Android phones, apps and tablets

Should be covered by their rules still, right?

Why not do what Michael Hutchence did, and try a New Sensation. Hang yourself.

Actual lol!

Sorry I meant I'm really offended by your insensitivity to the inherent dangers of auto asphixiatory onanistic thrill seekers, fucking lfgss these days ffs!

In response to Spotter,

Sounds like a case of the phone clearly being "not fit for purpose" and therefore a straight refund or replacement is imminent.
That's exactly what happened to my Sensation, and I got my money back no questions asked and bought something else.

If you've had it longer than a year I'm not sure what happens.
It should be this easy on contract too, but the networks do their best to muddy the waters a bit....

I had mine 8 months and Amazon sent another one out no questions. I still have the dead one, in fact. Need to send that bastard back.

apparently I only had 30 day return window because it was a 3rd party seller. I guess i'll have tor try HTC themselves.

I've been reading about ubuntu on android - has anyone had a look at it?

I'm awaiting feedback also. I think my Galaxy Note has got the horn for having some Ubuntu loving.

apparently I only had 30 day return window because it was a 3rd party seller. I guess i'll have tor try HTC themselves.

no way hose. your contract (according to the Sale Of Goods Act) is with whoever you bought it from.

Where's tiswas? His SOGA radar must be on the blink..

HTC 2 year warranty, give them a call or chat online they are open till 9pm

I have only ever unleashed the full fury of SOGA once, on T-Mobile. They trembled at it's mighty power and threw a replacement HTC Desire at me.

VIA have made a $49 Android PC barebones unit. I like it.

Saw the VGA port and instantly thought why are they bothering?
Then I saw the HDMI port next to it.

apparently I only had 30 day return window because it was a 3rd party seller. I guess i'll have tor try HTC themselves.

no way hose. your contract (according to the Sale Of Goods Act) is with whoever you bought it from.

Exactly - they're fobbing you off with this 30 day bullshit. The phone is not fit for purpose, you get a refund or a replacement. I'm not wholly au fait with the Sale of Goods Act, but they're just trying to avoid their legal obligations

VIA have made a $49 Android PC barebones unit. I like it.

]

Do want!!

Either this or the raspberry pi.

I've reverted from the HTC One X to my Galaxy Nexus.

The One X is sublime. It's fast, smooth and the screen is unsurpassed by any other smart phone of any type (iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Phone included).

However... there are 2 issues that bother me:
1) Battery life struggles to make it through a long day of reasonably heavy use.
2) Calls are dropped too often.

The call dropping thing is a big concern for me. I make very few calls, but when I do they are important. It's just not on to have calls drop as often as they have done. And I have a stack of phones here, and I can easily compare the reception quality on the same SIM across different devices. The HTC One X fares slightly worse than all of the other devices (iPhone 4S, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, HTC Nexus One) in terms of signal reception, approximately 15 decibels weaker signal, whereas all of the other phones are within 5 decibels of each other (with the iPhone being weakest, and the Galaxy Nexus being strongest).

So calls are important enough for me to have concern.

Then there is the battery. Since coming off of a Blackberry years ago I have never been happy with other smartphone battery life. A Blackberry easily gets a few solid days of really heavy use and constantly running background processes. The battery life set the standard, it was possible to have a weekend away, leaving Friday evening, and for the phone to be on it's last legs just as you arrive home late Sunday.

Given that I've always been frustrated with iPhone and Android battery life, I could tolerate it so long as the phone never quite died, and always had just enough juice in the bank to do just a little bit more if needed. The HTC One X is the first phone I've had in which 12 hours of heavy use away from the charger seems to be a real struggle for it. At 16 hours it's dead, pretty consistently. Bear in mind I've got a vanilla Android ICS on it, and no background processes aside from Latitude (which I've had running on every phone except iPhone for the last 5 years, so my battery expectations include it running constantly). The screen is the biggest suck of power. I apparently use the phone too much.

Between the two, it's turned the phone from sublime piece of technology which is a joy to use, into a beautiful device that I'm cautious about using. And I don't want a phone that I avoid using, just to ensure the battery lasts or that a phonecall works.

Switching back to the Galaxy Nexus, it's noticeably slower (the extra CPU cores int he HTC One X really show), and the screen isn't as glorious. But it's OK. I'm happy to accept the slight grain on the dimmer screen, and to not scroll so instantaneously... because now the phone comfortably makes it through the day with juice to spare and no dropped calls.

At the end of the day, I want a phone to work well more than I want the latest bling. I knew when getting the upgrade that I didn't actually need or want to leave the Galaxy Nexus, it's a lovely phone that works really well. Now a fortnight on the HTC One X shows me how good the future will be when they manage to get the battery life to last and improve the basic telephony... but until then I'm really happy where I am.

If people were to ask what phone to get: I'd still say the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

I'll probably wait until another Nexus appears at the end of the year before taking the upgrade on the other contract I have.

Interesting - could of points;

Could the calls being dropped be fixed in a future firmware update?

Also could you underclock the cpu when it's rooted, you wouldn't notice much in the functional use of the phone but could extend the battery some what.

Also could you underclock the cpu when it's rooted, you wouldn't notice much in the functional use of the phone but could extend the battery some what.

Whilst I'm all for pissing about with the phone, I have done to all of mine, I'd expect a reasonable battery life out of the box.

Oh I know cake - I'd expect a full day at least.

I googled around for more info on the dropped calls. There's all kinds of speculation, about whether it's the 2G network that causes it, 3G, or whether it's connected to having WiFi enabled.

The only consistent thing I see are companies and people suggesting getting an amplifier or local broadcaster in the form of Vodafone Sure Signal or something like that.

I've never had to do that with another phone, so I'm inclined to think... no thanks.

I could in theory underclock to get better battery life. But again, I've not had to do that with another phone and end up thinking... no thanks.

It is rooted. I've put my own build of ICS on there from the AOSP repository. Using the radio files that were originally shipped by HTC. So I can do all that stuff, but I part think... why? The Galaxy Nexus is on the desk in front of me, doesn't have these problems, and I actually preferred it (I like the throbbing notification light as a small detail).

Very informative secondary review Velocity.

I think Motorola are showing the way forward for professionals. A 3300mAh battery seems almost a no-brainer, so why aren't other makers following Motorola? It's for this reason that I think the Motorola Droid Maxx HD / Droid Fighter has the potential to be a success.

Battery technology isn't increasing at the same rate that CPU, GPU and screens are.

I firmly think that increasing capacity isn't an answer that works in the long-term. That hardware designers need to think holistically about power use and main board layout and features, such that the battery life is balanced along with features and speed. I know these are considerations already, but the importance of them is secondary to features and speed.

Android itself needs to be more power efficient. For a good start it could move to the very latest Linux kernel (ICS is on 3.0 and the latest is 3.4 which has had some major improvements in power management and efficiency).

Then I believe that app designers should be constrained. I believe that the developers should be given a sandbox that is memory constrained and power constrained. When they exceed the constraints their app should be killed. That sounds excessive, but if it were there from day 1 every app would have conformed by necessity. Today developers would find it hard to fit into any constraints of an explicit sandbox purely because they've been sloppy and wasteful with CPU cycles, RAM use, screen rendering, etc. All of which use power.

Bigger batteries only take us so far. Android needs to go back to basics if it's going to get faster, more beautiful and more functionally powerful over the coming years.

One of the really interesting things about batteries is their draw rate.

If you increase capacity, you usually are changing the chemical make-up of the battery such that you decrease the draw rate (you have less power to play with... but more overall so it lasts longer).

All those big screens suck power like no-one's business. Couple it with hungry CPUs and to get the draw rate right, you have to change the chemical composition such that the capacity is reduced, or the number of recharge cycles is reduced.

Batteries are interesting things. And no matter which way you look at it you're making a compromise somewhere.