[ I started this post the week of GSMA but never took the time to wrap up ]
[ Here’s part of what I wanted to say ]
[ Next rant after CTIA ]
My smartphone timeline goes something like this:
N80 > E51 > E71 > E72&N900 > Galaxy S
The E71 to the E72 upgrade was largely pointless. The cpu was faster but S60 still faced a debilitating shortage of RAM while the camera, GPS and overall build quality rapidly declined.
I’m faced with a similar lack of upgrade path with the GT-i9000. I love 2.2.1 with voodoo and see zero reason to upgrade to a new device in 2011. Given IOS dated look and Honeycomb’s premature launch it’s difficult to understand if anyone will impress me this year.
My only real issue with the SGS is Android’s short battery life. I’m not clear how Symbian can leave IRC and email running all day on a 1500mAh battery while Android will eat a 3000mAh battery in the same amount of time. I know JAVA is a piece of shit but is it really that bad or is something about the linux kernel inherently more power/cpu hungry?
I’ve decided the short term solution is to shift part of my “workload” like exchange and some “social” apps to IOS. Afterall, if I kill an iPod Touch battery what do I care? It’s that I /need/ access to this software. They’re a luxury.
So… can Samsung ship a tablet with a mature OS and awesome batter life before the end of June?
If not I’ll stick with my metaphorical E71. The amazing GT-i9000.
I finally took the time to fire up Odin and install voodoo 5 thanks to a friend on twitter.
Download mode and reverting to 2e recovery took less than a minute.
Voodoo from update.zip took a bit of time but wow is it worth it the performance gain is phenomenal.
Samsung should really hire people like supercurio to work out the bugs in the SGS.
Android 2.2.1 eliminated the GPS annoyance. I no longer need to toggle GPS from the Power control widget. Now adding widgets or apps to launcher pro takes a second or two rather than 5 or 10. An incredible improvement. Samsung would double sales if the Galaxy S shipped with this incredible speed. Almost as fast as my hands on experience with the Nexus S.
I see lag in the Market after the update but I imagine that is because of the new app rather than a Samsung issue.
The only real downside to the performance I see on 2.2.1 is loss of my desire to change devices. I imagine by Summer of 2011 something Tegra based will catch my eye though.
Three Towers in my life.
I have great line-of-site 1900Mhz HSPA at my office in Pacific Shores, Redwood City, California, USA. Sometimes DATA drops for days but in general outages are less than an hour. In fact I had an outage today. Being an ATT customer I see bad benchmarks in regard to upstream, downstream and latency. That’s OK. I can live with it.
However I live on South Abel Street in Milpitas where I have two towers in less that 2 miles from my condo. Awesome.
Not really.
The tower near Main and Calaveras does not have 1900Mhz DATA. NADA. ZERO. NOTHING. It’s been like that since I moved back to Milpitas the Spring of 2010. Why did ATT even bother?
Now the deal breaker. I hit a tower on top of the Hotel/Motel near Ranch 99 and 237 which has 1995 33.6k modem throughput up and down and latency you’d expect from tin cans and fishing line. This is the tower I hit for an hour every night when I’m at the gym.
What kills me. Today Tonight I benchmarked a tower in Union City at 1.5 down 1 meg up and quarter second latency. That I can handle. Why is it ATT cannot provide this level of service in Milpitas?
Next: Tower Location and Benchmarks
Before June of 2011 I will own a tablet . Perhaps an A9 tablet with 1280x720 or 1280x800 display and 1GB RAM if the price is reasonable.
My first tablet experience was the Nokia 770. I never thought java apps on ARM would work or screens would hit 10 inches. A year ago I might have said my N900 was the perfect form factor.
What could possibly come next?
I’m still hoping meego brings new ideas to the table and the N9 has as much success as the Galaxy S I’m using to bang out this post.
GPS is busted again Fixed if I toggle GPS once or twice.
Battery is going flat soon.
Picasweb uploader is force closing.
Cannot see my microSDHC from Root Explorer, but the data is there. Nope the path changed
Only the GPS issue kills me.
Love to track my walks with Endomondo.
Could be worse.
I love the upgrade overall. UI is smooth and fluid.
Some warnings before I start.
I use less than 2 minutes of voice calls a day. My i9000 is a notebook replacement with always on 3G. On that topic. GSM is disabled on my device so I only operate at 1900Mhz 3G. In a typical day I watch an hour of TV, IRC, ssh and web browse. My DATA use per week is less than 100 meg. I often disable wifi and sync when driving to the office, which is as much as two hours a day.
I bought the extended battery in this ebay auction for roughly 22$ USD.
First. The battery cover is cheap and greasy but I dont mind. Two blurrycam pictures here. I’ve already managed to snap one of the clips which holds on the cover but it was my fault. The fit is so tight I used a plastic card to force it off. Now the fit is better but not perfect like the OEM back.
More importantly. How is the battery life? It’s amazing. I had no idea it was possible to run so long on a single charger. Sure, it takes 7 or so hours to charge -I’ve never timed it - but I’ve seen as much as 26 hours of uptime on a single charge. My OEM Samsung battery is 6 to 8 hours unless I play Robo Tower Defense.
I’m not going to recommend the product yet as I’ve only had it for a few days.
There will be a followup post in two weeks with my conclusion and more photos.
BTW - I’ve seen the battery for 3$ cheaper now that I’ve done some more research.
Android performance is awesome.
Post One Click Lag fix the apps SPB TV, Pulse and the Market working working well. No more long unpleasant waits or black screens for me and I only used 600meg instead of the default 1GB.
This has me thinking about gingerbread and the possibility I could loose all interest in OS X notebooks like the beatiful MacBook Pro. I still believe BSD is the best OS and OSX as a relative is vastly superior to anything else as desktop platform.
But what happens when Samsung has a 1280x720 dual core Android tablet? Everyone knows the 7 inch Galaxy TAB is launching next week. It’s not enough of an upgrade from the I9000/SGS for me to upgrade but once I have ipsec/vpnc up and running on a tablet I’ll have zero need for my MacBook Pro. HURM! Maybe the only companies worthy of challenging Apple are folks we already know?
