General Consultant Discussion

Anybody using ice cream sandwich and gmail? In old Version when you would press and hold on a message in the message list you would get a pop-up menu. Now it seems to just open the message. That was an easy way to be able to mark a message as unread without having to open it again. Am I missing something?

I always use the checkboxes on multiple messages -- usually to archive them. I don't think you can long press and get a menu any longer -- at least I couldn't.

You used to be able to long press and get text to voice as well. That too seems to be gone. They also changed all the functions to hard to understand icons. If you ask me the new version of gmail is significantly worse than the prior. Yet I can't find anybody else who wrote about this

Found that unlike the Galaxy SII (which is still a great phone), S3 does NOT truly support Text Reflow. What I mean by that is if you zoom in on a column of text on a web page, the browser always wraps the text so that you don't have to slide left to right and back to read the column. For years I've said this is the best feature by far of Android vs. IOS. Now Samsung has gone and for some bizarre reason, killed it. They do have some odd 'Reading' button that simplifies the content for reading and that mode oddly does reflow text. however, for whatever reason, it's only available about 50% of the time. This behavior seems to flow to some other apps as well that supported this. For example, if you try Dolphin HD which is a very nice browser, on the S2 it reflows but NOTon the S3 so they must share some kind of core rendering engine. From what I read, the HTC One X(or EVO 4g as its now named on Sprint) does wrap text nicely and they are both based on the same version of ICS. Did a ton of research and found that Opera Mobile is the only browser that does wrap and thus that's what I'm using. I'm guessing they use their own rendering engine. Probably because from what I've read they essentially use the same source code on IOS, Android, Mac & PC so it must rely less on the OS. i do have to say its a very nice browser and its tab view is nicer than the others I've tried.

I've also found a surprising number of apps that don't properly support higher resolution phones. My old favorite news reader, NewsRoom which I discovered back in my Palm Pre days, is clearly messed up visually on the S3 (and from what I've read, on any phone with more than 800x480 resolution). It looked gorgeous on my SII. I'm going to have to switch to Pulse which is more popular but I find harder to view due to small tiles and titles. There are a number of apps where the fonts are too small and not adjustable, buttons are too small etc because they assume you are on an older resolution phone or they assume you must be on a tablet with this resolution. I'm hoping with the probably 20 million S3 that will be sold in the next 2 months it will kick developers in the ass to get their act together. This is one area where Apple has an advantage. Developers couldn't ignore the iphone 4 since all new phones would have the same Retina Resolution and modify their apps was crucial. If you didn't modify the app, the existing apps still scaled properly due to IOS, they just had jaggies. This was the case with the WSJ app on the Ipad which took a few months to go Ipad 3 native

Found one huge plus on S3 over S2. S2 had decent battery life (could get through most of a day with what I call light usage (mere mortals would call it normal). But barely. People with iphones, Droids etc seemed to always outlast me, but I'm constantly fiddling with the phone. The killer was the S2 took FOREVER to charge. I think it was like 4-5 hours from empty. If you were charging in the car and using an App like google maps or navigation, bluetooth and SiriusXM, it would actually lose charge while plugged in, just slower than if it weren't. The S3 seems to go from 0 to 100% in about 2 to 2.5 hours. Awesome!

I have very good battery life on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus -- which is unbranded pure Google - http://www.google.com/nexus/ Try loading Google Chrome and see if browser wrap works better

One of my partners just got a Nexus on Sprint. Nice phone, but one generation behind the S3. I tried Chrome, Dolphin, you name it. I also read about it. The ONLY browser that wraps (unless you change your ROM) is Opera Mobile and Opera Mini.