S6 Annoyances

[jcp007]

Just got mine S6 and I found few really annoying things.
- The touch is too sensitivity. Makes 1 hand navigation really annoying.
- Folder options are gone! Before u can create folder on both homescreen and appdrawer by clicking on menu button, now u need to drag 2 apps together to create a folder. Also in folder there are no add apps option and had to drag 1 app at the time into the folder.
- Miss the menu key. The toogle apps key is useless and prefer as before. Longpress home button to bring up apps toggle and a menu key.
- Glass back is real bad idea. Too slippery and the phone just keep sliding around, when typing or using on on a table/sofa. Also the reason behind many that havent theirs phones wireless charged to 100% overnight using, since Samsungs official wireless charger have only 1 coil and the phone need to be align to center for it to charge. Since the phone is slippery and it will slide off center and make it stop charging.

I hopes Samsung would fix the touch sensitivity in future updates.

Put a case on it to stop the slide.

 

[lisaquach]

You have many options to solve your problems, you can use launchers, you can use custome themes and widgets. Or if you are a developer then you can develop your own application coz android is an open source OS.

 

[razza1987]

First, try clearing the cache partition.

Turn the GS6 off.
Hold Home+volume up+Power.
In Manual Mode, use the volume rocker to toggle to clear cache partition. Power to accept.
When done, toggle to reboot.

When it comes back up, go to Settings/Storage and clear the app data cache. Do at least once a week.

Reset device to factory is also in your Settings.

Thank you so much for your advice. I will see if this helps

 

[Wiggum333]

What's even more annoying is when adults who should know better should pass on judging the quality of a response and respect the opinion of those that they don't agree with as well as apologizing for even the hint of impropriety in what would seem like an innocuous comment. It is only second to blaming Samsung for issues that can be mitigated by personal device management. For other technical issues, there are updates. If those don't help, buy the next big thing. It's important to be happy with your device. If it is isn't what you hoped for, return it or sell it and buy something that makes you happy.

I have to completely disagree with you here (see bold, in context to the rest of your post above).

You (meaning anyone) are the same person, with the same habits, same carrier, etc. ... but you just changed from (for example) and iPhone 6 to a GS6. One phone (iPhone) allowed you to do everything you wanted, the WAY you wanted to, etc. However, the GS6 requires (as you mention above) that you need to "manage your device" by turning some things off, changing some settings, etc.

Personally, I would call that a HUGE annoyance.

The point is, first off ... everyone has the right to be annoyed by whatever they want. Second, the ability to "make something work for you" is different than having something work for you the way you want it to work <--- and THAT is what I think we are talking about here.

Not to go off on a tangent here, but let me offer this anecdote. One of my best friends, who works right next to me, has an iPhone 6, while I have the GS6. From what I can tell from reading this forum, I seem to get better than average battery life, even though I use the heck out of my phone. Not as good as some others, but I'm definitely not suffering like a lot of people here are. I have made a FEW small tweaks to my phone to help with battery life, but nothing major. Anyway ... My buddy uses his phone all day ... mostly for phone calls, but some other stuff (apps, web, etc.) ... and it's VERY rare that he needs to even think about charging his phone during the day - and that's usually only when he didn't remember to charge it overnight the night before. I should note also that he knows very little about phones, and wouldn't even know where to start to "tweak" any settings, or set up his phone for max battery life. He pretty much as everything "on" all the time on his iPhone 6.

I don't monitor his phone's battery, so I can't get into any details ... but we have talked about it before he has told me that he hardly ever thinks about the battery/charge on his phone.

So, what I'm saying is, I find it totally acceptable for people with the GS6 to be annoyed with battery life, as well as the fact that it may take some tweaking of changing of usage habits to get "decent" battery life from these phone.

I came from my GS4 which had OK battery life, and I get the same or better with my S6 ... and I also expect to charge my phone during the day (which I do) ... but I have to admit, I would LOVE if I could take my phone off the charger in the morning at 100% and pretty much never have to think about my battery during the day unless I was actively using the phone all day long.

I don't consider this situation "annoying" ... but I definitely think that while phone mfg's have been focusing on "thinner phones" for a while, it may be time to take a step back and re-focus on battery life. Smart phones are becoming more and more an integral part of human life - in both work and play. Having it available and ready to go at all times is becoming increasingly more important. I've said it before, and will say it again - I would have been just as happy, or happier even, if the GS6 would have been thicker to the tune of making the entire phone the thickness of the section through the camera if it meant that the battery would be that much bigger, and allow the phone to last that much longer. I think this whole "let's see how thin we can make the phone" mentality is WAY over-rated.

 

[razza1987]

I would take a thicker phone for a bigger battery any day of the week. I pretty much did that for my Mophie case with my iPhone six plus

 

[syspry]

LOL...first off, you shoudn't have to "manage" a thousand dollar phone to get decent battery life. This is 2015. Why Samsung decided to go with a smaller battery than previous models is mind boggling. I guarantee the vast majority of people would trade a couple millimeters of thickness for better battery life. Second, nobody is "blaming" Samsung. They are just pointing out some things about the phone that annoy them. You seem to take it personally for some reason. If you buy a new Mercedes and the transmission fails after 5000 miles, would you blame Mercedes or the manufacturer of the transmission? Mercedes says "hey we didn't make the transmission, we just put it in the car." Of course you would blame Mercedes for using a faulty transmission and not doing adequate quality control. So you take the car back to Mercedes and they say "well if you didn't keep shifting gears, the transmission wouldn't have failed. Take some personal responsibility. Just leave the car in park and the transmission will be fine".

I think this is where a lot of people are having trouble coping. Android sure has come a long way towards being a totally use as-is out of the box experience, but a lot of people are now expecting it to be fully there right now and in my opinion it st still has a way to go. Unfortunately it's still somewhat of a complex OS that performs at its best when fine tuned by the user and in some cases on some devices can even suffer a little when not fine tuned.

But there's no "blame" for this, it's just how it is. I wouldn't actually expect any retailers to come right out and provide documentation listing a bunch of fine tuning tips because many people, especially those coming from iPhone would immediately go "what the heck? I shouldn't be expected to learn all this!" and they'd turn away. But yeah, if you're getting into an Android device would you be much better off hopping on the web to learn more about how to use it better? Absolutely. But unfortunately if you're an average Jane/Joe who doesn't visit tech sites nobody at all is going to tell you this so you'll have no way of knowing unless by some chance someone you know mentions it to you.

OTOH you could very well be a non-techie buyer, and end up using a device that isn't running in an optimized manner and you'd never even realize it. I know many many people who own Android phones and will use them for a couple of years without ever doing a single thing to tweak their phone. It's usable, but it's not running nearly as well as it should be but they'll never know. Occasionally I'll help out but there's so many people like this it'd be a full time job so I normally just keep quiet. Especially when they end up telling others what you did for them and word gets out that you're the guy to bug with questions lol.

 

[Bodzm]

First, try clearing the cache partition.

Turn the GS6 off.
Hold Home+volume up+Power.
In Manual Mode, use the volume rocker to toggle to clear cache partition. Power to accept.
When done, toggle to reboot.

When it comes back up, go to Settings/Storage and clear the app data cache. Do at least once a week.

Reset device to factory is also in your Settings.

Are you serious?!
I go over 2 months without restarting my HTC One and it runs as fast as ever. Why on earth do you need to maintain the device like this? This has been my experience of Samsung in the past and I expected them to resolve it by the S6.

 

[droidguy1964]

Are you serious?!
I go over 2 months without restarting my HTC One and it runs as fast as ever. Why on earth do you need to maintain the device like this? This has been my experience of Samsung in the past and I expected them to resolve it by the S6.

You are correct, you don't need to do any of that. Its just more misinformation.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[Kalvin Kerns]

Everything you can think of. Turned off background app refresh and background sync for all apps. Have my phone on the lowest brightness level possible, have a black display screen, have all notifications for apps switched off except for twitter, have smart network switch turned off.

It's just weird how people posy screen caps of their phones with 12 hours at 50% battery and their phone saying many hours remaining when I don't even get that much on a full charge. When I fully charge my phone it tells me I have 10 hours remaining even though I permanently keep my phone on power saving mode

Fully charged my phone says something like 33 hours remaining. I think there's may be something wrong with yours.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[anon(5719825)]

Mod Note:

I deleted some posts after getting some of them reported. Was going to issue an infraction to that person but that would have resulted in them being banned due to past infractions.

Keep the discussion on topic and civil. We don't need arguing.

Thanks

 

[BioFanatic]

The inconsistency in the battery life is seriously pi**ing me off. I notice it more having coming from the iPhone six plus. Yesterday my phone had 4-5 hours of screen on time. Today it was seven. Why shouldn't it be consistent? Why shouldn't my numbers be as impressive as yours when we have the exact same phone?

To be honest, inconsistent battery life is probably less about the battery and more about the usage. Different usages use the battery more or less than other things. For example, if you play games on your phone one day and not the next, you'll likely notice a difference. Higher quality games are going to push your processing a lot harder and use battery more. Another example is GPS. If you're pinging your GPS for Gmaps one day, you're going to use more battery. If you take a lot of pictures, the camera may drain more battery.

It's not necessarily ANYTHING WRONG, it may simply be based on what you're using. I hope that helps.

 

[Botjo]

FLAC files don't work even tho Samsung documents that they do.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[Botjo]

Gallery / photos don't rotate.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[D Android]

I've got a few annoyances that range from nit-picky to ones that negatively affect my usage:

- Battery life for me hasn't ever been stellar. I usually get about 3hrs screen time and by afternoon it's just about flat. I've tried various tweaks I've read to try and improve it, but haven't really noticed any difference. Sometimes at about lunch I just put it on power saving to keep it going into the night.

- I still get slight stutter and lag here and there. About 90% of the time it's fine, but every now and then it'll stutter between homescreen pages, drop frames when swiping from app to app or in Chrome tabs, take a couple seconds to open the multitasker app, the double press home button to open camera definitely takes longer than 0.7s or whatever they advertised etc. I just don't feel it's the fastest/smoothest android phone I've used.

- Notifications muting music for a good 3 seconds and that bar that pops up when you get a notification that just stays there for what feels like forever. I don't need it on the top of the screen like that. Just play the sound (don't need to completely mute music), and have the icon pop up in the notification bar at the top.

- Screen. While it's very good, I find it quite over saturated, to the point that some apps look blinding. I use the Google Keep app a lot and the yellow and red notes are so intense, they're hard to look at. Of the four screen settings two of them are oversaturated for me and the other two are too dull and undersaturated. I would have liked a screen setting to be in the middle.

- The auto-brightness is quite bad. I can turn the screen on, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, turn it on and it'll select a different brightness every time. Very inconsistent. I find it regularly being too low or too bright in situations. Also the transition from light to dark or dark to light is not a smooth, gradual transition as it is in other phones. It just kind of flicks to the brightness which is jarring.

- Even though the phone has 3gb ram and it constantly uses around 2.7gb of it, I always find apps and web pages have to reload if you move away to another app or homescreen or something. It seems to have really aggressive ram management and kills off apps really fast. Very frustrating when you're on Chrome filling out some form, go home to look at your Drive documents to get some details, go back to Chrome and it has to reload the page from scratch with all info wiped.

- The external speaker is not very good. Over half volume it starts cracking and distorting on mids and especially highs. I used to use external speaker for calls a lot on my previous phone, but now I've stopped doing that completely.

- Our firmware doesn't have auto-rotate for images in the gallery, which is extremely annoying. You have to rotate the phone, then press the 'rotate' button for the image to rotate. It also doesn't allow apps in the app drawer to be sorted alphabetically or line up so that there aren't gaps in app pages. A launcher fixes the app drawer stuff, but doesn't fix the gallery issue, which is not ideal.

- Because of the camera protruding from the body, I already have scratches on the bottom part of the camera module.

- I don't like TouchWiz's aesthetic and the Themes aren't any better. I'd like a theme that looks professional, classy and not designed for children. Better yet, just let us customise our own theme. I'd love to change the colours used in the notification shade, settings, phone dialer etc.

- The notification light seems to only have three colours: blue for notifications, red for charging, green for fully charged. When there is a notification the light takes a really long time to show up between pulses. A lot of times I've looked at the phone, waited a second or two, seen nothing, only to find out that there was a notification, but the pulse timing is so long. There's no way to customise the colours or pulse timing in the settings so you're left with having to download an app to fix it.


So that's about it. Again, they range from nit-picky to more serious issues. And they're things I personally have issues with and understand not everyone would feel the same.

Thank you! Your post just persuaded me to stick with my Note 4 for a bit longer.

 

[BioFanatic]

Gallery / photos don't rotate.

I still use Quickpic, it has the settings option to rotate with the screen. Quite handy!

 

[jimbl]

Google Play Music rarely plays from where I last paused it, almost always starts the song from the beginning.

 

[Coney718]

Google Play Music rarely plays from where I last paused it, almost always starts the song from the beginning.

This!!! Defintiely very annoying. Happens more often when im playing bluetooth in my car stereo. I get halfway through a song turn off the car turn it back on and the song plays for the beginning. smh

 

[syspry]

Are you serious?!
I go over 2 months without restarting my HTC One and it runs as fast as ever. Why on earth do you need to maintain the device like this? This has been my experience of Samsung in the past and I expected them to resolve it by the S6.

It's not necessary. I do recommend it just as an option if you're having consistent problems with sluggish overall performance. I also do it following minor patch updates just as a housecleaning habit. Major version updates always get a full factory reset from me.

 

[player22]

Everything you can think of. Turned off background app refresh and background sync for all apps. Have my phone on the lowest brightness level possible, have a black display screen, have all notifications for apps switched off except for twitter, have smart network switch turned off.

It's just weird how people posy screen caps of their phones with 12 hours at 50% battery and their phone saying many hours remaining when I don't even get that much on a full charge. When I fully charge my phone it tells me I have 10 hours remaining even though I permanently keep my phone on power saving mode

My phone has said 10 hours remaining after i unplug it after a full charge every single time since day one. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I actually get. I think its just a software glitch or something. My phone lasts all day . Between 6 and 7 hours screen on time . I
Take off charger at 5 am and put back on about 8 or 9 pm.

 

[Bodzm]

My screen is so sensitive it's ridiculous. I try and watch some videos on YouTube and if I move my phone in my hands it picks up and kind of movement and will change videos based on where my hands are. Like seriously -_-

Have you got the Edge or normal S6? How could the phone screen be that sensitive