I am Canadian.

ive had this happen a couple times on my nexus. sometimes i scroll the sound all the way to silent, then scroll back up to loud until it beeps and that works.


sometimes i restart or force close handcent.

With the Samsung galaxy s3 I'm having another issue. I am unable to get the nfc transfer to work for anything other than a contact. For example if I am trying to transfer a web page, it will only open the browser and stay at the home page. Any ideas?

what have you been reading? the one X is not available on verizon.

fwiw i played with a S3 yesterday and it blew me away.
cannot wait till mine arrives.

I've been using mine constantly since I got it. Even with Touchwiz its incredible, can't wait until I find a good ROM and put on a new launcher.

has anyone been able to find the S3 in a ATT store yet? about to give up and just preorder and hope I like it

I've had the phone for more than a month ... I just can't get used to needing two hands for everything. There is just no way to push the on button, then unlock the screen without using two hands. I'm hoping the Atrix 3 is smaller.

The Atrix 3 is rumoured to have a 4.3-4.5 inch 720p HD screen and will definitely be smaller than the S3. More are saying 4.3 than 4.5 fwiw and that is where my money is.

It should be around the HTC One S in size but with a better screen, a much much better battery (3300 mAh is the leak from multiple sources), quad core processor and 2 gig of RAM (some say 1 gig but id bet on 2).

Funny how everyone is all "zomg quad core marketing is the BESTEST" when frim what I've seen written, the snapdragon s4 is at least as good, if not better than the tegra 3. As if any of us would notice.

AFAIK quad core is only really a noticeable difference on top of the line gaming and even then it probably isnt. I did laugh at the presentation of the Nexus 7 with its 16 cores between CPU and GPU though.

Lol I meant ATT. Most reviews said "S3 reigns supreme, but if you can get the One X, damn that **** is sweet"

is there any reason for a basic non power user to root the phone and install a custom ROM? all I do on my phone is media/internet/text/tweet and I've never rooted before....wondering if I should be rooting the S3 when I get it.

depends on the phone and the current rom-situation and your needs. some possible reasons:
you get new versions of android faster in nearly all cases. the S3 has ICS, but you will probably have to wait 3-6month until there is a jelly bean update. (JB will officially launch middle of july). now, the changes between ICS and JB are not huge (even though there is some stuff in JB i really like), so it's not a huge reason. and most custom roms will probably take at least 1-2 months anyway until the JB version for the s3 is stable enough for normal use

many people prefer stock ICS to touchwiz interface (or htc sense interface etc). and in the US (mainly), most carrier but on some useless apps on your phone that you can't uninstall. (but sometimes also some apps that people like)

besides that, many ROMs have nifty small little improvements. for example:
- longpress the volume keys to switch songs while playing music (phone is in pocket and you want to switch songs without taking phone out)
- better integration of widgets in the notification area
- improvements to kernel etc to have an ever smoother / faster system
- often better battery life
- use the volume keys to change cursor position while typing
- change brightness of the display by longpressing notification bar and sliding left / right
- get directly to google search by longpress the navigation bar
- delete the google search widget from the homescreen & have a different homescreen layout that allows for more icons / widgets / "general stuff" on your homescreen
- better facebook sync (this is not available anymore in ICS & up default wise; google fighting with facebook). i think there are also options available to sync without rooting, but i'm not sure about that and no idea how good it works
- a lot of options for small layout changes to really "personalise" your phone. (most people are probably too lazy to do a lot with it). but for example one thing i really like: have the exact percentages of battery power shown in status bar instead of only the icon

feature list depends on the ROM obviously. in general, you can go three directions:
a) as many options as possible.
b) just a clean ROM, as close to stock android as possible
c) really minimalistic ROM, main focus on battery life and speed

so in summary: i wouldn't root the S3 when you get it. play around with it and just use it normally. there won't be any good jelly bean ROMs available anyway. after some time, it could make more sense.

and just to give also a downside to rooting / putting on custom ROMs: it will use some of your time. unless you wait until the ROM is completely stable, it's better to upgrade the ROM kinda regularly. it's not a big deal if you really know what you do, but especially in the beginning it will take some time until you understand everything properly and know how to do it the best / fastest way.
if you're the guy that has "fun" playing / tinkering around with your phone and look at the "improvement list" above and think "wow, that's great, i want that", go for it. but if you just want to have nothing to do with your phone and just using it, there is really absolutely no need at the moment.

It sounds like you wont get much if any benefit from ROMing your phone RBK. I dunno what classes someone as a "power user" but with a good launcher I have never needed to ROM and rooting is something I would just do temporarily to get rid of bloatware.

I probably hit a really weird venn diagram where I have made my own Beautiful Widgets layout, my own dockbar, my own GO SMS Pro theme, my own Widgetlocker sliders, I am currently playing around with automating with Tasker and I theme just about everything on my phone, can get nearly two full days of heavy use out of the standard size battery by paying attention to what is sapping power and why and yet I have just never felt the need to install a new ROM. The OS is just so open even when not rooted you can do virtually everything you could want to with it out of the box and as a bonus you know your phone is going to be extremely stable.

This just popped up on my twitter feed:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/04/motorola-atrix-hd/

4.5" screen.

what launcher do u use? also can u post some pics of ur custom themes n home screens?

Screen size is becoming less relevant imo. For instance the Droid incredible LG 4G LTE super duper bestesy ever screen seemed smaller than my dinc2 but the same size as the HOS. So it s eems that screens are getting bigger with the same phone size maybe. WILL SOME CARRIER DEMAND THE ONE S WITH 720P PLEASE???

rbk,

try go launcher ex. Also try out go sms pro, go contacts (phone dialer replacement), and go widgets. basically anything by go is a good app.

Looks good to me!

As a very very general rule that is pretty good. GO is what I use, it is a little bit out of favour right now going into ICS and eventually JB - from what I have read the launcher works on 4.0.x but a lot of people are using NOVA Launcher which seems to allow everything GO does so in theory everything here could be done on an ICS phone.

I have just changed nearly everything right down to the dock background on my phone so its a bit of a work in progress, but here is my homescreen:



I also have a homescreen to the left for a twitter feed:





And a homescreen to the right with my calendar and some widgetsoid switches to cover data syncing, brightness, tethering and volume controls.



Finally there is my lockscreen which is really rough and needs an overhaul. I have just gone back to using Beautiful Widgets instead of the built in WidgetLocker clock widget which is why there is two weathers and the background image I need to change to something less busy. The carbon fibre BW and sliders that I made dont show up so well on the screenshot either as it does in person.

But it gives you a good idea of how much control you can have over the phone even without rooting so I have my next four calendar appointments show on my phone every time I glance at it (I am terrible at remembering appointments) and I can directly access my dialer, sms and email which has number indicators next to the slider icon when I have a missed call or unread message/email. The sliders work upwards instead of side to side too, it is more secure and looks better imo. Frankly I am not a fan of the four way circle slider that Android has moved onto as standard since Apple patented the ability to slide one image across another image (which is another lulzy topic entirely)

I dont think it is interesting enough to screenshot and upload but I use the ICS theme on exDialer (both the theme and app are free in the Play Store, I have tried a lot of dialers and that is my favourite by far) and I have modified the standard grey GO SMS Pro theme to use the same colours of blue and white for text and black background so the two match up well together (if not the rest of the phone right now), there are themes for GO SMS but it is easy to modify the colours and I wanted something really simple so I just made my own.

As I say this is on Gingerbread but the principles carry over as NOVA seems to be almost a direct rip off of GO Launcher. Any Qs, I am happy to help.

-----

I actually wrote a $3 kindle e-book which covers this in a fair amount of detail and goes onto other topics as a kind of introduction to what Android is capable of. PM me if anyone is interested, I cant give out the link in the thread but I have permission to mention it exists and you can PM me.

Is anyone here an iPhone 3G or later convert to a modern high end Droid? I've had a first gen, 3GS, and now a 4, and I just played with the S3 and liked what I saw.

Coming from iOS I didn't really know what to do/look for but I really liked the giant screen and the fact that the phone was still significantly lighter than the 4 despite that. I thought the resolution was good/fine and liked that the entire phone wasn't made out of ****ing glass.

What are your thoughts on the switch? What do you miss? One of my bigger concerns is apps, I definitely use my phone for more than FB and texting so having some specialized apps for real estate. I looked and saw eKey was available for Droid, according to this 20 month old article

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-20032228-78.html

iPhone has WAY more apps than the Droid. I assume all the casual junk like Facebook/Instagram/games etc. is all there, so what ISN'T?

Also, talk to me about turn-based navigation, ie a full Garmin replacement. Do I have to go on a monthly plan? Is it going to chew up my data?

android prob has more free apps than iphone

and yes, all the big apps

The free/cost isn't really a concern. If there's something out there that makes my job 1% easier and it costs $10 it's a no-brainer, but that's still interesting and fairly surprising.

Is that due to Apple being more locked down so to speak?

yes

google play has tons of apps

but also, google amazon app store from your phone and download it -- you can get a free paid app per day as long as you set your phone to allow apps from unknown sources

Apple has way more apps but the popular apps get ported to Android and its range is pretty good. Gaming is the big missing piece of the puzzle for Android which google is trying to fix via giving devs DRM app encryption in Jellybean but it is passable enough right now and will improve. But on the other hand the open nature of the OS allows devs to do a bunch of techy geeky stuff you just dont see on Apple. Someone with more experience than me on iOS could cover that better.

Android has free turn based navigation built in as standard with Google Navigation and Maps and is what most people use but there are alternatives by CoPilot, Garmin Navigator, Navigon (which is owned by Garmin), Waze (which is popular on iOS apparently) and Mapquest which are all reasonably popular at various prices and may be an improvement over Navigation - ymmv.