Be Excellent To Each Other

Anyone want to buy a Nexus 4 16Gb and/or a Nexus 7 3G 32Gb before I send them to the great ebay in the sky? £120 for the 4, £100 for the 7.

Ooooh, Samsung have given me 50gb of Dropbox space, that's very nice of them

That's a bit shit.

For my part I finally sort of got it fixed but it's a really stupid situation. There's a key code to get into a hidden setting menu on Android (*#*#4636#*#*) which bypasses the normal options and allows you to force the network mode to any of the ones Android itself supports; so it's got all sorts of weird shit like EVDO and whatever in there. I went in there and forced on 'LTE only' mode and now I can pick up 4G if I stand in certain parts of the office. I've put it to 'GSM/WCDMA/LTE auto' and it should now go up to 4G whenever it gets a strong enough signal and work as it should. Why I've had to do that hack to get it working, and why the normal user level UI doesn't expose the LTE related options, is a fucking mystery though. I'm due an Android upgrade as KitKat is rolling out for my phone at the moment which might sort it but I shouldn't need an OS update to expose functionality the hardware's already capable of. It's really fucking stupid all in and not doing HTC's rep any favours with me.

Be aware that it's only free for two years, after which you either need to pay for it or you'd be unable to upload anything more to your account (assuming you used any other space you've got and started edging into that 50GB of course).

Aye, I saw that. I expect i'll just pay for it after 2 years, as they are hoping. Or i'll swap to my cloud based virtual server and look at the content via my VR interface, while working from my hover office on mars.

Spoke too soon. It worked fine... until it stopped working and now won't sync anything anymore...

*whispers* Media browser

That won't help me when I'm on the train though, will it?

Guess not. Carry on

Wiped everything, downloaded the free client and it seems to be working again...

Hmm... the Note 3 doesn't seem to be very happy with the SD card in it, a few times it hasn't turned back on when i've pressed the power button, and last time it reported that the SD card was corrupted and needed to be wiped when I restarted it.
I've removed it and it seems to be a lot happier.

You can't sync Plex to an SD card. I know it thinks you can, but you can't.

Ah. Maybe that's the issue, as the plex content is the only thing I've put on the SD card, and then the phone started to have a fit.

Man, why do things have to be so hard.

I can't pick up 4G on my Note 3, so I talk to Three, and they tell me I need to update my firmware. The OTA doesn't give me anything new, the Samsung Kies software tells me there is no new firmware for my phone, yet a quick google tells me there is. Why won't the Samsung software find it?

I'll get it myself and install it, I think. There are about a hundred different variants of the firmware out there, and I have no idea which one is the right one to install.

Grim... Any chance you can go into the "about device" screen, and tell me the baseband version and build number you are running?

Try the temporary hack from earlier on this page I had to use on my One Max to see if that gets it picking up 4G.

Enter *#*#4636#*#* on the phone keypad then go into Phone Information and scroll down a bit; you should see a drop-down labelled "Set preferred network type". Change that to 'GSM/WCDM/LTE auto' and your phone should then move up and down between 2G/3G/4G as available. If the 4G signal's a bit weak you can set it to 'LTE only' to force it to grab a 4G connection as a test. If that works you can just run that way for a while and grab the new update when it comes to your phone officially rather than taking a risk with internet downloaded stuff. Note that I think that will reset if you reboot the phone so doing so would mean you need to follow those steps again.

Nope *#*#4636#*#* does bugger all on my phone, I think a lot of things got locked down in Android 4.3.

Looks like i'm going to have to sideload the stock UK firmware via a 3rd party tool, which is a bit shit.

Cheers Grim... That's the version I thought I needed

I totally should have used my stylus S-Pen to scribble a new number in.

Because that would've looked well legit.

You have a lot of notifications, by the way...

Firmware updated and I have 4G mode available!

No idea why I had to sideload though, it should have "just worked"...

The bit that confuses me is why you need a firmware update at all to expose a network function the phone handles at a hardware level out or the box and that's one of the core spec features. It's really fucking stupid.

Ended up at £175 for the 7 and £125 for the 4. Better than I expected!

Cut the Rope 2, you say?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... ogle&hl=en

It's a bit "meh" isn't it?

I played the original for about five minutes before getting utterly bored; I never understood it's massive appeal. I have installed the new one though so I'll give it a another chance whenever I get round to it. Mind you, as it's a sequel to a popular mobile game it'll be IAP'd up the fucking wazoo with countdown timers and Facebook bullshit as standard so it's probably got less chance than the original of staying on my phone.

Now I've had the Note 3 for a bit, and have it set up how I like, I can safely say it is bloody brilliant.

5h 30m screen on time so far today, and I still have 25% battery left.

Pricing details have been announced for the OnePlus One and it's hilariously cheap, beating even the Nexus 5 for price vs spec. It's genuinely top end hardware (2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 CPU, Adreno 330 GPU, 3GB of RAM, 5.5-inch 1080p screen, 13-megapixel Sony camera) and it's only £229 for the 16Gb version or £269 for the 64GB. That aside it's an interesting proposition because it ships with an official CyanogenMod OS which I think makes it the first device to do so. Also, I do quite fancy a wooden or even kevlar back on a phone.

It'll be interesting to see what full reviews have to say about it but it's certainly not your usual Chinese knock-off bullshit.

I'll be moving to PAYG next week when my current contract comes to an end. My trusty HTC One X is now two years old and whilst I do very much like the One M8 it's not £500 of like, and it's not as if I want anything out of a phone that the One X doesn't do perfectly well.

I need very little in the way of texts and minutes, so I'll just be going onto a rolling 30 day PAYG tariff that gives me a big dollop of data (along with far more minutes and texts than I'll ever need).

I'm wondering if we're getting to the point now where a lot of tech is plenty good enough even for nerdy types who care about what's inside the box. My PC isn't exactly cutting edge and yet it does everything I want, our big telly is a seven year old 720p 40 incher that I see no point in replacing, my phone is now two years old and for the first time since forever I'll be going off-contract and onto PAYG because I don't want a new handset. Mrs AE went onto PAYG about six months ago because she's completely happy with her phone, and so on.....

Who do they sell new shinies to when the people who like new shinies stop seeing the point in upgrading?

Oh, you're AE!

I got a virus hit for arm amp if any one uses it without a scanner. Something bolt the virus.

Well, that's what you get for trying to make your limbs louder quite frankly.

Upgrade day: Note 3 ordered. Looking at accessories.Anyone use a case for theirs? I'm thinking Otterbox Commuter. Also one of those nifty spare battery and charger kits.

I use mine naked as the day it came.

Give it a go without a spare battery, it's pretty meaty and I haven't run out yet, apart from when I forget to shut down apps that are poorly coded and keep themselves running the background. Facebook messenger and marvel puzzle quest, I'm looking at you...

Yeah, but there's a lot of exposed glass on one of those things... *shudders at the thought of scratches, let alone dropping the thing face down..*

The spare battery is more for when I go away. To a field with no power. For 5 days in a row. My iphone generally dies on the train home even if I am super sparing in its use. Also it is always a nice thing to have a spare juiced up and ready.

Ex-Mrs B has one of these. It's relatively pricey for what it is because it's official Samsung gear but, because it's official, it's very slim and the phone fits very nicely in it. As someone who eschews cases in general it's one of the nicest I've seen. You actually take the whole back cover off the phone and it clips into the case as a new phone back so it's all very tidy and whatnot.



You'll find you get a lot more use out of it than an iPhone due to the massive battery in the thing, more so if you do the usual stuff like putting the screen on auto-dim etc. Well, I'm saying that; I'm drawing a conclusion from the fact that I've always run all my larger size Android phones at full brightness all the time because I can, whereas I've noticed practically everyone I know with an iPhone keeps the screen dimmed all the way down, presumably to save battery life. Not that it'll do you five days in a field obviously, but hopefully you'll see a positive difference.

Decided on one of these bad boys:

Spigen Armor View

It looks classy, (unlike some of the monstrosities that you see about) it offers quite a bit of protection, and it has all the S view gubbins. Quite expensive though.

'For those Serial Killer wannabes, this phone feels like baby skin. Also it provides a good bonding surface for when you upgrade to the real thing!'

How can you use the bottom of the screen? Does this easily flip open?

Yeah, its like a tougher version of the Samsung S-View case.

Okay, it's been two years since I had a 'droid phone, what are the current 'must have' apps?

Nothing really, pretty much the same as iOS.

One thing with the Note 3, if you use your phone as an alarm clock or kitchen timer, then the stock Samsung timer/alarm is fucking awful. I'm using Timely instead, which is much better.

+1

It's pretty impressive quite how much Samsung managed to fuck up such a simple thing...

Yep. But Timely is very good. And pretty.

And you can customise the snooze time. 1st snooze, 9 mins. 2nd snooze, 4 mins. 3rd snooze, 1 minute.

The obvious thing to investigate is alternative keyboards because it's something Android offers that iOS doesn't. I use Swype at the moment but I don't know what the current favourite is.

It's also worth looking for widgets you might find useful; I've got a tasks one on my homescreen which is massively useful for ensuring I remember to do stuff and the excellent National Rail one on a different screen but neither of those may work for you obviously.

Am I right in saying that emulation is easier on Android than iOS? If that's your thing then Android is well served with shedloads of emulators for everything under the sun.

Also there's a location based app that changes system settings and whatnot based on where you are (e.g. when you get to work it can turn all your volumes off) which I think I'm right in saying is more useful on Android than iOS because it can control much more stuff. Grim and Craster use it I think so maybe they can remind me what it's called and give some more compelling examples of what you can do with it.

Then you want one of these: http://www.amazon.co.uk/15000mAh-Portab ... ords=anker

I've had mine for a month now, and it's bloody brilliant. It can do at least three full charges for my Note 3 when it's fully charged (and quite possibly another one too).

Also a girl at a pub called me a "magician" because I could charge up her iPhone for her the other night. And then Snappa pulled her

That looks handy, how long does it hold its charge for?