Friday, September 21, 2012

Samsung Galaxy S III to supercede the hunk of junk that Verizon put out for their first 4G LTE phone

I once was a brief lover of the old Samsung Droid Charge...only because of the amazing community at RootzWiki and XDA-Developers.  I am not kidding.  If it wasn't for these people, I would have thrown that stupid phone into a trash can and found an old Droid Razr flip phone.  That Charge was awful.  Buggy even with un-rooted stock installed.  Best I could manage was the most recent update rooted via superuser (God bless you ChainsDD).

First off I'll mention I have dropped Verizon like a bad habit.  I loved the unlimited data package as I used my device for tethering my laptop via WiFi tether but the new shared family plans are allowing me to save $25 to 65/mo for two phones and a bunch of data.  I give two prices because I probably will go on an existing family plan my folks have to get even more savings.  Verizon phones were always the bastard children of the Android mod scene in my opinion because they use the CDMA chips.  The selection of phones are subpar and now that 4G is more ubiquitous, who cares?  The GSM phones always seem to have more updates issued which interests me.

I toiled between the HTC One X and the Galaxy S III however there were two items that sold the Galaxy for me.  HTC's body has an internal, unremovable battery.  I travel a lot and at times will run a battery dry with 10 hours left in the day.  I didn't feel comfortable with that option even though the Tegra chipset was supposed to rock with battery usage.  Also, the One X only has 1 GB of internal RAM for the OS and non-expandable 16 GB's of memory for storage.  I struggled with the Charge's 1 GB of RAM and didn't want to run through that again.  I also need the flexibility of a removable micro-SD card for various reasons and like the idea of expandability.  The HTC build quality is awesome and the interface is buttery smooth.  I also love HTC's attitude that it has taken with the developer crowd. It pained me to leave that phone behind.

So far I am pleased with the hand feel, the screen size, and the current version of TouchWiz.  The widgets are MUCH more improved over the Charge and the fact that I can be part of the Ice Cream Sandwich discussion makes things even better.  Using Odin to root my phone and hack the flash counter was a bit troublesome but I think have have gotten around it.  There are minor differences between rooting a the S vs. the S III...thank you again XDA-Devs.

Only issue I would through out there that I didn't figure out at first is that there is an internal SDCard and an external, optional SDCard.  When you load your files over from your old phone and look to restore everything via Titanium Backup (rooted phone of course) you have to move the TitaniumBackup folder to the internal /sdcard/ folder, not the mnt/extsdcard/ folder.

I can't say much else for the phone but I do wish it had the Exynos chipset for forward looking performance, but whatever.  I am already more than twice the power the old Charge with a whole lot more stability.  For goodness sakes the damn Charge sometimes would freeze just from picking up or making a call.

Beautiful wallpapers for your Android device

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