Yesterday, I turned my Samsung DROID CHARGE 4G from Verizon on and it asked me if I wanted to update. Always wanting that, I said yes. After two days, here are the nice things I’ve found (nothing bad so far). I was surprised when it finished, it did not offer me any idea of what it did though. I’m pretty sure it’s the Gingerbread update. My Phone Info now says 2.3.6 Firmware Version
So, here are the features (and screen shots)
| New Version numbers on main screen. |  |
| Nice transitions for top toggles (wifi,bluetooth, etc). Before, it was hard to tell if bluetooth was on, coming on, off or going off. |  |
| Shows top in green when phone is active. That is, it reminds me I have a phone call going while I’m doing something else. |  |
| pinch gives up to 4 browser sessions in carousel mode |  |
| breadcrumb icons showing which screen I’m on. Note at the top. I also has a button next to the screen numbers which brings up the screens all together like in the next screen shot. Also, when scrolling through the carousel, it now wraps from last to first instead of hitting a wall. |  |
| Allow me to set any screen as home screen. |  |
Feel free to add comments below about other things.
I just got back from CES and have been honestly quite confused about all the different claims for 4G verses 3G. Somehow, my T-Mobile phone I trialed (The Google G2) seemed to get pretty impressive download speeds, even though it was still not 4G (sometimes, up to 5MBs). Then, my AT&T phone running Windows Phone 7 would get close to the same running AT&T’s 3G. They both seem to call their networks HSPA+ I think, and somehow, that means 3G but faster (whatever the hec that means). Now, I have a Sprint phone again (the HTC Slide running Android) with the real 4G. Hmm. a big confusing.
At anyrate, Jason Hiner just a really good article that sorts all this out. My biggest takeaway is that the “real” 4G networks (Sprint (WIMAX) and Verizon (LTE)) have significantly reduced latency time which does make a big difference for how the web feels when you are doing interactive stuff. Below is a post to the article:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/how-at-t-and-t-mobile-conjured-4g-networks-out-of-thin-air/43577?tag=nl.e539
Hope this helps you as it did me.
First, let me say I’m not a professional photographer or even a good amateur one, but I do take a lot of pictures. You can look up the spec on line, but basically, the Epic has a 5MP camera and the EVO has an 8MP pixel. I wish I kept some originals from the EVO but I did not.
My impression is that the EVO camera did a better job of making pictures in all kinds of light just look better. I could be wrong. I’m attaching a picture of a friend of mine I took and uploaded to facebook, first with the EVO, then with the Epic. The EVO was taken later in the day without so much sunlight.
By the way, my friend Terry is President of Undiscovered Country Tours and one of my best bike buddies. He runs awesome bike trips in California! You can find his site here: http://www.udctours.com/. If you are looking tour in California, you won’t regret it!
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Normally, setting up Microsoft Exchange Server with a mobile phone is pretty straight forward. I just got the Samsung Epic 4G today (see my earlier post here: ( http://peterkellner.net/2010/08/31/sprint-samsung-epic-4g-first-impression/ ) and setting up Exchange was a little confusing.
I use GoDaddy’s Exchange Servers (hence the mail.ex1.secureserver.net), but the field Domain\Username through me for a loop. After some experiment, I just tried putting my email in there and, to my surprise, it worked. I don’t get why there is a leading backslash or the title Domain\Username but since my email is now working, I thought I’d share.
A Little History
Let me start off by saying that the HTC EVO has raised my expectations of what to expect from a smart phone. About two years ago, I switched to one of the first Android phones that came out. It had a very clunky keyboard slideout, it was very heavy, the interface was awkward and overall it was just not a good user experience. Even things like GMail did not work well. You could not do basic things like go from one email to the next without returning to the inbox first.
Fast Forward 18 months. I have a Palm Pre which I’m pretty happy with. It has a nice keyboard, nice email client for Microsoft Exchange, and though not many apps, it’s a pretty nice phone. It is pretty slow though. For example, sometimes a call comes in and the UI is so slow you can’t get it to actually answer the phone before it goes to voice mail.
Last Month, I took the plunge and bought the HTC EVO. I knew it did not have a keyboard, but I was hoping I could get use to that (not the first time I’ve been wrong). I did install a 3rd party application called SlideIT that did help some but still was not good enough. I made a huge number of mistakes in emails I sent out, practically to the point that I was about to put a message in my email signature saying “Sent using my Mobile SlideIT keyboard, pardon the mistakes”. I did not do that because somehow, as a technology guy, that just seemed wrong.
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