It's hard to believe I've only had this phone for 15 days -- it seems a lot longer. While it's a neat enough phone, overall I'm generally displeased. Once you get over the wow factor over how slim it is (or put it into an Otterbox case and completely hide that fact), it's essentially a sub-par run-of-the-mill Android device unless you start to spend hundreds of more $$ on peripherals to enable webtop mode.
At least once a day it reboots. Just sitting there. Nothing going on, even with 4G turned off, I'll suddenly hear the "shhh" and see the boot screen. I've done research and see that this is a common occurrence, and I'm confident that with some firmware updates this may be solved, but still it's a bit of a pain. Luckily I haven't been in the middle of anything important when it happens.
This other issue may be related to the first, but sporadically the keyboard stops working. I'm using Swype, and can't live without it. But there have been two occasions in the past two days where the keyboard just didn't put anything on the screen. It looked like it was working, it allowed me to minimize and maximize, shift and numlock, but no characters made it from point A to point B. Once in the market, once in a browser.
Wi-fi support is weird. I use wifi while at home and turn data off, but sometimes the notification bar doesn't sync with the signal -- when I'm standing right next to the access point. And sometimes it just stops working altogether and I get a "XXX needs a network to continue", even with wifi turned on. I use a static IP, and still get weird wi-fi drops and sputters, and the only way to clear them is to turn wi-fi off and back on.
Media support for video is just plain awful. Absolutely no support for DTS or dolby sound, even through HDMI. Try and play a video file with multichannel audio and you'll get video but no sound whatsoever. Also, no adjustments for brightness/contrast/hue/saturation, so everything looks dark even when you turn the auto-dim off and brightness to full. My Galaxy Wi-Fi 5.0 has better media support than this.
I also bought an HD dock with three USB ports and an HDMI output. The first USB keyboard I attached was a Microsoft Natural, and I got a lot of extra characters, like periods. And the "Enter" key cursored over two characters and put in a ']' character. I eventually used the USB keyboard that's built into my tablet case, and it works. I'll try a couple other USB keyboards to see if they work.
The auto-rotate doesn't. My home screen simply will not go into landscape mode. The Apps screen will, but not the home screen.
I really like a different launcher called "LauncherPro" (which does auto-rotate, and scale, and have more columns) and has many many more useful features like an awesome agenda/calendar, integrated facebook and overall makes your phone feel a lot snappier and more flexible. But it's completely incompatible with webtop mode (which I *do* like, mostly). The status bar at the top keeps flashing on and off, and the only way I found to turn it off in webtop mode was to completely uninstall LauncherPro and reboot. Maybe I'll look further into this and contact the LauncherPro folks to see if they can figure that out.
Speaking of webtop mode, the audio over HDMI is spotty. Not sure what happened, but the audio started out fine over HDMI, then somehow got put back on the phone speaker, which was very weird. I'd like to see a 1280x1080 16:9 mode for webtop because the 4:3 ratio took me some fidgeting with my monitor to look right. The 1024x720 mode looked very clunky.
There are some other little idiosyncrasies, but this is the most expensive phone I've bought to date, and feel somewhat cheated because it just doesn't work like it should. And it's not my phone -- it's evidently a lot of phones out there with these issues, so I'm hopeful that the impending ICS update will resolve many of these issues. And of course, I'll also try and get them to Motorola as well.
At least once a day it reboots. Just sitting there. Nothing going on, even with 4G turned off, I'll suddenly hear the "shhh" and see the boot screen. I've done research and see that this is a common occurrence, and I'm confident that with some firmware updates this may be solved, but still it's a bit of a pain. Luckily I haven't been in the middle of anything important when it happens.
This other issue may be related to the first, but sporadically the keyboard stops working. I'm using Swype, and can't live without it. But there have been two occasions in the past two days where the keyboard just didn't put anything on the screen. It looked like it was working, it allowed me to minimize and maximize, shift and numlock, but no characters made it from point A to point B. Once in the market, once in a browser.
Wi-fi support is weird. I use wifi while at home and turn data off, but sometimes the notification bar doesn't sync with the signal -- when I'm standing right next to the access point. And sometimes it just stops working altogether and I get a "XXX needs a network to continue", even with wifi turned on. I use a static IP, and still get weird wi-fi drops and sputters, and the only way to clear them is to turn wi-fi off and back on.
Media support for video is just plain awful. Absolutely no support for DTS or dolby sound, even through HDMI. Try and play a video file with multichannel audio and you'll get video but no sound whatsoever. Also, no adjustments for brightness/contrast/hue/saturation, so everything looks dark even when you turn the auto-dim off and brightness to full. My Galaxy Wi-Fi 5.0 has better media support than this.
I also bought an HD dock with three USB ports and an HDMI output. The first USB keyboard I attached was a Microsoft Natural, and I got a lot of extra characters, like periods. And the "Enter" key cursored over two characters and put in a ']' character. I eventually used the USB keyboard that's built into my tablet case, and it works. I'll try a couple other USB keyboards to see if they work.
The auto-rotate doesn't. My home screen simply will not go into landscape mode. The Apps screen will, but not the home screen.
I really like a different launcher called "LauncherPro" (which does auto-rotate, and scale, and have more columns) and has many many more useful features like an awesome agenda/calendar, integrated facebook and overall makes your phone feel a lot snappier and more flexible. But it's completely incompatible with webtop mode (which I *do* like, mostly). The status bar at the top keeps flashing on and off, and the only way I found to turn it off in webtop mode was to completely uninstall LauncherPro and reboot. Maybe I'll look further into this and contact the LauncherPro folks to see if they can figure that out.
Speaking of webtop mode, the audio over HDMI is spotty. Not sure what happened, but the audio started out fine over HDMI, then somehow got put back on the phone speaker, which was very weird. I'd like to see a 1280x1080 16:9 mode for webtop because the 4:3 ratio took me some fidgeting with my monitor to look right. The 1024x720 mode looked very clunky.
There are some other little idiosyncrasies, but this is the most expensive phone I've bought to date, and feel somewhat cheated because it just doesn't work like it should. And it's not my phone -- it's evidently a lot of phones out there with these issues, so I'm hopeful that the impending ICS update will resolve many of these issues. And of course, I'll also try and get them to Motorola as well.
