I have had an iphone 3gs for a while now (my own). Work just got me a samsung captivate and stuck me with the job of being designated hitter for android mobile support.
(For anyone interested, all the bitches you see in captivate reviews about the GPS are justified. It's slow, sloppy, and power hungry)
I'd really like the thing to not suck. I figured you guys might be able to save me the hassle of figuring out the fixes from zero.
1) Probably the biggest gripe is marketplace. Who knew that google, the kings of search, could make something that is harder to find stuff on than the app store? Got any good 3rd party sites for finding good apps?
2) wi-fi. Most of my data use is over wi-fi, I suspect the captivate has a crappy antenna. The reception on it is worse than pretty much every other wi-fi device I own. But if by chance it's due to some OS shenanigans, I'm happy to listen to any suggestions to try improving it.
3) Battery life. Short version is it sucks. Freshly charged with 15 minute syncing, and everything disabled except 3g, it doesn't even make it 24 hours with the screen locked and me doing absolutely nothing. I cleared out the running apps with advanced task killer, so only the basic integrated functions were running. Any more suggestions? In the worst case, I set it up to use wi-fi at home, charged it at work, unhooked it and within 2 hours, it was trying to brun a hole in my pocket and telling me to plug it in again. Don't know what it was doing.
4) Calendaring. It's active sync support is similar to the iphones, which has the same problem of only syncing one calendar. However, with the iphone, there's caldav support. Which allows me to sync all the calendars I need for work. I tried one caldav app that shoves stuff into the local calendar, but it' was pretty broken with regards to recurring events. (calendar sync beta from hypermatix). It's the only thing that shows up in marketplace for caldav.
5) E-reader. I love Stanza on the iphone. Aldiko is ok, but it's ability to search online catalogs is pretty piss poor, and page turns and chapter loads are kind of laggy. Is there anything better? The screen is great, so I'd kind of like to find something just as usable.
6) Keyboard management. Swype is pretty awesome if I am writing an email. Absolutely sucks for URLs, entering passwords and other stuff (maybe it'll learn eventually, but teaching it passwords seems like a bad idea). Is there any way to swap keyboards quickly that I am missing?
(For anyone interested, all the bitches you see in captivate reviews about the GPS are justified. It's slow, sloppy, and power hungry)
I'd really like the thing to not suck. I figured you guys might be able to save me the hassle of figuring out the fixes from zero.
1) Probably the biggest gripe is marketplace. Who knew that google, the kings of search, could make something that is harder to find stuff on than the app store? Got any good 3rd party sites for finding good apps?
2) wi-fi. Most of my data use is over wi-fi, I suspect the captivate has a crappy antenna. The reception on it is worse than pretty much every other wi-fi device I own. But if by chance it's due to some OS shenanigans, I'm happy to listen to any suggestions to try improving it.
3) Battery life. Short version is it sucks. Freshly charged with 15 minute syncing, and everything disabled except 3g, it doesn't even make it 24 hours with the screen locked and me doing absolutely nothing. I cleared out the running apps with advanced task killer, so only the basic integrated functions were running. Any more suggestions? In the worst case, I set it up to use wi-fi at home, charged it at work, unhooked it and within 2 hours, it was trying to brun a hole in my pocket and telling me to plug it in again. Don't know what it was doing.
4) Calendaring. It's active sync support is similar to the iphones, which has the same problem of only syncing one calendar. However, with the iphone, there's caldav support. Which allows me to sync all the calendars I need for work. I tried one caldav app that shoves stuff into the local calendar, but it' was pretty broken with regards to recurring events. (calendar sync beta from hypermatix). It's the only thing that shows up in marketplace for caldav.
5) E-reader. I love Stanza on the iphone. Aldiko is ok, but it's ability to search online catalogs is pretty piss poor, and page turns and chapter loads are kind of laggy. Is there anything better? The screen is great, so I'd kind of like to find something just as usable.
6) Keyboard management. Swype is pretty awesome if I am writing an email. Absolutely sucks for URLs, entering passwords and other stuff (maybe it'll learn eventually, but teaching it passwords seems like a bad idea). Is there any way to swap keyboards quickly that I am missing?