Tag: android

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LG Optimus Black Blues

I was really bored and couldn’t sleep so I figured, why not try the recently released Temple Run for Android on  my test Android phone, a SIM-less LG Optimus Black. So I booted up, joined my home WiFi network, opened Android Market Google Play, and searched for “Temple Run”. No connection. I retried. Still no connection. I checked the browser and other network apps and they seemed to be working fine. Only Google Play was not working. It seems it requires a data connection even if I’m already on WiFi.

I figured, maybe it’s an Android 2.2 Frozen Yogurt problem. The Android 2.3 Gingerbread update has supposedly been made available by LG so I figured maybe it’s time I should upgrade. I went to the LG website and found out that there is an unspecified, hopefully Android 2.3, update available. But I needed to download a Windows USB driver and a Windows update manager. Unfortunately, I have no Windows machine. Dead end. I guess I shouldn’t be complaining about the iPhone being reliant on iTunes :P

UPDATE: Turns out it’s the time and date. I just set it to current and Google Play worked. Go figure.

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LG Optimus Black: Paint It Black

I needed an Android phone to test the Android version of PSMonitor. I wanted a low-end phone, a least common denominator, so I checked out the Samsung Galaxy Ace. While it has better than usual low-end specs (800MHz processor, 3.5″ 320×480 display), it didn’t have a front camera and is not expected to have Ice Cream Sandwich. So scrap that.

This led me to search some more and eventually to the LG Optimus Black which is a bit higher-end (1GHz processor, 4″ 480×800 display). Expectedly, it was quite expensive. But that changed when LG lowered the price and, even better, announced that Ice Cream Sandwich will be available for it. After a few more days of considering, I finally went ahead and got it.

My first impression is that it’s a well-designed, minimalist, and low-key phone. Almost everything is black. Even the LG logos are in subdued shades of gray. Once you hold it, you see it’s also very slim and very light. Probably the one thing that really screams “Look at me!” is the Nova display. It is just BRIGHT! Unfortunately, it has a yellowish tint when viewed from the front which is a bummer.

The user-experience is typical Android, a whole lot of power and flexibility. Frankly, it’s way more than what you actually need to get real work done.  It’s not drastically more complicated or worse than iOS, we know they each got their particular quirks. It’s just different.

However, it does feel like it needs a bit more polish (but that’s supposed to change with Ice Cream Sandwich). Also, it’s a little bit laggy due to the low-end specs as well as all those virtual machinery and hardware abstraction layers. The price of multi-hardware support. But it’s nothing that you can’t get used to.

Performance with the built-in Frozen Yogurt is good although I expect it would improve once the promised updates comes out. Gingerbread after all is an enhancement, optimization, and bug-fix version. Performance with Ice Cream Sandwich would probably suffer. I’m hoping it would still be passable though. At least still enough for its primary purpose as my Android test phone.

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Mobile OS Updates

Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich is one of the best things since sliced bread Gingerbread. Unfortunately it seems not everyone is going to get it. It has been officially announced that the barely 2-year old Nexus One won’t be getting it. There was also a rumor (since quashed but only after a few long days) that the  barely a year old LG Optimus 2X won’t have it. Someone even made a chart of the sad history of Android updates. It’s a dismal picture for Android.

For the iPhone data, it’s pretty accurate. The by then 3-year old original iPhone (released Jun 2007) was not supported by iOS 4 (released Jun 2010). The 3-year old iPhone 3G (released Jul 2008) is not supported by iOS 5 (released Oct 2011). Basically, iPhones have a supported life of 3 years.

Continue reading “Mobile OS Updates”

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Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich

Watched the YouTube live stream of the launching of the Samsung/Google Galaxy Nexus and Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich. The Galaxy Nexus has nice specs (1280×720 display!) though I’m not too hot on the form factor. I’ve never liked banana-shaped phones (Nokia 7110/8110 anyone?) nor humongous screens (which unfortunately is the trend). But Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) stole the limelight. Slick new UI, powerful new features (Face Unlock, Beam, folders, screenshots, etc.). Both the phone and ICS seem to have patent-issue avoidance in mind, e.g. the phone cannot be mistaken for any iDevice, the new folders don’t have the content-view of iOS.