing to see here, folks. Even the Nexus One hasn't been upgraded yet, and I'm guessing most Nexus One owners are pretty pissed about that, what with having expected to buy a device that would be a supported Android dev phone for a few years (let's say two).
Sure, I'm enjoying Gingerbread (CyanogenMod 7 nightly builds) on my Desire right now, and I'm sure Honeycomb will be along soon, but Joe Sixpack is up shit creek... and outdated smartphones don't make great paddles.
Don't blame others for your mistakes. I could have told you that SAMOLED display would drain power like crazy (AMOLED saves power, yes - when displaying mostly dark images... uses up to 3x as much as a decent LCD when displaying anything moderately light) and that the system-available RAM is woefully inadequate at a smidge over 300MB... and that Samsung has quite a poor track record when it comes to Android handsets and stability/fluidity and buggy software.
Of course, Google endorsing the (Galaxy-in-Disguise-) S as a Nexus phone is entirely their fault. Shame on them...
Interesting, the website says $55 a year and up for specials. I'm guessing regulars are even more expensive?
What malware? The only apps that are installable are the ones on the Android Market, where any malware will be flagged by users right away...
Agreed, it's a feature implemented for our convenience. This so called researcher is blowing things way out of proportion...
The following is a legit set of questions...
First, are tablet PCs *REALLY* the future of computing? I mean, PADDs were cool on Star Trek and all, but are they really more desirable than either smaller form factor laptops and/or the iPod Touch and its ilk on a grand scale? I realize that not everyone is like me and needs to carry around an 11-pound laptop everywhere, but despite the current iPad/Galaxy Tab craze, is it really likely that tablets will be the de facto laptop replacement in five years?
For the average consumer, who doesn't do a lot of text entry? Very likely.
Hopefully this will lead to a world in which only tablets and Thinkpads/EliteBooks/Dell Precision are available. No more crappy consumer laptops with incredibly bad keyboards, super-glossy screens and mediocre battery life.
Actually, as far as I can tell from the comments made by developers in the hands-on videos from after the Feb. 2nd show, all phone apps will run on tablets, aside from the obvious restrictions (phone dialers and such probably won't run on tablets without a phone function). It's the other way around that's going to be a problem - hell, browsing the new online Market yesterday I already discovered the first app that's a tablet exclusive: New York Times something or other... my Desire is shown as not compatible.
While you or I may not have a problem with using a tablet-optimized UI on a small screen, the average person might have trouble with the small fonts and buttons. Fragmentation is an absolute necessity if both form factors are to be utilized to their maximum potential...
Personally, I'm torn between wanting to have Honeycomb on my phone (I run a custom LCD pixel density anyway, which makes screen elements about as small as they would be with the Xoom Honeycomb build scaled directly down to the smaller screen) and "doing it right" for everyone. To be honest, I'll probably be satisfied if we get the most important features on phones:
-Tabbed default browser
-Rich notifications (WHY for the love of God do persisten notifications not have buttons, like play/pause/FF/RW on music app notifications?)
-Hardware acceleration
-Renderscript