I wanted to give a noobs perspective to Android and a review of the Samsung Galaxy SII Skyrocket.
Blah Blah Blah Iphone 3Gs Blah Blah Blah AT&T unlimited grandfathered Blah Blah Blah out of contract for 6 months waiting on fall release.
Thoughts on the Skyrocket.
I am extremely pleased with this phone and its build quality. I have handled the original GS II, the iPhone 4s and pretty much every single phone for the past year as I tried to figure out what to do. I am absolutely no apple fanboy but I was willing to stick with them if they made a larger screen, thinner form factor with the features of iOS 5. Well that clearly didn?t happen! So off to Android I go!
This screen is AMAZING. I haven?t noticed any sort of yellow tint issues and whomever is trolling saying things are washed out is full of it. YES, I was concerned with larger screen that wasthe same resolution as the original GS II but having compared both side by side, there honestly is no difference other than the Skyrockets looks larger and better! Seriously, I had my panties in a wad about the Nexus and Note having HD screens and now that I have this phone I am like ?how much more crisp do I need things!?? I am certain that they will look amazing on those phones but this phone is no slouch and you should not discount it based on the display at all!
For those who say ?these phones feel too plasticity and cheap? well?I hear the same lines at the gun range when people about glocks and polymer frame guns compared with steel/metal frames like 1911s. Same song, different verse. The fact is this phone is fine. It doesn?t feel cheap to me at all. It feels nicely built and is smooth and feels like it was made of premium material. I?m sorry it doesn?t weigh more. Because clearly, the only way to verify quality is by weighing it! BTW, I own both glocks and 1911s and they both are awesome.
The Battery! Ok, so I keep reading LTE is a sucker of battery souls and woe unto thee who gets LTE! Well, um?the battery life is fine. Do I want a phone that last for infinity and never has to be charged? Hell yes! Do I need to tone it down a bit and get back to reality and consider all that this phone does when it comes to judging battery life? Yep. So can it last the day at work if I forget my charger? Absolutely. If I charge it up and leave it untouched overnight, is it dead in the morning? Nope. Over night with no usage it loses maybe 10%. I am getting about 8 hours of HEAVY usage out of it before I freak and charge it up. Could it make it 24 hours with limited usage? 100% yes. If previous LTE phones were killed by the LTE demon, this phone is the Buffy to the LTE Master.
Speaking of LTE? LTE IS FREAKING AMAZING!!! I am here in Dallas/Fort Worth and we are lucky enough to have full LTE coverage. On two bars I still pull 10-12 MB per second. On four bars I am pulling 24-36 MB per second. Need to download a 100 meg file. 3 seconds and its done. Need to download an app? Less than a second. Its stupid fast. Like insane. I have FIOS in my house and this is running almost or right at the same speed. I am completely spoiled by LTE and can?t imagine going back to my slow ass 3gS phone.
Size? Ok, this sucker is awesome. Yeah its big. Its bigger than many phones on the market right now. At this point, the Iphone feels like a baby phone and everyone on MacRumors who keeps denying reality that 3.7 is perfect and that Android phones are a joke with this size are secretly lusting after us. Androids with their big screens are the High School Jocks, pulling the babes. Iphones are the chess club, hating on the Jocks. I can?t even call the Iphone nerds, because, frankly, nerds deserve better. Sorry about that rant, but yeah, its bigger than a lot of phones but it?s still comfortable to hold and talk on and it goes in my pockets perfectly (6?0, 160, beer belly). My 5?1 wife also has this phone and loves it. Insert size joke here.
Camera! Ok, so my username says photoguy. Why? In another life I thought I would be a war correspondent. Well, I like money and abandoned that path. But I had the username already and have kept it for well on a decade now, that way it will be easy to scrub all my online postings when I attain a political office. The camera is nice. The white balance is off. Wait..what? The resolution is very nice and I see that it is responsive, however the auto-white balance needs some love because it doesn?t adjust very well. This should be a no-brainer at this point and probably is fixed using some other defacto camera app, but I haven?t gotten around to tinkering yet. Video is good but I do feel it?s a bit of a disservice to say 1080p with such a low bitrate on the data. Its fine, I guess its ?technically? 1080p but I don?t consider phone 1080p to be the same as DSLR/Video Camera 1080p.
The front facing 2 megapixel camera also rocks and it?s a blast doing video chats with my wife while we both are at work surfing the internet.
Gingerbread..and the Android OS. So, this is my first Android phone. I am happy that I get to start out on Gingerbread because everything I have read over the past year of scrubbing articles has spoken about how things kinda sucked for a while. I like this operating system. I like being able to customize the hell out of things. I love being able to have widgets and folders and pages. I love being able to use my phone as a storage device and drag and drop my music, videos and books and not have to run it through some bloatware to make it proprietary. HOWEVER, if you think lowest common denominator, this isn?t exactly the closed ecosystem that makes iOS so damn easy. And Google, the manufactures (Samsung, HTC) and the providers (AT&T, Verizon) are doing a horrible job with the included documentation on walking people through how to use Android and that?s a horrible disservice to the system.
Im geeky enough that I feel comfortable going through, tinkering, testing and playing and knowing where to go to do things. I am not so sure others are and this is one of those fundamental issues with a new OS.
Overall, Gingerbread is very nice and for the most part most things make sense. I do HATE the bloatware that AT&T puts on my phone but once we get the root stuff ready to go for the Skyrocket, I will get rid of it and be happy. I also look forward to ICS and ending fragmentation within the ecosystem.
I would be happy to answer any questions about the phone. I have my class 10 32 gig mirco sd card on its way tonight and cases should be in tomorrow or Thursday. The only way I would change my mind is if the Note gets announced by AT&T in the next 30 days and only because I have some specific needs that can be met with that amazing hunk of hardware. If AT&T announced the Nexus?I honestly would have to sit and wait and do some side by sides. If it wasn?t LTE, I might not jump on it.
Blah Blah Blah Iphone 3Gs Blah Blah Blah AT&T unlimited grandfathered Blah Blah Blah out of contract for 6 months waiting on fall release.
Thoughts on the Skyrocket.
I am extremely pleased with this phone and its build quality. I have handled the original GS II, the iPhone 4s and pretty much every single phone for the past year as I tried to figure out what to do. I am absolutely no apple fanboy but I was willing to stick with them if they made a larger screen, thinner form factor with the features of iOS 5. Well that clearly didn?t happen! So off to Android I go!
This screen is AMAZING. I haven?t noticed any sort of yellow tint issues and whomever is trolling saying things are washed out is full of it. YES, I was concerned with larger screen that wasthe same resolution as the original GS II but having compared both side by side, there honestly is no difference other than the Skyrockets looks larger and better! Seriously, I had my panties in a wad about the Nexus and Note having HD screens and now that I have this phone I am like ?how much more crisp do I need things!?? I am certain that they will look amazing on those phones but this phone is no slouch and you should not discount it based on the display at all!
For those who say ?these phones feel too plasticity and cheap? well?I hear the same lines at the gun range when people about glocks and polymer frame guns compared with steel/metal frames like 1911s. Same song, different verse. The fact is this phone is fine. It doesn?t feel cheap to me at all. It feels nicely built and is smooth and feels like it was made of premium material. I?m sorry it doesn?t weigh more. Because clearly, the only way to verify quality is by weighing it! BTW, I own both glocks and 1911s and they both are awesome.
The Battery! Ok, so I keep reading LTE is a sucker of battery souls and woe unto thee who gets LTE! Well, um?the battery life is fine. Do I want a phone that last for infinity and never has to be charged? Hell yes! Do I need to tone it down a bit and get back to reality and consider all that this phone does when it comes to judging battery life? Yep. So can it last the day at work if I forget my charger? Absolutely. If I charge it up and leave it untouched overnight, is it dead in the morning? Nope. Over night with no usage it loses maybe 10%. I am getting about 8 hours of HEAVY usage out of it before I freak and charge it up. Could it make it 24 hours with limited usage? 100% yes. If previous LTE phones were killed by the LTE demon, this phone is the Buffy to the LTE Master.
Speaking of LTE? LTE IS FREAKING AMAZING!!! I am here in Dallas/Fort Worth and we are lucky enough to have full LTE coverage. On two bars I still pull 10-12 MB per second. On four bars I am pulling 24-36 MB per second. Need to download a 100 meg file. 3 seconds and its done. Need to download an app? Less than a second. Its stupid fast. Like insane. I have FIOS in my house and this is running almost or right at the same speed. I am completely spoiled by LTE and can?t imagine going back to my slow ass 3gS phone.
Size? Ok, this sucker is awesome. Yeah its big. Its bigger than many phones on the market right now. At this point, the Iphone feels like a baby phone and everyone on MacRumors who keeps denying reality that 3.7 is perfect and that Android phones are a joke with this size are secretly lusting after us. Androids with their big screens are the High School Jocks, pulling the babes. Iphones are the chess club, hating on the Jocks. I can?t even call the Iphone nerds, because, frankly, nerds deserve better. Sorry about that rant, but yeah, its bigger than a lot of phones but it?s still comfortable to hold and talk on and it goes in my pockets perfectly (6?0, 160, beer belly). My 5?1 wife also has this phone and loves it. Insert size joke here.
Camera! Ok, so my username says photoguy. Why? In another life I thought I would be a war correspondent. Well, I like money and abandoned that path. But I had the username already and have kept it for well on a decade now, that way it will be easy to scrub all my online postings when I attain a political office. The camera is nice. The white balance is off. Wait..what? The resolution is very nice and I see that it is responsive, however the auto-white balance needs some love because it doesn?t adjust very well. This should be a no-brainer at this point and probably is fixed using some other defacto camera app, but I haven?t gotten around to tinkering yet. Video is good but I do feel it?s a bit of a disservice to say 1080p with such a low bitrate on the data. Its fine, I guess its ?technically? 1080p but I don?t consider phone 1080p to be the same as DSLR/Video Camera 1080p.
The front facing 2 megapixel camera also rocks and it?s a blast doing video chats with my wife while we both are at work surfing the internet.
Gingerbread..and the Android OS. So, this is my first Android phone. I am happy that I get to start out on Gingerbread because everything I have read over the past year of scrubbing articles has spoken about how things kinda sucked for a while. I like this operating system. I like being able to customize the hell out of things. I love being able to have widgets and folders and pages. I love being able to use my phone as a storage device and drag and drop my music, videos and books and not have to run it through some bloatware to make it proprietary. HOWEVER, if you think lowest common denominator, this isn?t exactly the closed ecosystem that makes iOS so damn easy. And Google, the manufactures (Samsung, HTC) and the providers (AT&T, Verizon) are doing a horrible job with the included documentation on walking people through how to use Android and that?s a horrible disservice to the system.
Im geeky enough that I feel comfortable going through, tinkering, testing and playing and knowing where to go to do things. I am not so sure others are and this is one of those fundamental issues with a new OS.
Overall, Gingerbread is very nice and for the most part most things make sense. I do HATE the bloatware that AT&T puts on my phone but once we get the root stuff ready to go for the Skyrocket, I will get rid of it and be happy. I also look forward to ICS and ending fragmentation within the ecosystem.
I would be happy to answer any questions about the phone. I have my class 10 32 gig mirco sd card on its way tonight and cases should be in tomorrow or Thursday. The only way I would change my mind is if the Note gets announced by AT&T in the next 30 days and only because I have some specific needs that can be met with that amazing hunk of hardware. If AT&T announced the Nexus?I honestly would have to sit and wait and do some side by sides. If it wasn?t LTE, I might not jump on it.
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