Month: November 2010

T-Mobile have been promising the Froyo upgrade for the Samsung Galaxy S for a couple of months, and it’s supposedly due by the end of November. Tomorrow is that day and there’s hardly been any information at all from T-Mobile apart from a couple of uninformative forum posts. I’ve been sticking it out because I don’t want to void my warranty (it’s either 18 or 24 months on my 24 month contract, I’m not sure) and I don’t really want to fork out £400 for a replacement phone, but on the other hand it’s maddening to see that the other networks have released their updates.

If we don’t hear anything I’m seriously tempted to debrand and use the stock Froyo update, but then I’d lose all my settings and saved games, so not sure whether to go ahead or not. If I do, I’ll most likely be following the instructions from Addictive Tips and Samsung Galaxy S Forums.

I’ve been having real lag problems with my Samsung Galaxy S, where it can sometimes take about 10 seconds between pressing an icon and something happening. This is well documented on the internet, and there are a couple of fixes available, but it seems that any fix needs to be taken out before upgrading to Froyo, which hopefully I’ll be able to do soon (not holding my breath though, bloody T-Mobile). So currently I’m waiting for the Froyo upgrade to be released before doing the lag fix. I’m really really tempted to just root the thing and install a custom ROM, but laziness (don’t want to wipe everything) and my warranty (don’t want to affect it, can’t afford a new phone) are stopping me.

It’s a shame, because I love the phone, but this problem seems to be straightforward to fix yet Samsung haven’t done it themselves.

Yesterday I decided to see if having a new launcher on my phone would make any difference compared to the standard TouchWiz on my Samsung Galaxy S, so I installed LauncherPro after seeing that it had a lot of good reviews on AppBrain. I’m so happy with it that I’m going to pay for the Plus version, not that I want any of the extra features but just because I want to show my appreciation for this.

It has so many ways of customising the home screen that I won’t go into them all, but these are the things that impressed me the most:

• You can customise the number of icons to show on the screen – you can have more than 4×4 icons on a page, which helps as I have a reasonably large screen which easily fits 4×5.
• You can have 5 icons in the dock rather than the 3 on TouchWiz, and they’re fully customisable.
• You can edit the text labels of each icon, or turn them off completely.

All of these things should be standard really, it’s a shame it’s taken someone else to put them in, but then I guess that is the beauty of Android.

I’ve been having a few problems with Touiteur recently where it seems to hang whilst updating my timelines, so I’ve decided to switch to Tweetdeck. It runs very smoothly and is very slick, but is missing a couple of features that I’d like that would make it perfect:

• An option to auto-refresh upon opening. You can set the refresh interval, but I like it to refresh when I open the app, after all if I’m opening the app I’d like to see the latest tweets, without setting the interval to 1 minute and draining my battery.
• An option to display the trends. Local (i.e. UK) trends would be even better, Touiteur only displayed the global trends.

I’m hopeful that these things will be added soon, as they’re already in the desktop app. It’s strange that despite the wealth of apps available, there still isn’t an app as good as Gravity on the Nokia 5800. Tweetdeck is close though.

The other day I checked my phone’s battery usage as it seemed to be going down quite quickly straight after I had charged the phone. I had assumed it was because I was in an area with a low signal, and this was in fact the case, but I noticed there was something called ‘sensorserver_ya’ that had used 2% of the battery up to that point.

A quick search shows a few other people have seen this process but most have no idea what it is for. Unfortunately I can’t shed any light on this either, although I haven’t seen it before or since so I can only speculate that it might have something to do with having little or no reception for any length of time.

I’m now on my third case for my Samsung Galaxy S. I suppose that will teach me for buying the cheapest ones I could find on eBay. The first one was a silicon effort which was too loose on the phone, so every time I put it into my pocket or took it out the case would come off – not very useful! The second one was a hard case with two parts, the main bottom part then a frame to go over the top and seal the phone in. The problems with this one were that the two parts didn’t quite fit seamlessly so there was a slightly sharp edge at the bottom. It also broke when I tried to take the case off to get at the memory card, and the two parts wouldn’t fit together properly.

So this time I decided to spend a little more. I went for the Flexishield skin from MobileFun. This seems much better, it fits the phone properly and doesn’t come off when I put it in my pocket. The only possible downside is that it doesn’t quite cover all of the silver edging, but it’s not really that noticeable.

This blog was ostensibly set up for me to learn about WordPress, and whilst I’ve learned a reasonable amount I don’t really have the time to devote fully to it at present, although I still intend creating a theme from scratch one day (I’ve got a book!) Until then, I’ve decided that this blog is going to be about my experiences with Android, so I’ll talk about using my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S), developing Android applications and my thoughts on various other things to do with Android.