It worked on the iPad without Flash, because the site gave my iPad an HTML 5 version. The same site on the Samsung Captive gave me Flash content, and inside the black flash video window, it gave me the "Flash Player upgrade required" button.

Bruno spin or not, I've so far had better luck watching videos online using my iPhone 4 or iPad then I have the Samsung Captivate. Call it Apple brainwashing if you want, but many sites have indeed moved to supporting HTML 5 video, but usually only for the iDevices. Kinda wish they would do so for Safari and Chrome too.

And I'm pretty certain at this point the phone has some version of Flash running, possibly Flash Lite. I just can't figure out how to tell for sure. I've now seen a number of places where a Flash logo appears and a small 9, indicating to me the phone is trying, and failing to load the SWF. Flash Lite has been out for ages on phones, it's just mostly worthless since it isn't anywhere close to supporting desktop Flash.

And I'm 100% certain that, as usual, this is another case of something that Samsung has put on the phone. Android 2.1 doesn't have any Flash whatsoever. Before 2.2, you could get a few browsers that would handle Flash video for you, but there was no Flash.

In 2.2, though, I don't have to worry about any of it, because Flash works, and without issue for me. It's like - shocker! - I can browse the freaking internet!

Wait, so up until 2.2, the Nexus One wouldn't let you browse the internet? I was able to do that in 2007 with my iPhone :-P

Joking aside, has having Flash really made a difference for you browsing now that you have had it for a little while? If I remember right, Bitt indicated he turned it off. I still don't honestly see the usefulness of it on a mobile myself. The type of browsing I do on the go is usually idle reading of a few news related sites, maybe a comic or two, and possibly videos linked off social networks. The only time the lack of Flash affects me slightly is on the iPad, with it being a larger form factor device, it's been natural to do a bit more browsing on it. Being that there isn't a viable Froyo Android tablet to compete with the iPad yet, I still see enough pressure out there to get more sites to move to standards adopted by Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Google and Opera instead of Adobe. For a lot of people, Flash means video, and the iPad works fine with video off most sites, including the big ones like ABC, CBS, Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and others.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/30/samsung-confirms-galaxy-s-will-get-froyo-in-september/

Hrm. Droids are getting it soonish, same with HTC phones, but Samsung, maybe late September. Gogo fragmentation. Not sure what I want to do now. I somewhat doubt 2.2 will address the major day to day issues I'm still having with the platform, like a working e-mail client.

Would forwarding your email to a Gmail account and using the Gmail client resolve that ?

Samsung may just beat Google's release of Android 3.0 out the door with their update to 2.2. I won't hold my breath though.

IMO, the problem with current OEM's treatment of Android is they're simply using it as they would any other proprietary OS to populate what they're treating as otherwise disposable handsets. They're not showing any signs that they're in it for the long term from either a hardware nor software perspective. They're not building a solid brand identity nor platform. They're continuing down the commodity path and that's why Apple is going to not only continue to slaughter them in revenues, but do so by an ever increasing margin.

Things are going to really be divided when many of these Android "proponents" start shipping Windows phones in a few months.

Nope. I'd violate IT security policies at work if I forwarded on my e-mail there. For home, it would be somewhat doable, but I'd have to migrate 10+ years of e-mail and folder structure, and still somehow send e-mail through my server if I want to keep my anti spam strategy in place.

Does the Best Videos 2010 thread crash the browser for any of the other Android users here? Tried reading it at lunch, and it just crashes every time.

Also, GPS is borked again, at lunch it said I was 1.1 km away from where I was when trying to check in via Gowalla. Kept the maps app up on the drive back to work, and it only locked on to my position after 5 minutes, right as we were pulling into the parking garage.

I'm really leaning towards just returning this phone early. Most of the posts here from Matt and others seem to be pointing the finger towards Samsung as the problem. Maybe I will reconsider the Evo once Sprint decides to call me. Any thoughts on going that route? My main concern there when entertaining that idea earlier was the battery life.

Ha! Well, you got me there!


Doesn't crash for me. The entire thread loads, followed a moment later by every embedded Youtube video. I can click on any of them to make it start playing.


Completely unrelated to anything we're talking about here, but one of the several reasons I stopped using Foursquare was that every single time I launched it it would not give me the business I wanted to check into. This had nothing to do with the phone or GPS, either. For example, if I was checking into the Glory Days Grill near my home, when I bring up Foursquare it would list the Micro Center, the Safeway, the cleaners, the Michael's, and almost every other store in the shopping center. Then, lets say I wanted to check into Micro Center. At that point it won't list Micro Center, and it will list other stores in the shopping center including Glory Days Grill! I'm sure a portion of this can be attributed to Murphy's Law or something, but I would experience this problem about 90% of the time I tried to check into places.

Anyway, sorry for the brief rant that has nothing to do with anything, I just had to get that off my chest...


From what I've heard, the Sense UI is the best of the skins, though it has its own performance issues. At this point, it pains me, but I don't know what phone to recommend.

I was listening to This Week in Google today, and they were saying that apparently it's very simple to root the Droid X now, and that while this doesn't mean that you can put a new ROM on the phone, you can remove the software that was locked onto into the phone, like the Motorola skin and any Verizon apps (if any). From what I've heard, the Droid X sounds like a really great phone.

Oh, those checkboxes are different from the normal Android checkboxes. The normal ones are medium-to-light gray. Unchecked ones have the "empty slot". Checked ones have a green checkmark. Disabled ones have a flat appearance as opposed to the regular ones' slightly convex shiny appearance.

One of Android's features is the ability to apply styles to UI elements. It sounds like Samsung may have done that across the board.

I'm going to be very attentive to Droid news in the weeks ahead.
I'm torn between the Droid 2 and the Droid X.
It makes no sense to go for the original Droid. About the only thing it has going for it is the lack of a skin. Tom's skin problems are quite worrisome (but perhaps staying with Motorola would be not as badTM).
The Droid 2, it seems, has this e-fuse to keep rooters from preparing a 'clean' unit for themselves.
I'm not sure I need a pull-out keyboard, so Droid X would be the answer for me in that case.

At any rate, I'm not leaving Verizon any time soon. I'd also like to stick with a Motorola phone.

Either there's something weird going on with your phone, or you're oddly misinterpreting the UI.

When in the full app list, you can press and hold an icon to put it on one of the main launcher screens. When you do this, the UI switches back to the main screen so you can place it. At this point, though, you're at the same position as if the icon has been on the screen to begin with. You can move it wherever you want, including to the trashcan to delete it from the screen.

It does not appear to be. I've never seen folders presented like that. On my client, folders are accessible via a menu option.

I don't have notifications turned on, though. Sorry.

Ok, so that is basically whats going on. Why have the trashcan appear then if it doesn't do anything, until after I've placed the icon onto the main screen? To me, a trash can means delete something, but yet it doesn't delete the app, only the icon and only after it's been placed. Part of this may be the Samsung launcher, as it does appear different then the stock Android one.

I deleted it, but only because the install is so freaking huge and I'm (apparently) obsessed with packing as many apps onto the phone as possible.

If that wasn't a concern, I definitely would have left it installed, especially since there's a click-to-activate option.

But it does do something. If you dropped the icon anywhere else, it would be placed on the main launch screen. It's the place you drop the icon if you don't want it on your main launch screen, regardless of where you started dragging it from.

Also no crash for me, and the embedded videos are links to the YouTube web site, which launches the dedicated YouTube app to play the video, since I don't have Flash installed.

There are (at least) two alternative browsers for Android: Dolphin and xScope. There are free versions of both. I'd be curious to know if those crash.

Ok, I see what your saying, and the trash can basically means "oh, oops, I didn't mean to press and hold this icon and move it to a main screen" when the icon wasn't already on a main screen. This still seems really strange to me to represent an "undo my accidental press and hold" with a trash can. When I didn't know that press and hold moved icons from the master list to a home screen, I assumed the trash can meant what it does on desktop OSes, ie Delete.

Home a little earlier then normal, due to an event I'm attending later. Battery life is much better today, at 66% charge left. And I think I know why. AIM wasn't signed in today, seems I forgot to restart it after a reboot of the phone. I guess I shot myself in the foot because I did the same thing I did on my iPhone for a while. I used the official AIM client from AOL. On the iPhone, and iPad it never kills the battery. But clearly it's doing something on Android that takes 40-50% of a charge by running it for 8-12 hours. Guess I'll have to investigate some other way of being on AIM now.

Oh, and the Battery usage screen never indicated AIM was anywhere near the top. It tended to show up below Google Listen, and it always listed the Screen entry as the main battery user. Highly misleading and really useless to me now that I know it can't even properly identify the major component causing power loss.

You could convince your friends and such to not use AIM and switch to Google Talk. I have zero issues with the talk client and I've found that people that require me to talk to them on AIM (AOL, blech) generally aren't worth talking to.

Doubtful I'd get even a portion of my list to move to Google Talk. And overall, I still prefer AIM to it anyhow. I like Google Talk for being a jabber based service, but overall I've seen much better reliability and uptime from AIM. Dropping AIM would mean dropping ~70 people off my list. And thats not going to happen just to keep a phone that ultimately has been a huge disappointment.

Tried to use Google Navigation again tonight. Worked fine for leading me to a friends house. I then spent 10 minutes there before we headed out somewhere. In that time, the phone dropped off the data network and wouldn't reconnect. Rebooted to resolve that issue, then tried to navigate to our destination. 15 minutes later we were there, and the phone was still lost.

Left the phone in the car, since I figured it wouldn't be too happy in Lake Travis (Saw Jaws tonight while sitting on an intertube in the lake). After the movie tried navigation again, and no GPS lock occurred until 10 minutes later.

I did want to try Android for a full month, but realistically, I need a working phone including GPS. I'll likely take this back this weekend, and write up a final summary of sorts of things I did like (and yes, there were some benefits I saw), along with the outstanding issues that would need to be addressed in some way before I try this again. A coworker picked up an Evo tonight, I'm curious to see what he thinks about it on Monday.

Yeah, that's a terrible thing for an operating system to do.

Maybe try one of the other IM apps? eBuddy, Fring, Meebo, Palringo, Nimbuzz, among others.

Sounds to me like your biggest issue is with the GPS. Which sucks, because I can assure you that the GPS on my N1 is awesome. That doesn't solve your problem, though.

Sounds to me like his biggest issue is with the Samsung. I haven't experienced any of the issues he's seen with my N1 which leads me to believe that not all Android experiences are the same. Which sucks.

Went over to compare the screen against Caleb's Nexus One, and I'm not sure what the Super part is all about. Screen readability for both appeared the same in sunlight. As far as readability of the OLED screen, it is a bit worse then LCD on the iPhone 3GS and 4 under sunlight, but not terrible. The biggest issue I could find was more the glare the screen has at certain angles. Still seemed usable enough outside though.

One odd issue I did notice is banding in the blue color on a website, that Caleb wasn't getting. Also, I did notice dithering artifacts here and there. Handing the phone to someone else at work who owns a Droid also noticed it without any prompting, so there is some quirkiness there for some reason. Dealbreaker either way? Not for me, but the Droid owner did say he wouldn't buy it for that reason. I was impressed with the blacks on the phone though. It was dark enough, that black on the screen just seamlessly blended into the black of the bezel.

I did find conformation in a video from Samsung showing the devices at some trade show confirming they did customize the mail program to offer a Unified Inbox, so odds are the folder rework was their handy work too.

AT&T now has the phone back, and I've woken the iPhone 3GS back up from it's nap. Had the GPS worked reliably this weekend, I would have been a bit more willing to keep the phone at least for the full return period window. Today I tried getting a GPS lock for an hour with the phone sitting next to an iPad that picked up accurate GPS location in 30 seconds after a cold boot.


This is why I'm more leaning towards just not even trying Android on another phone at this point, because I can't try pure Android. Every single phone for sale in the US, with the exception of the initial Droid has modifications. And with the Droid set to not receive 3.0 (due to not meeting minimum CPU requirements), I'm not going to invest in a phone that can't even run the newest OS a year after it's release. By not having a consistent experience across devices, it makes it much harder for people like me to even receive support from fellow Android owners. Most of this thread has been "I don't have that problem, or mine doesn't work like that", and ultimately that just had lead to more frustration on my side.

Even ignoring the Apple iPhone ecosystem, it seems like other smartphone platforms are able to provide a very consistent experience. Palm did for ages with their old OS and still does with WebOS. RIM has done the same with Blackberries, with the exceptions of the ones designed around full touch interfaces. Symbian seemed pretty consistent too. Windows Mobile had some fragmentation issues, but not a ton. Android though is suffering badly, and someone at work I think put it best with "Android is the Linux Desktop for mobile phones". Open, and no clear direction with so many parties pulling it in different directions all the time. While this might be great for the geeks out there, it's not great for providing a good and solid user experience.

That announcement wasn't official. Somebody was presenting rumour as fact. Google later tweeted that the requirements are recommended and not minimum.

Ahh, ok. Well, at least we know Android is popular enough to have the same style of inaccurate rumors as Apple these days :-)

That seems like a fair assessment, and a fair list of concerns. Sucks ass about the lousy GPS, though, as that's most definitely not an Android problem, but solely hardware.

Also, I know that as of Android 2.2, the default mail app has a unified inbox. I don't recall if that was there before then. I'm guessing not.

Seems like it would have been more cost-effective for Samsung to get 2.2 running on the phone rather than wasting their time making pointless additions to 2.1, doesn't it?

It has been said (and I don't recall if this was a rumor or from Google directly) that the bundled base applications are to be moved out of the base OS and into the market. That way, even if the phone vendor decides to replace it with something else, the user can get the base app if they want it. Hopefully, if true, that includes the Launcher application, so that people can get rid of the vendor's "skin" if desired.

Surely that would be easily defeated by the vendors, they get to build the OS how they want to don't then ?