Frustrations with the OS
I'm coming from an iPhone 6+. I've had iPhones for the last 4 years. I had an Android phone before that and I couldn't stand it. Lately, after Apple rolled out Apple Music, I have really started to hate my iPhone. The way everything has to be tied in with Apple Music and iCloud frustrates me as I don't use either of those things. It also has been significantly less reliable and I've had a lot of issues. These issues made me decide to try out Android again. Some research led me to the Moto X Pure which I ordered and received 3 days ago. There are a lot of cool positives about the phone. I love the turbo charge. I like the layout of the phone. I love the size and the feel. I love the look. I love the expandable memory. The negatives though might end up making me return the phone unless I can figure out how to improve them. So hoping I can get some help with these things:
Battery Life - The turbo charger is great but my battery is usually dead shortly after I get home from work. I'm not a super heavy user. My phone plays music in my car for 2 hours per day. I watch about 45 min of Netflix per day. And I send a few texts per day. With my iPhone I'd be able to make it from morning to bed time without any issue. With this phone it's around 30% by the time I get home and then when I start using it more in the evening it drops down very quickly. I usually have to put it on a charger within 30 minutes of being home and using my phone.
Music - I don't like the google play music app. I use my phone as my iPod and plug it into my car using the auxiliary jack. I've tried Poweramp, Rocket Player, and Amazon Prime Music. The Amazon app is alright but it's not as organized as I would like. Poweramp and Rocket Player don't allow me to easily sort by genre. I have a very large music library spanning multiple genre's that I keep very organized. With the way the iPhone music app USED TO work I could tap "Genre" and then see a list of all the genre's. And then if I tapped on one I would see a list of all artists in that genre. Tapping on one of those artists would then show a list of albums from them. Part of my frustration with the iPhone music app was that when they updated it they made it so that tapping on a genre immediately shows a list of albums instead of artists. I'd much rather see a list of 50 artists in a genre than see an alphabetical list of 300 albums that aren't grouped together. My problem with Rocket Player and Poweramp both is that they behave the same way. No way to tap Genre and see Artist next. Can anyone recommend a music app that does what I am looking for? I don't need anything super complicated. I don't care about equalizers, I don't care about streaming music, I don't care about editing tags or any of that stuff. I just want a straight forward, user friendly music player that can easily accommodate a large library.
Games - I only play 2 games regularly. Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff, and The Simpsons: Tapped Out. Both of these lag quite a bit and are very choppy. It isn't consistently like that. Most of the time if I'm on the app for a few minutes it seems to sort of kick into gear and works just fine. But at first it is slow. I have also found that the simpsons game only works on WiFi. If I try to get on it while not connected to WiFi it shows the initial startup screen and then immediately goes black. I don't have this problem when on WiFi. On my iPhone I was able to play the game whether it was WiFi or LTE.
Browser - I'm not sure I like Chrome as the browser on my phone. Getting into the bookmarks seems cumbersome to me. Can anyone recommend a better browser?
Gmail - I hate the gmail app. I have to swipe each email to delete it. With my iPhone I could tap "edit" and then select however many emails I wanted and batch delete. I get a lot of emails in the morning that I usually don't read (ads and such) and I'd like to be able to select and delete more than one at a time. Is there another app with this functionality?
Alarm Clock - I noticed this morning that 2 of my alarms didn't go off. I set 4 because I usually have a hard time getting up in the morning and I had to be up extra early for a meeting. The first 2 I had set did not go off. Luckily the last 2 did (and thankfully I have my wife set alarms as well just in case). Has anyone else add issues with alarms not going off? Is there a better app that is reliable 100% of the time?
Also is there a way to make the app drawer screen scroll horizontally instead of vertically? For whatever reason the first day I got the phone it was horizontal and then the next day it changed itself to verticle. Not sure if this is from some sort of update or what...
WiFi - Last night when I got home my phone automatically connected to my WiFi like it should. About 20 minutes later it disconnected itself and kept saying "Authentication error" when I would try to connect again. My wife's phone (also a XPE) was connected just fine. I ended up having to "forget" the network and log back in to get it to connect. I have no idea why that happened but it was concerning to say the least.
Notepad - I downloaded a notepad app (I was surprised there wasn't one?) but I'm not liking it very much. Anyone have a good suggestion for a notepad app?
This might seem like a lot of complaints -- and it is. But I guess the way I see it...I don't see the benefit of keeping this phone over my iPhone if I'm still having a lot of issues. I really want this phone to work out but I have to find a way to improve these things.
Would reloading the OS (if its even possible) help with the lag issues or the WiFi problem by chance?
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