Re: OT: Samsung phone junk

Thank you - I think I'm going to try to return it. I didn't realize android 4.x required that kind of RAM. I'll see if they have a better one available.

Y'er welcome. You should be able to return it to Walmart. Oh-oh. You only have 14 or 15 days.

My Google Nexus 7 tablet has 2 GB of RAM. I previously returned a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 and bought the Nexus 7 because the Samsung only had 1 GB of RAM. The added RAM made a huge difference in performance and response, but at almost double the sticker price.

The new Samsung Galaxy S6 phone has 3 GBytes of working RAM and a

Jeff, any advice on a physically small Android phone that's worth having? My Samsung Duos S digitizer died but it was always slow (768kB RAM). I bought it because it's comfortable in a small pocket; if I want to read email I use a computer. So a powerful but small phone is what I'm looking for, and phones just get bigger.

Sorry SED for the continued OT.

On a sunny day (Mon, 22 Jun 2015 18:08:30 -0700) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

What a joke actually. What a crap design these days. An in Java written low end multitasker that needs 1 GB RAM to get emails at reasonable speed.

And on top of that Samsung, that in my experience qualifies for Most User Unfriendly Electronics Of The Known Universe Award (MUUEOTKU).

I have a HTC android, old one, battery is out, and its in storage in a dark place.

I never had an Apple, but at least it does not run Android. But I do have 2 Nokias (from times before that company was destroyed), one has a web browser and email, the other is just a phone. No GB RAM, no huge batteries, and very fast, has video player too, but has other stupid errors, like on screen display does not go away when playing video. How about watching a video with in the center of screen 'Press here to stop', looks as bad as that youtube player Adobe app on my PC.

SOME company should start writing code in asm / C / and have their own programmers use the phones. Give them 250 MB and a 1 GHz processor.

IF you can program then you can beat all that other shit AND take the whole market. Insane long boot times with flashing blinding screens on the HTC, what an idiots. BOOT WHAT? Embedded code should just run. In ms.

Insane, who needs a quad core to read email, I could play video on a 486 DX266 PC

It is just quad core because suckers thing quad (4) must be better than 1 In fact the quad is probably even less efficient, it is the wrong solution,.

We have seen that program paradigm with IBM powerpc ? (what it called that) nobody could program it.

Just do not buy those shit phones. Use a cheap one to talk. use a small notebook with real keys (I have the first eeePC mdole, a collectors item) and tried it yesterday online with a Huawei USB stick and it flies on 3G network, could not believe it. It can do all those things Android cannot do, even run as backup server, has decent stereo audio speakers, looks absolutely cool, touchpad, and runs Linux and X windows. That first one made these small notebooks a hit. Then Microsoft bought its own crap into it (the next models had MS crap on it), they looked uglier and uglier, could do less and less....

Anyways, ranting... there is an opportunity there, for a company to make millions:

As to real buttons, and VOLUME CONTROL, an other problem if you do not want ear damage trying to swipe volume down.. I bought some of these:

Was it an impulse "bargain" buy or something? Why would anyone who even glanced at the build spec buy something quite so under resourced?

Moto G is pretty good as a powerful but cheap smart phone even has decent battery life provided you don't hammer it with video streams.

I was in a hurry and headed out of town and needed a new phone. I wanted to check out reviews while I was there, but there was no PC with an internet connection to the greater web that I could jump on quickly to do it.

I thought that by spending nearly $100 on a TracPhone it couldn't possibly be this bad. Guess I was wrong?

The Samsung Galaxy S Duos looks like a barely tolerable phone: The 768KByte RAM will cause performance difficulties. Replacement digitizers are available on eBay for under $10 with instructions at:

I'll assume that you're looking for a similar GSM device with a 4.0" diagonal display. For GSM, visit an AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile store, and see what's available. Then, go home and research the specs and reviews. Be sure to check on reparability on iFixit: However, I think you'll have problems finding something with that small a display. Most of what I see are 5 and 6 inch diagonal "phablets". You might try a phone selector web site, such as:

The new Android phones come and go so quickly that I can't keep up to date. Offhand, I don't know of any specific phone that meets your requirements. Try asking in: for advice.

Incidentally, I carry two devices, a common ordinary cell phone for talking (LG VX8300), and an Android phone for the computing stuff (Moto G). I use only wi-fi on the Android phone and have the cellular section turned off. In effect, it's a PDA. If I want to lookup a phone number or appointment, I can easily do it while talking. I have the phone books mostly synchronized, so voice dialing and lookups work. If I want to travel light, the VX8300 is much easier to carry than a smart-slab. Unfortunately, the utility belt look (cell phone, smart phone, flashlight, pocket protector) make me look like the consummate geek.

Well, it's somewhat closer to being on topic than plumbing, air conditioner repair, and balcony construction.

(...)

Permit me to explain how it works.

The average life of an ordinary cell phone is about 18 months. The average life of a smartphone is about 2 years. With such short lifetimes, there is little interest in providing longevity enhancing features, like sufficient RAM to handle OS upgrades, or sufficient performance to handle the inevitable bloatware, or a battery that lasts more than 2 years, or long term bug/security fixes. If your smartphone lasts more than the contract term, you're consider an exception.

From the moment you activate your shiny new smartphone, the vendors purpose in life is to prepare you for the next inevitable sale of a replacement phone in 2 years. Releases and updates will favor new phones instead of your

On a sunny day (Tue, 23 Jun 2015 09:12:44 -0700) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

Yao

Mine sure does.

One good thing about the mechanical part of my Android HTC is this: I mishandled it in a bad way, especially when I get severely pissed, and could not crack it or break it, that is good for a design award. Nice work!

Yea, well for some 'tronics it is HARD to make it short lived.

No, this issue is different. Big company would give _everything_ to increase market share in a way.

IF they could make things boot in a fraction of a second, make it cheaper to manufacture, and have the _same_ features as the competition, then they WOULD increase market share. Of course you need a good sales person say hypnotizer (like Steve Jobs was) too. Marketing that is.

And the point is that fast boot and fast response can be done with a fraction of the hardware, but the programmers have no clue about the hardware (probably something like Visual Studio poisoning or whatever), and no Android Java API..

so they are clueless, DO NOT ATTRIBUTE TO MALICE WHAT CAN BE EXPLAINED BY STUPIDITY. I wrote my own UDP stack, for my LED lighting in PIC asm, boot time? No. Many years ago I did the same for TCP/IP and ham radio ax25 (packet), boot time? No (Z80 4 MHz duh).

So much for networking. The video decoding I have done it all, some in C some in asm. And most of that these days is hardware anyways. So what's left in the video phone? Well they all run Linux (or a flavor there of). I am an avid Linux user, been with it since 1998 (SLS linux 0.98 I still have it on flop somewhere) but that does NOT mean Linux is my solution to everything. But for the clueless hardware knowledge lacking code typers it IS everything (they know about) and nothing will change, they will need ever more resources to do ever sillier things ever slower, as they do not even understand the basics of coding. THAT is the problem: DO NOT ATTRIBUTE TO MALICE WHAT CAN BE EXPLAINED BY STUPIDITY.

Yea, write some code, then come back.

Fairly good description. Android bugs are bad enough in any device, but this is slow enough to be even more annoying.

I have one, but am still hoping I can find a better phone so I don't have to fit it.

Yes. I like having a touch-screen QWERTY keyboard with Swiftkey. Sending SMS on a numeric keypad is no fun.

We got rid of our CDMA network some years ago.

Exactly. Was hoping you had other news!

Yes, I had a Nexus 7 for a while (it broke, twice) and now a similar-sized Samsung. Big enough for maps, email given my slightly lessened eyesight, but I too find I don't always want to take something I can't put into a pocket.

It seems that there should be a market for small fast phones for

My kingdom for something the form factor of the old Razr, but with a touch-screen keyboard for SMS.

Clifford Heath

How about a Voice to SMS app?

I tried Googling for a "small screen android phone" and found a few articles. The problem was that the authors considered anything from 4 to 5 inches as small. Reviews and comparisons more than about a year old are not very useful. The search program I found offered a MINIMUM size size, not a maximum. This is not going to be easy. These might help but are old and out of date:

Grumble. I do mostly CDMA phones.

Oh, you also want it cheap. Sorry, but I can't even ship an empty box these days for $50. I think you'll find something useable in the $175 and up range. Good luck.

No, I didn't say cheap - but I won't spend $800 either.

I found some of the same search sites, with the same problems you note.