Well a little over a week has gone by and I must say I’m pretty happy with this phone. The screen and camera are pretty stellar. And it caters very well to needing to be connected to the internet at all times. At first I was reading around and a lot of people were bitching about battery life, gps, facebook syncing, foursquare and other various conditional bugs and weirdness. Naturally I assumed the same would be true about my phone but alas I’m all good.
My first gripe was the battery life. I was trippin out because I would use the phone from 7am to about 5:30pm on a full charge and the battery would be dead. This was of course with a magic moving background that reacts to touch, wifi, both gps modes, and gmail/twitter updates every five minutes. Upon reading around I figured the problem was the amount of shit I was needlessly running and not something wrong with the phone or its battery. It took me a second to realize my phone is basically a tiny laptop, in the sense that if I walked around with an unplugged laptop and worked it from 7 to 5 the battery would also probably be dead.
I fixed it by opening the browser on the phone and doing a google image search for “black.png”. From there I downloaded the smallest and blackest from the results. I read this on some blog (I read too many and didn’t bookmark, sorry I cannot properly credit the person, but THANK YOU!) and it also mentioned that the super awesome screen on the phone uses no battery when generating black (f-ing genius!) So by setting the black.png as the background my battery life became noticeably longer. I also changed the update settings on my gmail and twitter and set them to fifteen minutes instead of five minutes. I also keep the wifi and gps services turned off unless I need them, that way they aren’t needlessly searching for signal. I also read that any vibrating is using the battery up, I assume more so than silent or a regular ringtone since there was no mention of ringtones doing damage. I left all the cool vibrating shit on though because I enjoy the way it feels when I type haha. But I know I can kill it when the wow factor wears off if I want to milk the crap out of my battery life. To finish it all up I downloaded this task killer app that let’s you kill running apps that I run every now and then but not too often or I’ll waste my battery haha. My battery life on a full charge is now like 1.5 days 🙂
Another gripe was that it came with a bunch of pre-installed apps that you cannot delete with out “rooting” your phone. Which is making yourself the super admin of the phone which is awesome if you’re a semi-smart human but you risk deleting important shit and turning the phone to a paper weight. I had to download a few more apps but from there on it was all gravy. I deleted all the random crap but kept the Avatar movie cuz it’s friggin ridiculous. It is kind of lame that they make you basically void your warranty to remove apps you will never ever use… seriously who is playing Sims 3 on their phone??? That is some scary shit.
Other than that my gps is good enough, foursquare is kind of crazy sometimes and I still can’t sync with facebook but I will live without fb updating itself every 15 minutes. Oh and the wordpress app loads all your images at the top of the post for some reason (luh-haaaaaaaaaaaame). Android OS is pretty bad ass though and I am considering getting a book on it. The camera is pretty good too. T-mobiles network isn’t too terrible. I thought it would be worse because I never had a data plan and wasn’t too sure what to expect but I’m happy for now.