New Charge Owner

[carguy37757]

Hey all. New charge owner here. Just got it today and have been messing with it all day. Im digging the phone! I actually came from a Droid X and a Fascinate before that and for me, this phone seems like a good compromise between the two for me.

My questions I have though are as follows:

1. I am not rooted and do not plan to do so immediately. Any suggestions for a non-rooted charge? Must have apps or utilities?

2. I live in a 3G area but work in a 4G area. Is there a good app or widget i can use to turn off 4G easily when I know I'm not in a 3G area?

3. Does the battery always take this long to charge? I popped it in and ran it dead and then charged. Its taken several hours to get to 77% charge. My X would charge from 15% to 100% within an hour or so. Im up to 5 hours charging now.

4. Where can one get the stock android keyboard for the charge? Better yet, is there a version of the gingerbread keyboard for 2.2 that will work on the charge?

Sorry for all the questions. I'm a charge newbie and hope to be able to contribute and help others here very soon.

Thanks in advance!
Nick

Sent from my SCH-I510 using Tapatalk

 

[imapepper2#AC]

This is my first Driod as I came from the Storm2 (love/hate relationship).

Q1 = For me these are the ?must have? apps.
LauncherPro (can customize the number of screens, rows, columns, and docks)
Calendar Snooze (I need a calendar nag)
Smooth Calendar (widget)
Quick Settings (change volume levels on the fly)
Sound Manager (never forget to lower notification volume when at work)
Dolphin Browser HD (better than stock browser by a lot)
OurGroceries (a must have for married couples)


Q2 = The only one I found to work on the Charge is LTE Switch.


Q3 = Sorry to say but Yes it does. I don?t know why a battery that only has 4% or 6% more capacity takes so much longer to charge (maybe a protective Samsung feature) but it does.

I charge my phone every night, but that ?battery charged? notification became very annoying so I use Sound Manager to automatically silence my notifications at Midnight and turn them back on at 6:30am.


Q4 = Sorry, can?t answer this one.

 

[lfurlong]

Hi there.
I've only had the charge for a few weeks so I can relate. I've had several android phones though.
If you go to the market there is a keyboard called Keyboard from Android 2.3.
I use Go Keyboard. I like it alot.
I also use the Go Launcher EX and Go SMS Pro. They allow you to customize things alot more than the apps that come with the phone. There are also alot of themes for all of their products and a good portion of them are free.

Enjoy your new phone!!

 

[eygraber]

Idk about the others but I downloaded gingerbread keyboard from the market and it works fine.

 

[xaerospace]

Yes, there is a gingerbread keyboard. I LOVE IT!
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.moo.android.inputmethod.latin.free

I am a recent owner too and I really am diggin it.

 

[anon(94115)]

I won't list my apps because most of them have been covered. I use LP+ because you can also speed up the phone a touch if you are on stock.

BEWARE of LTE switch, myself and several others have had to do a full reset to get 4G bak, but as always YMMV

Be sure to calibrate your battery properly, that may help with charging times but yeah it takes a bit to get this up to 100%

Keyboards have been covered better than I would do

 

[albertgeorge]

Cant you just switch between CDMA and LTE/CDMA to turn off lte

 

[hillview]

Just got my charge today and like the phone, but the camera sucks. Any changes in settings to get it close to the fascinate? I took a picture of the same thing with both the charge and fascinate and then put the memory cards in my computer and the fascinate is a high quality pic but the charge looks fuzzy, you can almost see the pixels. Any ideas?