Be Excellent To Each Other

Didn't you already do that?

Land...line.

You mean the thing I pay for to get broadband? You can call people on that? Far out, man.

you can snark all you like, but how else would I receive calls from strangers about accidents that have befallen me or PPI policies I may have taken out?

You could answer 4/5ths of the incoming calls on my mobile and fill yer boots

Cool! Any particular way you'd like it answered? I do a range of voices.

Do you do "whore"?

A popular choice! What trim? We have:

- Angry Croydon
- Matronly Leeds
- Drunk Welsh

My wireless charging doohickey has arrived, not much to say about it really except that it works nicely, and is a massively better fit for the S7 than the nexus pad that it replaces.

Oh yes and the instructions are in wonderful Chinglish.

I did yeah, a disposable one costing £39 to take on holiday.

Grimm... I have to have a landline for our t'internet and it's free 24/7. We have some quite swanky Gigaset handsets far more comfy than any mobile I've ever used.

Why would I enter into a mobile contract costing £x when I simply wouldn't use it.

Can you do stoned-for-the-first-time posh girl?

I spy a fetish

Only if she's a redhead.

How would you know over the phone?

Oh, you'd know.

So, I've had iPhones (first a 3G, then a 4S which I am still using now) for a fair few years now and am thinking about changing.

iOS works just fine for me but I'm a little ...bored... of it now and feel like a change. I think I've convinced myself that the Galaxy S7 is the phone I want (good camera, lots of storage options, nice screen, waterproof, can piss about customising android).

Hearthly, how are you getting on with the S7?

I really like it but do be aware I've 'Google-fied' it as much as possible, replacing the Samsung UI and Samsung Keyboard (which also nuked the horrible Samsung take on the Google Now screen), running nearly all Google apps and leaving no sign of the Samsung stuff which was pre-installed (not that there's very much of that now).

I believe the Nexus 6P is quite a bit cheaper than the S7 so unless there's something specific about the S7 you really want, the 6P might be a better bet.

All that said it is a great phone, the construction and build quality is fantastic, and the AMOLED screen is gorgeous. (The always-on thing isn't anything to get overly excited about though.)

I haven't tested the water resistance thing, I'm too chicken for that.

The main differences between the S7 and N6P would be the S7s ability to take SD cards plus it's water-proofing and smaller screen size. If none of those are deal-breakers then the N6P is worth considering, but if you need those factors then the S7 will definitely give you a good Android experience.

Man, I'm sure there's something else the S7 does that the N6P doesn't...

I can't even begin to explain how hard this is for me.

Title

I quite like the idea of expandable storage. I use my phone as my main picture-taker (as I always have it on me) so it'd be nice to have a phone that can take good pics, and lots of them. With expandable storage I could do that and have music and photos on there too.

If one of the recent nexi-us-es-s had a slot for cards that probably would have swing it for me.

I've had the 4S for probably 4 years now, maybe a little more. It'd be nice if the next phone I get lasted a similar time too. Wishful thinking perhaps?

Coming from a 4S, any new top-end phone is likely to feel massive in my hands.

I do have quite small hands for a bloke, it seems.

The HTC phones with unibody metal cases are pretty durable. The newest one (HTC 10) has got a MicroSD card slot, too.

They do not. Irritatingly.

The camera will be piss though, HTC cameras are piss.

The decision is made. Oppo Find 7a. Quad core 2.3ghz with 3gb ram and 16gb storage, upgradeable to 128 using the MSD port. 5.5" 1080p version and it cost £170.

I fancied something a bit nicer.

Hearthly a few questions if I may. The Oppo has been sent RMSD today and I will have it on Tuesday. I've already prepared myself by downloading a couple of versions of Oppo's Color OS (based on Lollipop it comes stock with Jellybean) but was wanting to do what you did to your Samsung and "go all Google".

Can you tell me what Google apps you use please? Inc which browser you use. No offence but it seems you've done all the spade work

Cheers.

It was just the 'Google Now Launcher' and 'Google Keyboard'. (Cheers to DocG and Bamba for the heads-up on those respectively.)

The Launcher replaced all the front-facing elements of the Samsung UI (and also the horrible Samsung version of the Google Now screen), the Keyboard did exactly what it sounds like - but just those two things made the phone feel far more like my N5 which I think I've said before is basically the best phone I've ever owned, and the stock vanilla Android experience has a lot to do with that.

I also stopped/removed/replaced any Samsung app twaddle and replaced them with the Google equivalents, although in fairness it was nothing like the wall of utter fucking shite semi-malware that infested Mrs Hearthly's Samsung S4 Mini at purchase which is the last time we had a Samsung smartphone.

In essence I wanted a Nexus 6P, except for, y'know, that thing.

Now that you've got the S7, I can just imagine This being released with wireless charging next month.

Google make Chrome, if you want to go Google for your browser then use Chrome. I'm a bit surprised you didn't know that to be honest.

Oh shit yes sorry JC I binned off the Samsung browser for Chrome, but that's kind of a gimme I'd have thought

I run Chrome on everything (phone, Chromebook, Shield, all PCs/laptops etc) so that I'm signed in to everything all the time. Stuff like shared browsing histories over devices and whatnot is dead useful.

I wish Chrome for iOS was a little better. It's better than Safari, but not as good as it is on every other platform I've used it on.

I agree with Lewie. It seems really, really slow on my ipad.

Yeah of course I knew that I just wondered if there was something better that would be better to use Obviously not

Cheers Hearth, will get onto that when the phone arrives.



Aye see normally that thing would piss me off but the Oppo can fully charge in an hour and charge to 75% in about 30 minutes.... It's got a seriously brutal charger. So hopefully I will only need to use it once a day

Got the phone early this morning. It came with Android 4.1 on it as stock. Now during me placing the order and doing my research I found out that I had two options. One was to install the very latest Color OS (which is based on Android 5.0) or, to install what Oppo call "Project Spectrum" which is a standard 5.1.1. I decided on the latter and tried to install it using Oppo's instructions. However, when I tried that it would get to a certain point and say "Installation failed". At which point I would then have to hard reset the phone and let it restore back to 4.1 which took ages.

In the end I went into the phone and installed two updates from Oppo which put me on 4.3, then the flash to 5.1.1 worked.

What saved me some time was that the phone automatically detected my 'droid console and so all of my apps were ready to be installed in one chunk

So I'm very happy with the phone. Hopefully later my VR headset will arrive

The phone didn't do that, Play did.

All right show off.

It can do things like this, too.

Despite the name, that's nothing to do with Play.

Yes. Yes, it is.

Nothing to do with Android but I particularly enjoy the new error messages that Microsoft seem to have adopted.

"Something went wrong. Please try again."

This seems a particularly random thread to have posted that in.

Well it's on theme with "Something went wrong with Android Play services", I guess.

Goat Simulator Z isn't very good, by the way.

What's Microsoft got to do with Android Play services?

Not that this matter in the slightest I realise, but I am quite bored in my defence.

Had a bit of an issue last night where I was not able to change my ring tone without Google services crashing. Turns out I stumbled across one of the only bugs. The fix was simple, just install a free app called ES File Explorer and it sorts it out. I can now change ringtones.

My Cardboard headset came today (it's this one here)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01 ... UTF8&psc=1

And in the ten minutes or so I had to play with it I got it running OK. I did not use an app to line up the phone properly and so on and I can't control anything yet (need to order a mouse thing) but it seems to be pretty cool. Kinda like 3Dvision on your head. It's a good thing I ordered a fully adjustable cardboard gadget because I had to fine tune it for my eyes. Works pretty well though, but a quick tip, make sure you clean your phone screen first as even the tiniest spec of dust becomes a black square lol.

The one thing I am absolutely loving about the Oppo is the quality of the screen. It's absolutely epic. Being a "proper" shaped and sized phone it's also miles beyond my Blackberry for watching TV etc. The Blackberry has a square screen, so simply ran Youtube in widescreen with massive bars across the top and bottom. I think I prefer the Blackberry for browsing forums though because its width means you don't need to zoom in at all.

You realise that the commonality doesn't have to be the vendor, right?

If in this thread someone said 'my Nexus 10 blew up" and somebody else replied with "my iPhone blew up last week too!" it would be completely on topic. In this context, the commonality is "mobile devices saying 'something went wrong' in lieu of a decent error message". It's perfectly relevant.

Wait - you realise that TheVision's message was a response to the image that Grim... posted, right?

I do indeed, it just seemed something that was very specific to MS stuff so, if it was me, I'd have posted it elsewhere. That's just me though.