Loved The G Pro, But Returned It After 3 Days (This Is A long Post)

[anon(829886)]

I've been using an iPhone since 2008. I decided to try a phablet last January. I waited until an IPS model hit the market. I pre-ordered the G Pro and received it on Friday. I returned it Sunday night. I spent most of my weekend using it.

For starters, I really like this phone and highly recommend it. In the end however I decided the weight in pocket and attempting one handed operations were too much for me. I also had great difficulty attempting to transfer my music onto the SD card and that soured my overall experience.

Let me start with the SD card slot. I purchased a new Sandisk 64 GB card from Staples and my G Pro had no problems reading the card. The issues arose as I attempted to transfer my iTunes collection onto my SD card via iSyncr. I followed the steps as directed, made sure that the sync was being applied to the SD card. For starters, the transfer itself was incredibly slow. Roughly 1 hour for 10 GB of music. Perhaps my slow Mac Mini is a factor in this. I don't know. I figured that wasn't the end of the world because it would hopefully be a one-time action. At the 23% mark I started to receive a Mac MTP Error message as the songs attempted to transfer to the card. I stopped the sync, wiped the data off the card, attempted the sync again, and received the same error at the same place again. I then attempted to wi-fi sync with iSyncr which only lead to a continuous message regarding my playlist and then after 10 minutes it would just stop attempting to sync.

Frustrated I went to DoubleTwist. Followed the steps. The desktop software recognized my G Pro, found my music. As I attempted to place the music onto my G Pro, nothing would happen. I did a Google search to see if I was doing something wrong but it appeared as if I wasn't. Nothing I tried got the music to being syncing over to my phone.

As I last ditch effort, I downloaded Android File Transfer. I tried to drag and drop just a few songs and kept receiving an error message.

That was a really frustrating experience. iTunes makes transferring music to my iPhone a pretty painless experience. I'm positive I was following the correct steps and it simply wasn't working for me. It's really important that I be able to transfer my music to the SD card (or internal storage). Streaming is simply not a perfect solution for me. I want my music locally available at all times. I have that with my 64 GB iPhone 5.

Back to the phone. The screen is remarkable. I have no complaints with it. AT&T was nice to provide the flip folio case to pre-orders. I liked it a great deal. After using a 4 oz iPhone 5 since launch I had to adjust to a 6 oz G Pro. It was something I felt I always noticed. Especially in my pant pockets.

Battery life appeared to be on-par with my iPhone 5. No better or worse. The plastic back didn't bother me. However it also wasn't great. I think the only truly good plastic back plates are ones with a tactile feel like you'll find on the Xperia ZL. The notification light is a really cool touch. The home button is fine. It should be thicker like the button on the S4/Note II but it's fine. I also think screen sizes this big would really benefit from on-screen buttons and not any capacitive or physical ones. Put on-screen buttons on that 5.5" screen and it will be easier to use with one hand plus you don't lose the width of the screen in portrait.

Navigating the Google Play store for the most part was a smooth experience. Some weird moments when trying to enter words into the search bar. But for the most part, no issues. Seeing the Play store icon in the menu bar after each download was a bit odd at first. Jelly Bean (Android?) really makes more use of the notification shade compared to iOS. In some ways this is good. (Controls for the music player, etc.) In some ways it gets annoying. It can also be confusing at times when you realize you need to use the back or menu button within an app. I'm sure this is something you get used to however over time.

When I logged into the Play store for the first time I used my most-used Gmail account. Soon after I found all my email contacts in my Phone app. I didn't want that. I deleted all the contacts in the Phone app and later learned that I had also deleted all those contacts within Gmail entirely itself. Suffice to say that really angered me. There are previous contacts that I no longer can get in touch with.

Roughly 85% of the apps that I use on my iPhone were in the Play store. But some of the apps that I use a lot were simply worse in their Android varient. (USA Today, The Weather Channel, Xfinity Remote, Echofon.)

Habit browser is sensational. One of my big worries going into the experience was finding something to compete with the smoothness of the Safari browser and I was really impressed by Habit.

The Gmail app. Wow. It looks terrible compared to Apple default Mail app. And I learned in a quick Google search that you need to download Nova Launcher Prime plus TelsaUnread in order to obtain number notification on the app itself. This isn't a huge deal but I was miffed that this was even required in the first place.

Pocket Casts is a great podcast app but I found it really odd that I could not organize the placement of the podcasts manually (on the main podcasts page). Also the Accuweather app seemed to take over my phone. I could not get rid of the degree icon in the upper left no matter how hard I tried. Eventually I deleted the app. Also I kept getting the GPS icon at random intervals. I ended up toggling off GPS and figuring I'd just turn it back one when really needed.

Widgets are cool and even though I was only using one or two this is something that iOS should offer. Ditto the easy toggles at the top of the notification shade. Also the Q Slide apps can be removed from the notification shade but you cannot remove the edit button entirely. So you are left with this ugly bar taking up space for QSlide apps you are not using.

Despite my issues I was overall impressed with Android. The SD card thing really was an issue though. I know countless others don't have this issue but it really bothered me. I wish Google would just make an iTunes like app that would allow you to manage your music beyond just storing it in their cloud service. Or I wish you could just pin the music for offline use directly onto the SD card without needing to root first. If I were to consider an Android phone in the future I think I would make 64 GB of internal storage a prerequisite just to avoid any issues in the future. I'd use a potential SD card slot for photos and videos (that I shot with the phone) only.

I still think phablets are here for good. I think there is a strong market for such a large phone and I think they will only get better in the future. (Lighter, etc.) I would even consider one in the future but only if it had on-screen buttons.

That doesn't mean my iPhone 5 is perfect. I'm starting to think that a 5" screen is my personal sweet spot. But at this point I think I'm okay waiting for Apple to release a 5" iPhone, and I think they will in due time. Probably not however until 2014.

Thanks for reading. Sorry for being all over the place. I'm just trying to recall things off the top of my head. Definitely came away impressed overall with Android.

 

[snookasnoo]

Not to be critical but as someone who use iOS and Android devices and have for years I think you should have given it more time. Yes things can be frustrating in Android world and it looks like you got tired of that pretty quickly. But I would have given it a week at least.
I have Pocket Casts on Android too and I think its the best Android podcasting app but its not as good as Downcast or Instacast on iPhone.
Also agree about Gmail app. it's not very good compared to Apple mail app so I usually read my gmail as well as mac.com mail there.

I've been using an iPhone since 2008. I decided to try a phablet last January. I waited until an IPS model hit the market. I pre-ordered the G Pro and received it on Friday. I returned it Sunday night. I spent most of my weekend using it.

For starters, I really like this phone and highly recommend it. In the end however I decided the weight in pocket and attempting one handed operations were too much for me. I also had great difficulty attempting to transfer my music onto the SD card and that soured my overall experience.

 

[badMojo69]

DoubleTwist sucks sucks sucks. I don't know why people use it.
Sony makes free product called Media Go that is a billion times better than Double Twist and it works with everything.

Anyway sad to see you go.

 

[bigjim71]

Sorry to see you go. Although I can relate to your frustration with the music issue. I remember getting my first android and leaving the iPhone for long dark death in my drawer, and have never looked back. I too have a macbook and at times have gotten very frustrated trying to transfer my music. Each time determination had won. It seems that certain transfer apps will/will not work with certain phones. For example I had no issues at all using android file transfer to put anything I had on my laptop on to the ogp, whereas for the the life of me I had I heck of atime trying put things on galaxy s3.When all else fails, copy what you need from the computer to the sd card directly. Good luck and you decide to come back soon

 

[ratchetjaw#AC]

Hate to see you go. Really want this forum to grow but understand. So glad I got away from iTunes

Sent from my LG-E980 using Tapatalk 2

 

[semp1]

I don't understand why you were getting failure notifications when using android file transfer. It should work flawlessly. Although when it comes to music. All my iTunes 7500 songs were transferred minus 28 (2 albums) songs into the cloud all you need to do is download what you want when you want at a much higher bit rate right on your device and btw much better quality than itunes and what apple offers at the moment. I don't know. I think you're like I was. You're too anxious over the possibility of not having connection to the icloud and apples devices where many of the google services are either as good or better. When it comes to weird words showing up in the play store swiftkey fixes this with predictive text from their keyboard. Honestly shouldve kept the phone longer since you had a longer return policy. The Optimus g pro is a great phone. I almost bought one today and still might. Too bad you didn't give it a chance. The only thing I miss is iMessage. Regular mms just doesn't cut it after experiencing iMessage.

 

[XavierMatt]

I've been using an iPhone since 2008. I decided to try a phablet last January. I waited until an IPS model hit the market. I pre-ordered the G Pro and received it on Friday. I returned it Sunday night. I spent most of my weekend using it.

For starters, I really like this phone and highly recommend it. In the end however I decided the weight in pocket and attempting one handed operations were too much for me. I also had great difficulty attempting to transfer my music onto the SD card and that soured my overall experience.

Let me start with the SD card slot. I purchased a new Sandisk 64 GB card from Staples and my G Pro had no problems reading the card. The issues arose as I attempted to transfer my iTunes collection onto my SD card via iSyncr. I followed the steps as directed, made sure that the sync was being applied to the SD card. For starters, the transfer itself was incredibly slow. Roughly 1 hour for 10 GB of music. Perhaps my slow Mac Mini is a factor in this. I don't know. I figured that wasn't the end of the world because it would hopefully be a one-time action. At the 23% mark I started to receive a Mac MTP Error message as the songs attempted to transfer to the card. I stopped the sync, wiped the data off the card, attempted the sync again, and received the same error at the same place again. I then attempted to wi-fi sync with iSyncr which only lead to a continuous message regarding my playlist and then after 10 minutes it would just stop attempting to sync.

Frustrated I went to DoubleTwist. Followed the steps. The desktop software recognized my G Pro, found my music. As I attempted to place the music onto my G Pro, nothing would happen. I did a Google search to see if I was doing something wrong but it appeared as if I wasn't. Nothing I tried got the music to being syncing over to my phone.

As I last ditch effort, I downloaded Android File Transfer. I tried to drag and drop just a few songs and kept receiving an error message.

That was a really frustrating experience. iTunes makes transferring music to my iPhone a pretty painless experience. I'm positive I was following the correct steps and it simply wasn't working for me. It's really important that I be able to transfer my music to the SD card (or internal storage). Streaming is simply not a perfect solution for me. I want my music locally available at all times. I have that with my 64 GB iPhone 5.

Back to the phone. The screen is remarkable. I have no complaints with it. AT&T was nice to provide the flip folio case to pre-orders. I liked it a great deal. After using a 4 oz iPhone 5 since launch I had to adjust to a 6 oz G Pro. It was something I felt I always noticed. Especially in my pant pockets.

Battery life appeared to be on-par with my iPhone 5. No better or worse. The plastic back didn't bother me. However it also wasn't great. I think the only truly good plastic back plates are ones with a tactile feel like you'll find on the Xperia ZL. The notification light is a really cool touch. The home button is fine. It should be thicker like the button on the S4/Note II but it's fine. I also think screen sizes this big would really benefit from on-screen buttons and not any capacitive or physical ones. Put on-screen buttons on that 5.5" screen and it will be easier to use with one hand plus you don't lose the width of the screen in portrait.

Navigating the Google Play store for the most part was a smooth experience. Some weird moments when trying to enter words into the search bar. But for the most part, no issues. Seeing the Play store icon in the menu bar after each download was a bit odd at first. Jelly Bean (Android?) really makes more use of the notification shade compared to iOS. In some ways this is good. (Controls for the music player, etc.) In some ways it gets annoying. It can also be confusing at times when you realize you need to use the back or menu button within an app. I'm sure this is something you get used to however over time.

When I logged into the Play store for the first time I used my most-used Gmail account. Soon after I found all my email contacts in my Phone app. I didn't want that. I deleted all the contacts in the Phone app and later learned that I had also deleted all those contacts within Gmail entirely itself. Suffice to say that really angered me. There are previous contacts that I no longer can get in touch with.

Roughly 85% of the apps that I use on my iPhone were in the Play store. But some of the apps that I use a lot were simply worse in their Android varient. (USA Today, The Weather Channel, Xfinity Remote, Echofon.)
.

Boy boy boy. Yea it was long but at least I th was not boring. I especially agree with you in terms of the android back button. It's a mess that needs to be fixed and the solution needs to be drilled no matter what app you are using.

HTC ONE ~ Android Central App

 

[anon(829886)]

Thanks for your civilized responses.

Forgot to add another issue/con. At full volume podcasts on the G Pro were as loud as they are on my iPhone at 75%. I even went into the sound settings to increase the media volume and it didn't make a difference. Also the back speaker was pretty mediocre compared to my iPhone 5. Sound was pretty weak and somewhat distorted. I hope more OEM's become inspired by the HTC One's speakers. I think it's a very important feature personally.

I know I alluded to it in my long post but Google would really benefit from making their own music organizing software. Something that is compatible with all Android devices and makes transfer music much easier. I don't think searching for 3rd party solutions is a good answer.

 

[badMojo69]

+1 on your last sentence.

 

[mayconvert]

I am getting this phone in the morning, moving over from iPhone 5. This will be my first android device, so I plan to give it a full 13 days before I would return it.
I am hoping I like it enough to not want to return it. I know it will be a learning curve and a Big change.
I agree the email on android sucks compared to iPhone's native mail client.
I have added all my music in iTunes to Google Play. I think I can stream it or maybe even download it to the device since its already there.

I am torn between the top 3 of android right now. LG Pro, S4 and HTC one. I love the LG display so I thought I would give it a shot. Screen is great on HTC one as well but its in 3rd place because I am switching because I want a bigger screen. Tired of 4" tall. HTC is 4.7 but has on screen black bar that takes up .5" of the screen....
Hope I am not making a bad choice. It looks like a great phone to me. Something keeps nagging at me to go S4. but I really don't care for the display. everything else is perfect....

 

[semp1]

Thanks for your civilized responses.

Forgot to add another issue/con. At full volume podcasts on the G Pro were as loud as they are on my iPhone at 75%. I even went into the sound settings to increase the media volume and it didn't make a difference. Also the back speaker was pretty mediocre compared to my iPhone 5. Sound was pretty weak and somewhat distorted. I hope more OEM's become inspired by the HTC One's speakers. I think it's a very important feature personally.

I know I alluded to it in my long post but Google would really benefit from making their own music organizing software. Something that is compatible with all Android devices and makes transfer music much easier. I don't think searching for 3rd party solutions is a good answer.

Wouldn't that be the Google play music app. Which is basically on every phone and looks the same with a link to the Google play store. With the ability to stream your library to your device with ease or download it if you please at an extremely high bit rate.

Posted via My Developer's Edition HTC one

 

[Aquila]

I know I alluded to it in my long post but Google would really benefit from making their own music organizing software. Something that is compatible with all Android devices and makes transfer music much easier. I don't think searching for 3rd party solutions is a good answer.

Wouldn't that be the Google play music app. Which is basically on every phone and looks the same with a link to the Google play store. With the ability to stream your library to your device with ease or download it if you please at an extremely high bit rate.

Yep, that's actually the easiest solution to the SD issue also. Google Play Music can sync directly from iTunes into the cloud (up to 20,000 songs free) and you can download them all to the device and move them to the SD card, etc. This obviously would also make all of the music available from any web browser as well, making it a much more reliable back up to the SD card.

 

[chrisngrod]

I got the Optimus G Pro and my wife threw her iPhone 5 in the trash to take my HTC One. End of story.

Just kidding the story isn't that bad, but we've owned the 4, 4S, and still have an iPad Mini / iPad 3. The iPhone 5 just didn't thrill her. I little birdie told me someone uses MP3 Ringtone Maker as well.

 

[anon(829886)]

Google Music isn't a solution to my needs. It uses up too much data on my plan plus I don't always have access to a wi-if or cellular connection. You cannot pin music for offline use onto an SD card without rooting first, which I don't want to do.

 

[ratchetjaw#AC]

I am getting this phone in the morning, moving over from iPhone 5. This will be my first android device, so I plan to give it a full 13 days before I would return it.
I am hoping I like it enough to not want to return it. I know it will be a learning curve and a Big change.
I agree the email on android sucks compared to iPhone's native mail client.
I have added all my music in iTunes to Google Play. I think I can stream it or maybe even download it to the device since its already there.

I am torn between the top 3 of android right now. LG Pro, S4 and HTC one. I love the LG display so I thought I would give it a shot. Screen is great on HTC one as well but its in 3rd place because I am switching because I want a bigger screen. Tired of 4" tall. HTC is 4.7 but has on screen black bar that takes up .5" of the screen....
Hope I am not making a bad choice. It looks like a great phone to me. Something keeps nagging at me to go S4. but I really don't care for the display. everything else is perfect....

I have all three. I like the Optimus G Pro the most but it's the newest too me. Second would be a rooted Htc One (to remove the black bar, three dots, and remap buttons. Honestly the only thing I like about the S4 more than the Optimus G Pro at this point is the Tv app.

Sent from my LG-E980 using Tapatalk 2

 

[ratchetjaw#AC]

Google Music isn't a solution to my needs. It uses up too much data on my plan plus I don't always have access to a wi-if or cellular connection. You cannot pin music for offline use onto an SD card without rooting first, which I don't want to do.

That's not true. I save music to my phone all the time from google play music

Sent from my LG-E980 using Tapatalk 2

 

[anon(829886)]

That's not true. I save music to my phone all the time from google play music

Sent from my LG-E980 using Tapatalk 2

You can't save Google Music directly onto an SD card without rooting.

 

[anon(5982890)]

Meh - I could never go back to an iPhone. Every time I use one now, I can't help but think about how much of a joke the GUI is - it almost feels like a device made for children.

I don't know how you view files on a mac, but I would have just connected my SD card directly to my computer's card reader and transferred the files as if I was using a USB drive. But then again, I use Google's Play service for all of my music. It's great - no syncing, no ever having to deal with the headache that is iTunes. I just download my music to the same folder on my computer and everything automatically shows up in Google Play.

 

[ratchetjaw#AC]

You can't save Google Music directly onto an SD card without rooting.

Okay if you say so. No worries

Sent from my LG-E980 using Tapatalk 2

 

[semp1]

Meh - I could never go back to an iPhone. Every time I use one now, I can't help but think about how much of a joke the GUI is - it almost feels like a device made for children.

I don't know how you view files on a mac, but I would have just connected my SD card directly to my computer's card reader and transferred the files as if I was using a USB drive. But then again, I use Google's Play service for all of my music. It's great - no syncing, no ever having to deal with the headache that is iTunes. I just download my music to the same folder on my computer and everything automatically shows up in Google Play.

I personally stick with iTunes since I get an iTunes version and my google desktop manager app scans my library and adds a google play version for free at a higher bit rate into my google library. This way I future proof my library with multiple versions at one price. Also on the topic of Apples GUI. Of course it's simple their target audience is the mainstream most of which are children and people like my parents who want ease of use. Not every one likes tinkering with things or needs the newest tech out like every one including myself on this forum.