Topic: Smartphones

[Steve]

Thats how I used to do it honestly but it would go full to dead inside an hour of use so it just never came off after that. To be fair I was running the bail company and taking hundreds of phone calls a week at that time so, it was under far more demand than my android is. Not really a fair comparison as i sit back and think about it.

[Govtcheez]

> seems to like it but the latest Android update actually made her battery life worse.

Same thing happened to me when I had my Eris - the OS upgraded and my battery life went from a couple days to 4-5 hours

[ober]

Same thing happened to me when I had my Eris - the OS upgraded and my battery life went from a couple days to 4-5 hours

Well she's on a Droid Pro now and it was pretty decent.  Some research on the web has led me to believe that the Android updates don't always happen cleanly and some stuff that gets left behind ends up killing the battery.  Doing a factory reset (which keeps the updated OS) is supposed to be the fix.

[micah]

so anyway, I bought a Droid Bionic.   The selling points were 4G and price.  So far i like it but I have to get used to it.  and sure enough, the batter sucks ass but i guess I'll just have to learn to live with that.

[Steve]

Or download ODIN and flash CwM

[Perspective]

I picked up a bluetooth hands-free car speaker thing during boxing week (BlueAnt S4). That combined with the free android app "Vlingo" is awesome. Highly recommended (especially if you live in a place with hands-free-only laws for cell phones in cars). I can make calls, receive (or ignore) incoming calls, send text messages, start navigation to an address, and ask simple questions all completely hands free. The BlueAnt also indexes your contact book so it will announce the name of the caller for incoming calls.

Even if you don't go for an in-car speaker thing, Vlingo is pretty awesome. Check it out: http://www.vlingo.com/

[Steve]

I have been playing with Skyvi (Siri for Android) and it works pretty well. buggy and somewhat goofy when it doesn't know, but it works better than siri imo

[micah]

so I just got this widshield-mounted dock today and I must say it is very awesome.

When docked, the phone recognizes its in a car dack and displays a custom "home" screen with big buttons to get to the navigation, music and voice search.  My phone can now officially replace a stand-alone GPS.  Also, it has a 1/16 audio jack that plugs into my car so I can stream apps and internet radio through my car radio (which is good since I'm dropping XM.)

An added bonus, aside from the very scary temptation of watching netflix movies while I'm driving, is the fact that the dock doesn't cover the 8mp camera and I can record where I'm driving -- in effect, a dash mounted camera!  oh the possibilities

[Perspective]

I have a dock that plugs into the cigarette lighter and has a bendy arm to position it. I like the windshield mounted ones better but they are technically illegal here. My phone's gps is way better than the gps unit I used to have. I also stream podcasts and radio. love it.

The only thing I don't like about it is the cables sticking out everywhere.