Be Excellent To Each Other

Irritatingly I didn't notice until quite a while after I got back, or I could have just had Android Device Manager make it scream at me.

We live in perilous times.

Does it have gps? Can you tell Google to tell you where it was last through that history thingy?

It supports the Location function through the usual settings, but as it's wi-fi only it can only do so when it's connected to a network I suppose, as there's no version of the new Shield that you can put a SIM into. It's properly stripped back to the basics, a single 16GB model, with wi-fi only and no LTE. You don't even get a cable in the box.

Oh, sure. It's in my house.

Seriously? You genuinely thought that question was aimed at you?

I was just answering the question, and had to quickly slot it in between games of Hearthstone, as such I didn't really analyse things much.

No. I didn't.

Having got back into using Android on a daily basis after having been without a phone (but with a Laptop and iPad) for like 6 months, I can confirm that for my tastes Android really is so much better than iOS for daily use.

I mainly got the iPad for games, causal web/twitter use, and youtube. It excels at these tasks, particularly for games, I think if that's all you need your device to do, Apple hardware is quite nice, and iOS has lots of superficial sheen to it that is quite pleasant.

When it actually comes to a device that you rely on, use in short bursts, or want to do any more complex tasks on, I find Android to be far better. I'd never want an iPhone, but chose an iPad over a similar Android tablet.

Android handles multitasking far better. It's smoother, quicker to switch between apps, and doesn't seem to just arbritrarilly forget what I was in the middle of doing and reset me from the start like iOS does. I can get a web page loading up on Chrome, switch to a different app, and when I come back the page has loaded. On iOS the webpage won't load in the background, it'll just give me an error and ask me to reload the page when I come back to it.

The Android keyboard is so much nicer than the iOS keyboard. Even with the minor upgrades in recent iterations of the iOS keyboard, it's still lagging so far behind Android. It's crazy that I'd prefer to type a longer message on a small Android phone than an iPad.

I guess it also helps that I use a lot of google services. Youtube is way better on Android, you get a notification entry telling you how far downloaded videos are that you are saving for offline viewing (something I do fairly often).

I feel like the option menus are so much more intuitive on Android, and it gives you scope enough to customise things to suit your needs even though it's basically fine out of the box. Still getting used to some of the stuff new in Android 6, but I like it so far.

Not saying iOS is all bad, it has far more games I want to actually play, and it is a little bit slicker in (as I said previously) mostly superficial ways, but it's more a thing I tolerate in order to get access to the broad industry support and nice hardware Apple make than it is the thing that attracts me to Apple devices. For actually getting shit done, I prefer android.

SwiftKey is available for both, should you want to stop hating the keyboards.

Can you play a tune through it, like whistling to your keys?

If it wasn't for 'find my iPhone' i would never find my iPhone.

I Mrs so great name.

Not without any charge in it you can't.

Third party keyboards are terrible on iOS.

-edit- omg you're using my terrible ms paint-altered avatar.

I much prefer the default android keyboard to swiftkey, don't really want to pay money for an imperfect solution on iOS.

Google should put their keyboard on iOS.

Huh, that's crappy. How come?

I only tried both Swiftkey and Swype at launch, but they were buggy as shit. And also in some apps it would default to the normal keyboard, so I just couldn't get used to swiping. They're added like other language keyboards are, so you can't get rid of the normal one.

They crash a lot, either stop halfway through or fail to appear when they should. They're slow to load. The main way to change keyboards is by tapping the "next keyboard" button, which all keyboards must include but doesn't have to be in any particular place; this button is easily hit by accident, which means you need to tap back through it N times to get back to the keyboard you wanted. At least one keyboard I know of couldn't use HiDPI textures for the keycaps due to memory pressure.

Fixed...?
https://twitter.com/RDR0b11/status/672127765785612288

The dialer app also now has call blocking.

Yes, Nexus phones did not have on-device call blocking until now.

— David Ruddock (@RDR0b11) December 2, 2015

Good to know, presumably this will be in a subsequent update of some kind.

Ha, the update was waiting for me when I opened Google Play and it works a treat. Nice.

Nexus 5x get!

/mumbles something about wireless charging....

Anyone got any cool Android games on the go at the moment? Obviously HEARTHSTONE has pride of place on my Shield, and I've been trying a game called SUMMONERS WAR which a mate is all over like a cheap suit on his iThing but I can't get really get into it.

The problem I have is all the F2P shit on the Play Store, which you know is going be loaded with horrible game mechanics to try and get you to part with cash.

I'd much rather pay a few quid upfront for an actual game, rather than get something ZOMG FREE and then endure repeated attempts at gouging for cash. (Plants Versus Zombies 2 got the better of me in that way in the end.)

As I have a PREMIUM POWERED tablet it can be as shiny and sparkly as it gets. (The benchmarks/reviews that pitch the Shield somewhere between an iPad Air and iPad Air 2 in terms of performance hold up in the real world in my experience. Not bad for something that costs £150.)

Get Hitman Go or Lara Croft Go. Also The Room or The Room 2 are wonderful as is Monument Valley.

Also: check the entire thread we have for Android apps and games.

I'd forgotten about that thread, cheers. You've even posted a list of 'here are all the games I've liked' sort of thing to it.

I LIKE THE CUT OF YOUR JIB.

The Pixel C has officially gone on sale on the Google store at £400 for the 32GB model and £479 for the 64GB. I'm really tempted because my Nexus 9 annoys the shit out of me and I'm definitely upgrading it to something else soon, but I don't want to repeat the mistake of just buying the thing sight unseen before the dodgy reviews come in. Hmmm...

That's less than the Nexus 6P. I can't make that compute in my head.

Oh, it doesn't come with the keyboard. That's a shame.

Tablets always cost less than phones (if you compare the same segment of their respective markets), are you just noticing this?

I'm not at all interested in the keyboard as I don't want a 'productivity' device, I just want a nice high-spec Android tablet that preferably isn't a Samsung. That last part being the real problem.

I'm only just giving it serious thought.

If I didn't have a Surface Pro (which is the daddy of all tablets) I'd seriously consider a Pixel C (and a keyboard).

Wow, £400 for the tablet and then £100 or more for the keyboard?

This review is hardly enthusiastic - http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/98699 ... ew-android

The Nvidia X1 chipset is very much of interest, but it's the kind of thing Nvidia will probably do in their own £200(ish) tablet if the K1 chipset is anything to go by.

I'll wait for that.

In Nexus 5x news, I love it. That's as in depth as I can be arsed to go, quite frankly

I luffs my Nexus 7. I'm pretty sure I'm not getting remotely everything out of it that i could, though.

Where's this android games thread, btw?

So the Pixel C is a very, very nice bit of kit then. It's all lovely smooth nice metal that just feels really nice (and which I'll ruin utterly by shoving it a folio case at some point). At the risk of giving myp something to be a dick about, it's proper Apple levels of fit and finish basically. Aside from that it's just a really nice and fast Android experience, which is exactly what I was after. Thoughts:

• The initial setup method is a bit weird. When I migrated from Nexus 9 to Nexus 10 I signed into my Google account and it gave me a list of my devices asking which one I wanted to replicate stuff from. I choose N10 and it started downloading all the apps and set up placeholders for app icons, widgets and folders on the 'desktop'. It did basically the same thing this time but it made me do it by putting the N9 and PC beside each other so it could use Bluetooth to get all it's data. At this point it was already connected to the wifi so why not just use that? Also, Bluetooth? Really? In this day and age? Ultimately it was a smooth enough process but going from downloading some kind of stored profile data from the internet to using Bluetooth and requiring physical access to the clonee device just seems like a backwards step.
• So the thing's got a lovely but very slidey back. What's the best way to package it then? If you said, "On top of a completely needless and itself very glossy bit of card such that as soon as the unsuspecting owner first handles it the thing instantly slides dangerously and heart-stoppingly off the needless cardboard towards the floor" then you can apply for a job with Google. Also: punch yourself in the fucking head.
• Whomever decided on the design of the charger needs a good fucking kick in the balls. The cable is hard-wired to the plug. No nice removable cable which can double up as a data cable for you! Also, should you want a longer charging cable, which I absolutely do, then you need to source another charger plug because tough tits, you don't get to use this one. This is particularly fucking annoying because of the move to USB C because it means I actually cannot copy files to my brand new device in a reasonable manner as I have no compatible data cable. Obviously I could use wifi to copy 6GB of comics but that can get to fucking fuck. I can't even copy the files onto a USB stick and then onto the tablet, which was my other plan, because the USB OTG connectors I've got are all micro USB. Fuck you very much Google, you dicks.
• I forgot about the other challenge of early adopting a new tablet: no decent cases for the thing. I'll need to pick up some generic sleeve type case while I wait for the third party manufacturers to swing into action and get me the solid folio case I need.

Urgh, spoke too soon! I've got touchscreen issues exactly like this guy:



Looks like this is getting returned! Fuck sake Google.

On the upside, the magnets on the back are so ludicrously strong you can have yourself a smart fridge.

Christ. Best keep it away from things with a hard drive.

Nah. Most powerful magnets in your house are inside your spinning rust drives.

See, I've always thought that, but there are plenty of accounts of magnets fucking hard drives up.

We clearly need to do science. You can buy 2kg pull magnets from Amazon for next to nothing.

You're not exactly selling it here.

Your list of complaints is far longer than your list of likes, the touchscreen doesn't work properly, but it's the world's most impressive fridge magnet. (I'll concede the fridge magnet part.)

Other than that I'd say that on balance I'm currently fairly happy with my £150 Nvidia Shield. It doesn't stick to the fridge, but the touchscreen works and I can plug any micro-USB cable into it that I want to, of whatever length.

Because I wasn't trying? I bought one; I don't care whether you do or not. Anyway, it doesn't do wireless charging so I know I'd be on a hiding to nothing there.<--THIS IS A JOKE.



Fucking hell dude, you might want to just possibly consider the idea that I wasn't actually genuinely saying that it's ability to stick to a fridge somehow outweighed the serious flaw in it's basic operation. I may just have been pointing out something amusing for the sake of it.

Yes I know, I get that the fridge magnet thing was a joke.

Huh. So I reported it to Google's support and they sent me a list of the usual steps to go through before they'd take it back (reboot, hard reboot, etc). The last step was to do a full wipe and reset from the bootloader and, unexpectedly, that seems to have sorted it. Certainly I've just spent more time in Google Maps and Chrome solidly pinching and zooming that I have in the rest of my life put together and it's running like butter. I have no idea how that could possible have made any difference, but fuck it.

My S6 was updated the other day and now nobody can hear me and I can't hear them when I make phone calls and normal sound will only play via Bluetooth speakers or headphones. I've tried googling that shit but I can't seem to find anything about it - anyone else hit this issue?

What version are you on now?

5.1.1 Android Version. Just a really odd error to have.

Does it think you've got some headphones plugged in?