The Gadgetry Thread

[Brian Fowler]

I'm a bit sad that start three straight years of completely fresh flagships, LG has finally hit the iterative update thing.

On the other, I love my G3, and a refinement that improves on the handful of flaws is a good thing.

Also, this year seems to have marked the end of the ever growing android flagship displays. Two straight years of HTC at 5", two straight years of galaxy S st 5.1" (and two straight Notes have been 5.7") and two straight years of LG at 5.5".

[Petey]

Makes sense. Everyone who looks at my Nexus 6 thinks it's a tablet. Really can't go much bigger.

 

I wasn't very impressed by LG's showing. I kinda knew it all in advance but I don't know. The UI is still ugly looking and I have no idea if the Snapdraggon 808 will be a noticeable improvement over the 805. With all the good press Samsung's getting, I think LG is gonna have a tough time making an inroad this year.

[Brian Fowler]

I find it odd they bumped up the release of the G4 to so early in the year.  Typically, they were launching their flagship 4-6 months after Samsung, to build something that had a faster chipset and one-upped them in features and such.

 

At any rate, it's all moot to me, I'm not upgrade eligible until late summer 2016.

[Craig H]

I un-rooted my Note 4 and I swear it's working better. I'm still noticing sine quirks like the battery life dropping quicker than it probably should, but this was a used phone so I may just buy a new battery. Web browsing works better also. I haven't messed with the camera much, but I'm still annoyed there isn't a feature to snap pictures as fast as you tap, as opposed to a burst feature that snaps way too many pictures.

[glfpunk]

An article was on xda the other day where Samsung admitted to significant memory management problems with the S6 and S6 edge. Apparently causes the phone to continue to allocate memory resources to apps and games even after closing the app causing the phone to slow down until it eventually runs out of all memory resulting in crashing and freezing. Can be remedied by manually going into settings and force closing apps or rebooting the phone. Naturally they quietly released this information on their UK site.

[CrazyMax46]

I have attempted all day to get a Roku working. I am convinced Roku just doesn't want me as a customer.

[Brian Fowler]

Strange, my Roku stick never really gives me any problems at all.

[glfpunk]

What version? If it's the 3 then check my post on it earlier in the thread. Likely due to the WiFi between the roku remote and the unit being interfered with by other signals.

[NikoBaltimore]

An article was on xda the other day where Samsung admitted to significant memory management problems with the S6 and S6 edge. Apparently causes the phone to continue to allocate memory resources to apps and games even after closing the app causing the phone to slow down until it eventually runs out of all memory resulting in crashing and freezing. Can be remedied by manually going into settings and force closing apps or rebooting the phone. Naturally they quietly released this information on their UK site.

Good thing I decided not to get it right away.  The Galaxy S4 has given me memory issues in the past, though using an app or two helps manage that.  It sounds like it's a lot worse with the S6, so unless I want to use the app often I might hold off until they fix that on an update.

[Brian Fowler]

Reviews are starting to roll in for the G4. The main impressions seen to be the abdroid skin is still obnoxious but slightly less so, the silicon is a half step slower than competitors but never stutters or lags, the screen is fantastic, arguably the best on the market (mostly depending on how you feel about Samsung's over saturated colors) and the camera is damn near flawless. Battery life is supposed to be really good as well.

Biggest criticism is the plastic build, especially since apparently reviewers weren't given the leather backed models.

[Craig H]

Flawless camera eh?

[Brian Fowler]

That seems to be the consensus.

[Petey]

It seems like people are going back and forth between the G4 camera and the S6's, depending on the person/situation. At least there is a legitimate alternative to the S6 since we know that won't be the HTC M9.

[NikoBaltimore]

I find myself as time goes on looking at other brands like LG.  I've considered myself a Samsung guy, but their Touchwiz launcher takes away from the stock Android experience I'm going for.  It's sad I have to install a custom launcher for that.  I would need to see how the new LG stacks up in terms of performance.

 

And once again it goes back to being sick of the oversaturation of phones on the market.  The next big thing gets trumped within a couple months.  Whether it's the LG or S6 I just want a fucking future-proof phone.  You know, one that I can be happy with beyond two years and not longing for the hot new phone in that time.

[glfpunk]

That's why I gravitate more towards phones like the Nexus line, Oneplus etc. I go for hardware, a good design, decent camera, and stock android or as close to vanilla as I can.

[Craig H]

Obviously, I prefer a phone with a great camera, along with impressive hardware. I do notice that my phone performs better after un-rooting and doing a factory wipe of my phone. I wonder if the previous owner didn't do a proper wipe before selling it or if something with awry when he rooted it. There are dips in performance, like when I play Magic the Gathering 2015, but that's to be expected since it's fairly graphics intensive and for mobile, it was previously only available on Android or iOS tablets. So yeah, a smaller phone is going to have a harder time and it's going to chew through the battery (typically a 20 to 30% drop over 30 to 45 minutes of gaming). What I didn't expect was poor performance with Hearthstone. Last Thursday, a bunch of us got to the theater for Avengers 2 about an hour early. A few of them were playing Hearthstone. One has a Galaxy S4, another an iPhone 6, and the other an Xperia Z3. It performed very well. On the Note 4, it wasn't close to as smooth. It may get better with future updates, but I was surprised by the poor performance in handling a game that a Galaxy S4 had no problems with.

 

The camera is still an issue. It takes great pictures outdoors most of the time. I say most of the time because there is some kind of post-processing happening that either compresses the hell out of the picture or video or it just straight up reduces the quality. Case in point was a video I took from Sunday morning. I recorded my daughter as she woke up and came out of her room because my girlfriend and I decorated the hallway with birthday decorations and filled a space in the living room with about 100 balloons. After I took the video, it looked fine. Then I did my usual uploading to Google+ Photos, Facebook and my own server. The video then looked like shit, but on the video app on my phone, it was fine. Whether if I watched the video on Facebook on my phone or on my laptop, it was just crappy. Pictures do something similar. I took some great pictures at the zoo, but when I went to print them, there was a "fuzzyness" to the edges and the background was a little washed out. My understanding is that the camera sensor is fairly big, which should result in a good photo, but I'm just not consistently getting good results.

 

Indoor photos is a whole other story. I've seen some people say it takes great indoor pictures and others say otherwise. I'm on the "otherwise" end of the spectrum. Pictures are grainy, washed out, and/or blurry. It may be that I'm expecting too much, but from everything I've read, this should be better than my iPhone 5 camera.

 

At some point, I'm just going to do some camera tests with my Note 4 and iPhone 5 camera to compare side by side.

 

Ideally, I would want the phone camera to:

• Take pictures as quickly as I tap the phone, like my iPhone 5. Yes, there's a burst feature in most camera apps, but there's a degradation in quality or it's just overkill in that it takes way too many pictures.
• If there is going to be a burst feature, have their be no degradation in quality. This is primarily related to the speed at which the pictures are processed and saved. The internal memory should be plenty fast, so maybe it's just an issue with the apps I'm using.
• Be able to take good indoor photos.
• Give the option to save in RAW format.
• Provide options similar to a DSLR to attempt to achieve a greater depth of field to have a bokeh effect.

Again, maybe this is all an app issue and there's a better camera app out there. I'm currently using Camera Zoom FX. If anyone has a better suggestion, I'm all ears.

[Tabe]

Facebook and YouTube downgrade the quality of the stuff you upload. How do your photos and videos look if you copy them to your pc directly and view then in their native state?

[MonteCarl]

Is there a good free music player app for Android that is best for truly randomizing your music collection? I'm sick of having a song play 45 minutes or so after I just heard it, or hearing the same songs all the time. I have over 1,000 songs on my phone and I know there are a bunch that I never hear unless I manually select them. I'd love a player that keeps track of the songs that have been played and the ones that haven't and selects them accordingly.

[Craig H]

Facebook and YouTube downgrade the quality of the stuff you upload. How do your photos and videos look if you copy them to your pc directly and view then in their native state?

I haven't had the time to try yet, but I'd like to import then into Adobe Lightroom to take a look. Still wish they were in RAW format, though.

[Brian Fowler]

I'm all but trolling Bank into buying a new phone here, but the G4 can do raw photos.

[Tabe]

G4 can do RAW? Big plus in my eyes.

[Brian Fowler]

Yup.

This is my off year for upgrades, but I'm already starting to look forward to the G5.

[NikoBaltimore]

A friend of mine got the S6 Edge so I had the chance to check it out.  The side panels feel weird and might take getting a little used to.  The side panel is a thing, but seeing it up close I'm not sure it's a thing I need in my life.  You can have set contacts and all, and with a back and forth swipe get various notifications including news.  But the point of it is to be hands free, so unless there's an option not sure it's worthwhile for me.  Hard to get a grasp on performance as he hasn't loaded the phone with many apps yet.  He's going to add some by Friday and is cool with me testing them out.  If there's noticeable improvement with app use compared to the S4 then I might be leaning towards this.  Still need to compare it with the G4, but it's at this point down to two phone.

 

Why is the OnePlus not tied to Verizon?  At this point I might say to hell with them and switch to another carrier.  Especially if the second version smokes the first one.

[Brian Fowler]

Because Verizon (and Sprint) use a different signal type than the vast majority of carriers worldwide. In America, they are big enough that the OEMs build support in for their network. But if the company isn't primarily aimed at the u.s. market, and doesn't have a carrier agreement with Verizon, it's not worth the extra hassle.

[Craig H]

I use Ting and like them a lot. They use the Sprint network, which I know is a deal breaker for some, but the coverage here is good. It helps that the former CEO was a Notre Dame grad so we typically wind up in the first wave of upgrades or we're usually a test market of sorts. Some of that may have changed since Sprint has a new CEO, but who knows.

My only complaint is lack of unlimited data. Going from 6 to 8 gigs of data to trying to be under 1 gig is tough. It's especially difficult when apps still use data off of WiFi even though you have it set to only use data on WiFi. And for whatever reason, Pandora is a huge data suck. On 3g/4g I have only used Pandora maybe 4 or 5 times about 15 minutes each time. That used up 130mb. My understanding is that it should only be around 30mb for an hour of use. I'm wondering if having the music paused causes the app to still consume data and I should close the app instead.

Also, limiting data is beyond stupid. Everyone should have access to unlimited data or at the very least, data charges should be dirt cheap.