(07-05-2011, 07:27 AM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]I got the phone because sometimes I'm stuck in a small cramped car for five to seven hours to drive down near New York City so I could use something to do such as browsing the web, checking my email on the go and play some games. So anywhere there is 3G coverage I can hop online even if I am going down the road in a car.
I would recommend checking out Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. Opera Mobile is currently the only GPU accelerated web browser on Android, so it has by far the smoothest zooming and scrolling.
Opera Mini is like Mobile, but rather than rendering everything on the phone, everything is rendered on one of Opera's servers, and sent back in a compressed format. You loose dynamic stuff like flash and pages can sometimes look a bit weird, but on 3G/2G data connections it can really speed things up over traditional browsers.
I noticed that Opera Mobile doesn't render some pages properly. Also it doesn't seem to support voice recognition. I think I'll stick to the built in browser for now, it's helluva fast on wireless using my Fios or 3G so I'm not really bothered. Most of the games for Android do suck from what I've seen so far, although great for wasting time, for the most part games are on rails. Is there any games for Android not on rails and are actually good? I got my emulators set up, trying to use the touch screen to play is a bit of a pain.
(07-05-2011, 03:21 PM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]I noticed that Opera Mobile doesn't render some pages properly. Also it doesn't seem to support voice recognition. I think I'll stick to the built in browser for now, it's helluva fast on wireless using my Fios or 3G so I'm not really bothered. Most of the games for Android do suck from what I've seen so far, although great for wasting time, for the most part games are on rails. Is there any games for Android not on rails and are actually good? I got my emulators set up, trying to use the touch screen to play is a bit of a pain.
If your looking for more traditional genres (that is, not the mobile casual games like Angry Birds), Gameloft has some ok-ish stuff but you have to buy the games from their site since most aren't in the market. They make shameless clones of games on bigger platforms, for example NOVA(Halo knockoff) and Sacred Odyssey (Zelda knockoff). I say ok-ish because they're surprisingly playable, but incredibly generic. Unfortunately they dont have much competition, making them the best traditional game maker by default.
As for Opera, yeah, it does render pages a bit funky at times. But thats one of the great things about Android. Unlike other platforms, you can choose whether you want a browser that has better compatibility, better speed, specific features, etc. If you like the stock browser, then by all means stick with it.
All good things must come to an end unfortunately. After seeing what my first bill was going to be I couldn't afford it ($164 for my first bill) and it's currently too much with my Fios to afford. I'm waiting on some money I am owed, hopefully I can buy an even better phone, activate it on any network I want without being bound to a contract.
Thankfully I bought the Galaxy Prevail, while it's not a top-of-the-line phone, it was $150.00 out the door without a contact. I can use it with my home/work wifi and hook it up anytime for $50.00 whenever I please with no surprise bills. I have another phone for everyday use anyway for now.
Your first bill will always be expensive, that's all the random activation and surcharges that Verizon tacks on. Be warned and Verizon is known to do this, Verizon will charge you extra for just about anything. From changing a ringtone, to how you pay your bill each month. If you look online, you can find discounts that you can use no problem.
A lot of sprint devices can be flashed to Boost mobile, which right now the current phone that has the best hardware that can be flashed to boost mobile is the Samsung Epic, which with a bad ESN can be found cheap for $200 or so. Unlimited everything starts at $50 for Boost mobile, and if you pay your bill on time within 6-12 months I believe your bill will be $35 a month.
That, or if you want to do Virgin mobile with cheaper plans the Motorola Triumph when it comes out. I'll compare it to the Droid X.
1. As far as we know, the Triumph will not have an encrypted bootloader. This is a positive because root depends a lot on this, as well as custom roms and recoveries to make the most out of the hardware.
2. The Triumph's SoC the Snapdragon Scorpion is not as fast in the gpu part of the TI OMAP SoC inside the Droid X, but not much of Android is hardware accelerated anyway.
3. The Triumph comes with 2.2 froyo, which is not bad but there are some needed improvements in Gingerbread. EXT4 file format is a big one.
4. NO MOTOBLUR!!!!!!
5.The screen on the Triumph is .2 inches smaller than the X.
Yuck for bills and contracts, I stay away from any of that when it comes to mobile phones.
I use something called cash card and load a small sum on that for ringing.
It's rather convenient and saves me lot's of money from bills and contracts since I seldom call from my mobile anyway.
Yeah, the smartphone supercharges are really stupid. I actually wanted to buy mine without a data plan and primarily use wifi, but no carrier where I live allows that. At least, none with decent coverage.
(07-11-2011, 08:59 AM)Jotokun Wrote: [ -> ]Yeah, the smartphone supercharges are really stupid. I actually wanted to buy mine without a data plan and primarily use wifi, but no carrier where I live allows that. At least, none with decent coverage.
Problem is smart phones are constantly sending and receiving certain amounts of data that is excluded from any cap if there is one, where if you're charged by certain rate per mb, you're gonna end up paying more.
(07-11-2011, 11:53 AM)vbetts Wrote: [ -> ] (07-11-2011, 08:59 AM)Jotokun Wrote: [ -> ]Yeah, the smartphone supercharges are really stupid. I actually wanted to buy mine without a data plan and primarily use wifi, but no carrier where I live allows that. At least, none with decent coverage.
Problem is smart phones are constantly sending and receiving certain amounts of data that is excluded from any cap if there is one, where if you're charged by certain rate per mb, you're gonna end up paying more.
Thats what the carriers want you to think. What they dont tell you is that its a non-issue if you turn off cellular data in your settings. Cant send/recive if its not connected to the data portion of the cellphone network.