2015 Smart Phones

The edge is gimmicky in what it promised, however I do love the dim night time on the edge at night. I dont have any clocks in my room or use alarms. Its nice to roll over in the middle of the night and look at the phone to see the time w/out pressing any buttons and getting a blinding light in my eye.

The S7 is what the S6 should have been. Its disappointing Samsung is going the Iphone route with downgrading or incremental feature additions. Its disappointing they are not going with USB C. I will be passing on the S7 and see what the S8 has to offer....I should be due an upgrade at this time.

I am also keeping an eye on the Windows developments. The Lumina 950 XL looked promising, but I am not ready to switch over. I am hoping the rumored Windows Surface Phone comes up with a winner. It would be very nice to replace my work laptop with a phone that can do the basic processing . It would be nice to set the phone on a wireless dock for easy pickup if the user needs a quick exit.

 

I was very impressed by both LG G5 and S7 announcements today. I applaud LG for trying something new and different. Only time will tell if there will be worthwhile modules for the magic slots. The camera one is interesting. You get a more comfortable grip, more battery, and a dedicated shutter button that really makes it possible for the phone to become a (good) point and shoot replacement. I with the camera module had an extra dial in addition to the zoom so you can easily adjust shutter speed or iso.

Samsung didn't really push any boundaries. But they took all the great features and finally combined it into one phone.The Edge version should have ridiculous battery life. The water resistance is nice.

This Galaxy S7 battery case with qi does seem really cool though. http://www.androidcentral.com/samsungs-galaxy-s7-battery-case-uses-qi-keep-your-phone-powered

 

Just bought the huawei honor 5x. Interested in it for the fingerprint scanner and overall design. I've heard not so great things about the ui but hopefully a different launcher should fix that issue. Also was thinking about picking up the Alcatel idol 4s but it's a little more than I'd like to spend

 

Regarding Textra...

This phone has an LED light that's supposed to blink when I receive notifications, so that I will know that I received a text without having to unlock the phone. But ever since downloading Textra and making it my default texting app, it doesn't do that anymore. I went in to Textra's settings and can't see how to turn this feature on. I also checked and all the permissions for this app are on.

And what's worse about Textra: I have to open the app itself to see if I have received any text messages. It won't even have a little 1 or 2 to show if I have unread messages in there. And again, I looked into the setting and I can't see how to fix that.

Do you know how to fix these issues?

 

This is a BLU issue. Reboots are supposed to fix this problem.

 

What's the Note 6's story supposed to be about?

 

OK, sorry to be so dumb, but...

I have rebooted the phone. The problem persists.

Now, if you meant that BLU needs to reboot something, OK. Do you know when and how that would happen?

 

If its still a problem, then I imagine BLU has to send out a software update to fix this. This has been a known issue. Their notification LED has had issues with other apps as well. Supposedly reboots fixed the issue but seeing as it isn't for you, perhaps you might have to revert to the stock messaging app.

 

The new HP windows phone looks much better than the Lumia 950. They clearly built that thing for business and enterprise use but the features are nice. 4100 mah battery, Snapdragon 820 with 4GB of RAM, microSD slot etc.. Also it looks like they are building around continuum because they included a nice dock and they plan on selling a laptop shell that you can connect your phone to as well.

With that said, its still Windows 10 Mobile so they need to fix the litany of bugs and get more app support.

 

Meanwhile....Still waiting on Marshmallow for my s6 edge.

 

I think Samsung released the update but I think TMobile has been the only carrier to actually make any sort of announcement. In the US, carriers still dictate update schedules for Android devices so I imagine you'll see Marshmallow within the next few weeks.

 

It seems like the rollout should have begun on or about the 15th. I can't even begin to understand the logistics in rolling out these updates. It's driving me crazy!

 

Did anyone see if the LG g5 battery is hot swappable?

 

Even though Samsung made the announcement, this is ultimately at the discretion of the wireless carriers. In general, all four carriers have their own certification process and they wont release the update package until that process is done.

For example, the carriers (with the exception of Sprint) do certifications around VoLTE (voice over LTE) which actually takes months to test for. Granted I'm sure they started a while ago but they can't start until Samsung delivers a final Android 6.0 build of Touchwiz. They also do general certification around basic features and other carrier specific features like wi-fi calling.

Some carriers tend to have longer certification periods than others. Verizon for example has a very thorough testing process. Also, TMobile has the most custom features of any carrier so they have extra items to test for. So its not unexpected for carriers to take a little longer to release the update.

 

^^^ yep. what he said. i recommend buying international variants, but making sure your carriers bands are supported. iphone, international variants depending on band support, or nexus. all three are better off.

 

It is not. The phone turns off.

 

That's disappointing. =(

 

So the S7 and S7 Edge will be out soon - what about the S7+?

 

Samsung is "trying" to cut down on the number of flagship variants.

The S7 Edge is now the larger phablet companion to the S7. I presume they'll keep the Note series so that will be the phablet with a standard screen.

Before we had 4 phones (S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+ and Note 5). They killed one of the Edge phones and kept the larger version this time around. I think the S6 Edge+ ended up greatly outselling the standard S6 Edge so they just went ahead and axed the smaller S6 Edge.

 

Hey, it does seem to be an issue with 3rd party apps not be able to utilize the notification light. I can't get it to work either. I googled a bit, but can't find a solution.

As for your second problem, you can enable textra (or whatever app you are using) as 'important' under notification management, then you'll get a little icon on the notification bar whenever you get a text.

To get to the notification manger: pull down from top to open notification center > click on upper square symbol on the upper right > select textra and set it as important.