Since cell phones are a topic that comes up frequently .... Cutting to the chase, when the Samsung Galaxy S3 works, it's awesome, but it has some very annoying glitches.
First of all, it is impossible for me to separate the S3 experience from the 4G experience. When it drops a call where no previous phone did, is that because the S3 has a lousy radio, or because Verizon has comparably lousy 4G coverage. I have owned several PDAs, PDA phones and smart phones that were truly revolutionary. My first Palm Pilot back in '94. My Kyocera Palm phone, my last treo, and my first generation Moto droid were all devices that represented huge leaps ahead. The galaxy S3 is very nice, but there is nothing about it that I find groundbreaking or earth shaking. There are some things that it does better than my moto droid did, but I haven't yet found any huge leaps in functionality that makes me thrilled with the phone. It is just a technology appliance. Buying my S3 was a very frustrating experience. My moto droid was getting very long in the tooth, slow and flaky as the new software would frequently overwhelm it. The plan was that on lunch break at our dojo summer retreat, I'd backup the droid, go to Verizon and buy a 32GB S3. Before heading to verizon, the day the S3 was publicly available, I downloaded titanium backup, which someone had highly recommended, installed it, tried to run it, and my phone started acting flaky. Next thing I knew my phone was doing a very good imitation of a brick with a screen that would glow slightly. I got to Verizon, and had to wait. And wait. And wait. Finally someone was willing to help me. First, I found out that the 32 GB was not available, only the 16GB. Then I found out that by upgrading phones, I would lose my unlimited data plan. Then I found out that if I returned the S3, I'd get a $35 restocking fee. Then I found out about Verizon's fee for upgrading my phone (which, it turns out was offset by a credit on my account). If I had had a working phone, I would have walked out of the store, and maybe come back a couple weeks later when the 32 GB version of the phone was available. However, none of the problems were enough to overcome the inconvenience of being without a cell phone for an indeterminate time period. Especially with my girlfriend across the country in New York. One of my main reasons for having an account with Verizon is that they have, by far, the best coverage in the Santa Cruz mountains. At one point, if I wanted cell service at my house, I had my choice of Verizon. For most of the places I go, Verizon has exceptionally good coverage. With the S3, this simply is not the case. Driving up hwy 9 from Santa Cruz to Felton, it WILL drop calls. Not maybe, but will. Even if I'm only a little bit out of town, until I'm nearly in town again. This is my primary route between home and Santa Cruz, and a section of road that over the past 30 years or so I have crashed (is in needing a tow, or a tote) in a car, on a motorcycle and on bicycle. It is also a section of road that I've been one of the first people on the scene after other people's accidents. This is a section of road that is very important to me that I can make a 911 call, and a section of road where the phone simply does not work. I haven't tried it out in many other portions of rural Santa Cruz county. Lilipia, the saleswoman at the store assured me that if 4G is not available, the phone would switch to 3G or 2G. So, it may just be that my phone has a lousy radio. By the same token, occasionally the phone loses it's data connection, and just totally freezes up. As in totally. Eventually it will post an error message that internet is broken, would I like to kill it. Restarting the network connection often solves the problem, once I have the opportunity. Also, every so often (possibly just on facebook) it will start downloading a web page, the screen will go dead white and nothing will have any effect, except pushing the home button, or the power button. Likewise, sometimes when I click on a link from mail, clicking the "return" button only pops me up a level in the browser, and I have to restart my email program. One mild annoyance is that I'll get notifications and it is often nearly impossible to find out where they are coming from. For example, shortly after I got the phone, I was getting push ads in my notification bar. I had no easy way of finding out what app was causing them to be sent. I eventually figured it out, and unfortunately, it was an otherwise useful app that I had to delete. I also get, probably several times an hour, a notification that something having to do with mail was unable to send several messages. I don't know which messages, I don't know whether it's "email" or "K-9", nor do I really have any idea of how to stop those notifications, since as far as I can tell, every email has gone out. One major peeve is text entry. My moto droid had a hard keypad. It worked well. The S3 only has a virtual keypad. It has something called T-9 text entry, which works like swype, and is really awesome when it works. I liken it to Graffiti on the Palm Pilot, except with words rather than letters. However, about 10% of the time it decides that I'm trying to enter one of several words, none of which are the one that I'm trying to enter, and there is no easy way to correct it. I can't just hit a button and make the bad word go away, I can't have it just accept what I entered. I have to delete the word, character by character, I usually end up trying to swype it in again figuring I must have made a mistake, deleting it character by character, then retyping it character by character. The predictive typing with the plain keyboard is slightly better, but not sufficiently better. I've given up and just gone back to regular text entry. I likely would have gotten the Droid 4, when it came out, except that it does not have a user replaceable battery, and living in the woods as I do, with the tendency to run the phone down without realizing it when on a walk in the woods, the ability to pop in a spare battery is crucial to me. I have also not been able to find a good written manual for the phone. I hate the facebook effect, though it probably started with macs, where everything is assumed to be user intuitive (mac) and it isn't documented lest they decide to totally change the user interface without warning (facebook). If I plugged my moto droid into a USB port, and told it to make the memory available, the data on the SD card was available in the file browser of the computer, making it trivial to copy photos, files etc. back and forth. This is not nearly so simple or intuitive on the S3. The phone, however, is not an unmitigated fail. Otherwise I would have returned it, despite the extra cost and annoyance. The screen is wonderfully clear, and actually usable for displaying photos, something that the droid barely succeeded at. When the phone has sufficient signal, the calls are clear and it's easy to understand people. I've been told that it's easier to understand me. When I have a 4G data connection that works, it is wonderfully zippy. Likewise the processor is nice and fast. There also seem to be some nifty features in the new droid OS (Ice Cream Sandwich IIRC), such as being able to shake the phone and put it up to my ear to call the person I'm texting with. That worked great a couple of times, then seemed to stop working. I've seen hints of others go whizzing past when I was trying to do something, but haven't been able to find a good manual for it. I tried downloading a PDF I found online, but never had success. I had my original droid for well over the required period for updating because there simply wasn't anything that filled my needs better. I don't anticipate doing that with this phone. I expect that at some point, possibly even before the two year period is up, I'll buy something else and swap my SIM card. I may just look for a 4G dumb phone, that works well as a phone, that I can swap my SIM card into when I need to make a phone call, and the S3 won't work. And no, I haven't tried the camera. I always have at least one real one with me. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
