Galaxy S4 - Watch Thread....

Ok, let me preface this by saying I have not read 99% of this thread before.

I received my s4 and note 2 yesterday and have been playing with it as much as I can. One of the only things that has bothered me about these phones was the fact that the keyboard doesn't allow you to autocorrect to the highlighted word when you press space. My HTC EVO 4G and 3D had this feature. I did a little googling and it seems that a lot of people use the swiftkey keyboard in place of the Samsung one. What are you all using to deal with the lack of auto-correct on space?
 
I havent used android (on my own phone) without swiftkey in over a year, cannot live without it, if you do not own it I highly recommend it.
 
W.Feather said:
I havent used android (on my own phone) without swiftkey in over a year, cannot live without it, if you do not own it I highly recommend it.
Click to expand...

Thanks. Both my wife and I are on the trial right now. I'm guessing it will start giving me annoying messages within a week or two telling me to upgrade. I guess for $3.99, it's completely worth it to remove the annoyance. I have two issues with swiftkey though:

1) The row of numbers that are at the top of the Samsung keyboard are now gone.

and

2) The swiftkey keyboard seems to randomly give me double spaces between words.
 
You could try to get used to its idiosyncrasies or try Kii which will let you customize what you want (but less bazaars prediction compared to Swiftkey)
 
Does anyone know of any good cases for the S4 that would hold a stylus well. Bacially I am stuck between the note 2 and S4, I do not want to wait for the note 3 but I want the stylus, Samsungs phones seem to be capable of detecting a smaller tipped capacitive stylus than others so I might just try to make an S4 work like a note 2. ( I do realize it will not be pressure sensitive).

Ideally I would have a case that would hold a stylus that acts as a stylus and also has a pen on the reverse side and is no longer than the phone.
 
ChronoReverse said:
You could try to get used to its idiosyncrasies or try Kii which will let you customize what you want (but less bazaars prediction compared to Swiftkey)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion, but Swiftkey ended up being ok for me. After I got used to its idiosyncrasies, I'm trying better than I was on my old evo... was worth the $3.99 upgrade for me.

New question: When I copy picture files from my S4 to my hard drive, there quite a few files that I have to rotate. Most of the ones I have to rotate are the ones that are vertically oriented. I could swear that they are of the correct orientation on my phone before I copy it over. Has anyone else experienced this? Am I doing anything wrong?
 
its because the phones resolution is oposite of your monitor

Monitor
1920x1080

Phone
1080x1920
 
I am looking for a case that holds a stylus anyone know one?
 
Trimlock said:
its because the phones resolution is oposite of your monitor

Monitor
1920x1080

Phone
1080x1920
Click to expand...

Hmm.. my main monitor is now 2560 x 1440 but I feel like that has nothing to do with the picture not displaying oriented correctly on the transfer.
 
We moved one phone in our family to the S4, previously we had HTC phones. One thing I miss about HTC was the nice compact 1x4 widget that showed the time and weather as well as getting you to all the watch function IE alarms stop watch etc... Is there any such widget for the S4? Also these new phones without search buttons suck.
 
rudy said:
We moved one phone in our family to the S4, previously we had HTC phones. One thing I miss about HTC was the nice compact 1x4 widget that showed the time and weather as well as getting you to all the watch function IE alarms stop watch etc... Is there any such widget for the S4? Also these new phones without search buttons suck.
Click to expand...

You can find tons of clock widgets on the playstore for free. For instance - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=factory.widgets.SenseAnalogThin
 
rudy said:
We moved one phone in our family to the S4, previously we had HTC phones. One thing I miss about HTC was the nice compact 1x4 widget that showed the time and weather as well as getting you to all the watch function IE alarms stop watch etc... Is there any such widget for the S4? Also these new phones without search buttons suck.
Click to expand...

I've been using Beautiful Widget with a Sense 1.x skin for the last few years, even on my old HTC device. I preferred it over the HTC clock/weather widget.
 
I just picked up a Galaxy S4 with Fido ( Came from Rogers shit plan with my own bought Galaxy Nexus *best phone ever*) And im really liking the S4 its very sharp, the camera is wicked and the resolution and colours are awesome compared to my Nexus :p. But i do want to flash to a pure google rom but so far im getting used to touchwiz and there are some advantages over the pure google experience

Overall im very happy :D

Edit: It was a toss up between HTC ONE and a S4, but the S4 had more features and a better review.
 
Oh my gosh I cant believe my thread has hit almost 41,000 views lol... who'da thought it possible? GS4 is amazing little phone. Cant wait on the Note 3 to come out.

p.s. I am well aware there are other threads that are far greater but for me this is a wow ... normally I would never have started a thread that garnered this many hits.
 
Reposting this from XDA in here because I hate making new threads :p.

My wife has had her 32GB GS4 for almost a week now and has been pretty happy with it overall. It came with the VRUAME7 (fixed bootloader exploit) update on it :(, so I haven't bothered trying to root/ROM it for her (I wanted to put a stock Samsung ROM on it to restore Blocking Mode and fix all the crappy Verizon modifications/bloat to the software, but it seems that's impossible now). But I have found some bugs/issues with it while playing with it and want to see if anyone else here can replicate them:

1. Last night, her phone started consistently rebooting every few mins. I kept hearing her phone do the little chime/reboot sounds and finally decided to investigate it before I got up for work. Turns out that the Play Store was setup to auto-update on WiFi (which was on and connected to my home network) and Pinterest was trying to update. But upon installing the update, the phone would reboot every time. I tried uninstalling it and doing a fresh install, but it still reboots every time I try to install Pinterest. Every other app updates/installs fine. Pretty odd.. can anyone else install this on their GS4 without issue? I didn't have a prob with it on my (rooted/ROM'd) Note 2. I even tried installing it from the Amazon app store instead and it still rebooted the phone upon trying to install. So I'm not sure if this is an issue with the app or phone. She loves this app, so it's crappy that she can't install it now.

2. In the camera app, when I expand the settings on the right (in portrait mode, top in landscape) and tap the mic icon to enable it, then tap it again to disable it, it crashes every time. - FIXED - Just figured this out as I was typing it; I had S-Voice disabled in the app manager (along with all the other Verizon/Samsung bloat) and that's what the microphone icon was for (voice commands). I guess I'll leave that enabled for now, she may actually like some of the functionality it gives.

3. Is it normal for the phone to get really warm while you're using it for anything? I can just be poking around the (Nova) launcher and the settings and it seems like the top half of the phone gets really warm, almost hot. My Note 2 doesn't do this at all unless I'm playing a demanding game or downloading something constantly. I was also just messing around on her phone while I had it plugged into my PC and despite it being plugged it, it was still discharging at a decent rate while I was just poking around on it. I know USB mode makes it charge much slower at ~550 mAh, but I wouldn't think it would still discharge while I'm not doing anything too demanding; I know my Note 2 doesn't do that unless I'm doing something really data/CPU/GPU intensive. I would think that the GS4 would be more power efficient than my Note 2 with it being on a newer/faster SoC. Is this not the case? I use System Panel on my phone(s) to keep tabs on runaway processes and I'm not seeing anything like that on her phone, CPU usage is staying pretty low on all cores.

Thanks in advance for any help!
 
Last edited:
T4rd said:
Reposting this from XDA in here because I hate making new threads :p.

My wife has had her 32GB GS4 for almost a week now and has been pretty happy with it overall. It came with the VRUAME7 (fixed bootloader exploit) update on it :(, so I haven't bothered trying to root/ROM it for her (I wanted to put a stock Samsung ROM on it to restore Blocking Mode and fix all the crappy Verizon modifications/bloat to the software, but it seems that's impossible now). But I have found some bugs/issues with it while playing with it and want to see if anyone else here can replicate them:

1. Last night, her phone started consistently rebooting every few mins. I kept hearing her phone do the little chime/reboot sounds and finally decided to investigate it before I got up for work. Turns out that the Play Store was setup to auto-update on WiFi (which was on and connected to my home network) and Pinterest was trying to update. But upon installing the update, the phone would reboot every time. I tried uninstalling it and doing a fresh install, but it still reboots every time I try to install Pinterest. Every other app updates/installs fine. Pretty odd.. can anyone else install this on their GS4 without issue? I didn't have a prob with it on my (rooted/ROM'd) Note 2. I even tried installing it from the Amazon app store instead and it still rebooted the phone upon trying to install. So I'm not sure if this is an issue with the app or phone. She loves this app, so it's crappy that she can't install it now.

2. In the camera app, when I expand the settings on the right (in portrait mode, top in landscape) and tap the mic icon to enable it, then tap it again to disable it, it crashes every time. - FIXED - Just figured this out as I was typing it; I had S-Voice disabled in the app manager (along with all the other Verizon/Samsung bloat) and that's what the microphone icon was for (voice commands).

3. Is it normal for the phone to get really warm while you're using it for anything? I can just be poking around the (Nova) launcher and the settings and it seems like the top half of the phone gets really warm, almost hot. My Note 2 doesn't do this at all unless I'm playing a demanding game or downloading something constantly. I was also just messing around on her phone while I had it plugged into my PC and despite it being plugged it, it was still discharging at a decent rate while I was just poking around on it. I know USB mode makes it charge much slower at ~550 mAh, but I wouldn't think it would still discharge while I'm not doing anything too demanding; I know my Note 2 doesn't do that unless I'm doing something really data/CPU/GPU intensive. I would think that the GS4 would be more power efficient than my Note 2 with it being on a newer/faster SoC. Is this not the case?

Thanks in advance for any help!
Click to expand...

I have a GS4 with AT&T - I contacted Samsung on Twitter when I had issues - and they were quick to respond - the only thing they told me to do is to shut down the phone normally, take out the battery for about 2 minutes, and then pop the battery back in and turn it on. It surprisingly fixed the issues I was facing, as stupid as that sounded. You could try that, and then also just reach out to them on Twitter.
 
Fahim said:
I have a GS4 with AT&T - I contacted Samsung on Twitter when I had issues - and they were quick to respond - the only thing they told me to do is to shut down the phone normally, take out the battery for about 2 minutes, and then pop the battery back in and turn it on. It surprisingly fixed the issues I was facing, as stupid as that sounded. You could try that, and then also just reach out to them on Twitter.
Click to expand...

Well that seems to have fixed the Pinterest installing issue. I got it to install now! Thanks!

For now it doesn't seem to be warming up as much (still a tad warm though) or draining battery as fast either! Crazy.. I hope that doesn't become a reoccurring problem/solution though.

Were you having similar issues with your GS4 too?
 
Last edited:
T4rd said:
Well that seems to have fixed the Pinterest installing issue. I got it to install now! Thanks!

For now it doesn't seem to be warming up as much (still a tad warm though) or draining battery as fast either! Crazy.. I hope that doesn't become a reoccurring problem/solution though.

Were you having similar issues with your GS4 too?
Click to expand...

It was a while a go - but yeah i remember something to this effect. My GS4 running pretty smooth now. Enjoy!
 
Fahim said:
It was a while a go - but yeah i remember something to this effect. My GS4 running pretty smooth now. Enjoy!
Click to expand...

Cool. Well it seems since I did this, Google Services has been murdering her battery. Today it about killed it from a full charge in 4-5 hours and used 68% of her battery. It only used like 1m30s of CPU, but it kept her phone awake for almost 2 hours according to the battery stats. I did some of the suggestions in this thread and hopefully it will help now. :eek:

I don't think I've ever had this issue on my Note 2, as of today, Google Services has used 5% of my battery, used 22 seconds of CPU and kept awake for 9m38s. :confused:
 
My GS4 is pretty darn nice...even not having read this entire thread.
 
Anyone know how to replace the outside silver frame? i seemed to have dropped a few times and it's a little rough around the edges now. I wonder if it's a simple job to replace.
There are a few guides out there on ifixit http://www.ifixit.com/Device/Samsung_Galaxy_S4
But I'm not event sure what part i'm trying to even replace - is it the antenna?
 
could anyone please confirm if the SG4 can playback FLAC music files? thanks!
 
xlcr said:
could anyone please confirm if the SG4 can playback FLAC music files? thanks!
Click to expand...

Do you mean using the stock player? because there are plenty of apps on android that will play FLAC. I guarantee you can play FLAC files using a GS4.
 
thx cbutters, looking into GS4 DAC's.. seems there might be performance issues between int'l vs US i9500/i9505 versions and whatever Wolfson/Qualcomm 8740 DAC is in there; in addition to, only capable of up to 44kHz playback, reported buggy camera(?) and phone heating up issues; but, i'm still trying to confirm all this..
 
My wife's GS4 has serious issues with my old 32GB SD card. It worked fine in my Note 2 until I got a 64GB card. So when my wife got her GS4 recently, I put my old 32 GB card in it and it freaks out. It constantly mounts and unmounts the card and eventually says the card is damaged. But I can take it out and put it in my Note 2 and it has no issues reading it. I tried formatting the card from the phone and my PC several times. It's a Sandisk class 10 SD card, so it's a decent card. Not sure what to do about it.
 
rudy said:
Does the 64GB card work fine in the GS4?
Click to expand...

I haven't tried my 64GB card, but I tried a couple of our old 16GB cards and it has no issues with them. So it only has issues with the 32GB card, which works fine on my Note 2 and on my PCs. :confused:
 
I exchanged my LG G2 for the Galaxy S4, and couldn't be happier so far. Couldn't get comfortable with the G2.

In the past year, I've had a lot of phones; HTC One X, Note 2, Nexus 4, G2, and now the S4. To me the S4 feels best in hand, just a great size, with beautiful screen. The S4 is lightweight, and feels very comfortable in the hand with a case, I like the design of the black one it looks classy and cool. Not sure why so many people call this phone cheap and lame looking ? Once you have a cool looking case on it, the phone looks fantastic.

I just rooted it last night using the Kingo method, no ROM's yet, just stock, and deleted a ton of ATT and Samsung crap bloat, also installed Greenify, DroidWall, and running Nova launcher with the Axis icon theme. We'll see how battery life goes ? Trying to install AdFree but it won't connect to the server to actually activate it, been reading that's an ongoing issue the last day in other threads.

The G2 was nice, but just too heavy and large, as lame as that sounds. The thin bezels are almost too thin, afraid to crack damage the phone too easily. Plus 5.2" is just over that borderline of screen size I am comfortable with. The S4 is as big a phone I want, that's the limit, I don't want anything larger, but also nothing smaller, I think the S4 is just the right screen size, thinness and weight.

Overall I like the S4 a lot so far, more than the G2 as crazy at that sounds. And find the S4 more enjoyable than my Nexus 4. Only bummer is that I am on the MF3 - Mother Fukker firmware, so I am limited on ROM if I go that route, but so far happy enough just rooted on stock.
 
Was your main problem the size of the g2? I have and am comfortable with the note 2 but the g2 buttons worry me. How's the battery on your s4 compare to the note 2? I am a heavy user and don't like to charge all day.
 
Skter505 said:
Was your main problem the size of the g2? I have and am comfortable with the note 2 but the g2 buttons worry me. How's the battery on your s4 compare to the note 2? I am a heavy user and don't like to charge all day.
Click to expand...

I have a Note 2 and my wife has a GS4. My Note 2 has considerably better battery life over her GS4, but her GS4 still usually makes it through the day as long as she's not staying on it all day (which she's been doing a lot of lately actually). When she first got the phone, she charged it up and waited for me to come home to cut her SIM card down, install it and set her phone up for her. We pretty much stayed on it from 100% to 1% customizing it for her and it got over 5 hours of screen-on time, so I was pretty impressed. But when she watches videos/Vines and plays Clash of Clans on it throughout the day, it usually only manages about 3-3.5 hours of screen-on time. Standby time was pretty bad at the beginning, but I found that for some reason, enabling carrier location services (where it uses WiFi and Cell towers to find your location) causes an excessive amount of wake locks while the phone is asleep, causing battery life to suffer a lot while the phone's not even in use. But since disabling that, it gets pretty good standby time. This bug might be exclusive to the Verizon GS4 though. Now that I think of it, I read that an updated came out for the Verizon GS4 a week or so ago, it may have fixed this.
 
T4rd said:
My wife's GS4 has serious issues with my old 32GB SD card. It worked fine in my Note 2 until I got a 64GB card. So when my wife got her GS4 recently, I put my old 32 GB card in it and it freaks out. It constantly mounts and unmounts the card and eventually says the card is damaged. But I can take it out and put it in my Note 2 and it has no issues reading it. I tried formatting the card from the phone and my PC several times. It's a Sandisk class 10 SD card, so it's a decent card. Not sure what to do about it.
Click to expand...

Is it the ultra model? Some were recalled you might want to contact them for a free replacement.
 
Holy cow :) I had no idea how great the battery life would be on the S4 :D

First day, after 15h 44m unplugged, still had 44% battery life, and that was with 3h 22m On Screen time. Was on 4g LTE all day, no WiFi yesterday. So looks like I can get 5.5h to 6h On Screen time :eek:
 
elzeus said:
Is it the ultra model? Some were recalled you might want to contact them for a free replacement.
Click to expand...

It is indeed the Ultra model, so I might ask them about that. It's just odd that the card works fine in everything else besides her GS4, but then other cards work fine in her GS4, hah. Thanks!
 
I would say this is pretty good battery life :). I should be able to get 5.5h to 6h On Screen time on this phone. That's nearly 50% better than my Nexus 4. No way I would trade this phone in for the Nexus 5 only having a fixed 2,300mAh battery.

Only other phone coming out I would upgrade to is the Galaxy S5 due out in 4 months in February, with metal body like the HTC One and iPhone...the next gen Snapdragon 1,000 processor...a 2,800-3,000mAh battery...4GB RAM...all new screen technology, no longer AMOLED...and redesigned Touchwiz, based off Android 4.4 Kit Kat.

I was on the 4G LTE network majority of the time, only on WiFi a few hours.

attachment.php


attachment.php
 
Last edited:
Zorachus said:
Only other phone coming out I would upgrade to is the Galaxy S5 due out in 4 months in February, with metal body like the HTC One and iPhone...the next gen Snapdragon 1,000 processor...a 2,800-3,000mAh battery...4GB RAM...all new screen technology, no longer AMOLED...and redesigned Touchwiz, based off Android 4.4 Kit Kat.
Click to expand...

Dood, you should totally make a thread with these confirmed specs! lol :rolleyes:
 
Zorachus said:
I would say this is pretty good battery life :). I should be able to get 5.5h to 6h On Screen time on this phone. That's nearly 50% better than my Nexus 4. No way I would trade this phone in for the Nexus 5 only having a fixed 2,300mAh battery.

Only other phone coming out I would upgrade to is the Galaxy S5 due out in 4 months in February, with metal body like the HTC One and iPhone...the next gen Snapdragon 1,000 processor...a 2,800-3,000mAh battery...4GB RAM...all new screen technology, no longer AMOLED...and redesigned Touchwiz, based off Android 4.4 Kit Kat.

I was on the 4G LTE network majority of the time, only on WiFi a few hours.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=2349221&d=1382702694[IMG]

[IMG]http://forum.xda-developers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=2349225&d=1382702706[IMG][/QUOTE]

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v337/computerbox/Screenshot_2013-10-24-17-52-36_zpsf5e5d38c.png

CB34 e-peen >> Zorachus e-peen
Click to expand...
 
T4rd said:
Dood, you should totally make a thread with these confirmed specs! lol :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Gotta love my future hardware forecasting :D FYI, I am half joking when I write this stuff, but I'm typically not far either from reality.

It's a no brainer the Galaxy S5 will run the Snapdragon 1,000 processor, or whatever the next gen Qualcomm chip will be named. Most likely will have the same 3GB RAM as the Note 3 as a base, possibly more. And rumors of Samsung saying the S5 will be their first phone with a brand new design, moving away from plastic, and trying a metal design like the HTC One or iPhone, as well as moving away from AMOLED screen tech.
 
Just installed the 4.3 OTA on my wife's (Verizon) GS4. MUCH better so far, even if just for the restored Blocking Mode and dismissable WiFi notification. But it also seems to have fixed the SD card issues she was having with her phone that I described a few posts ago in this thread, at least so far it hasn't unmounted the card randomly anymore like it was doing before and I was able to take pics and store them on the card.

Phone seems just as smooth as before, which I never noticed much stuttering on 4.2.2 anyways. She was already getting 4-5 hours minimum screen-on time before too and that was with an hour or so playing Clash of Clans, which absolutely murders your battery, not only because of its somewhat demanding graphics, but it's a cloud/online based game, so it constantly uses your WiFi/Cell radio too (basically turns your phone into a hand warmer). So hopefully this 4.3 update doesn't make battery life worse, because I can't imagine it getting much better.
 
4.3 has monumental better memory management as well as file trimming. The benefits come from prolonged use, you shouldn't see any degradation in performance as the device ages.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top