Samsung Galaxy S II Owners Thread

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27 posts

Geek

#482505 18-Jun-2011 12:44

nzgeek: The WiFi antenna appears to be at the bottom ot the phone, somewhere near the capacitive buttons. If you hold that end of the phone you'll get a weaker signal than if you hold the top. Makes life a bit hard if you're holding the phone in portrait orientation, but not so bad in landscape.

Cheers, i had tested that and did get a slight improvement but it's not really a practicle long term solution for what is fantastic phone in all other repects.

nofam

1094 posts

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#482556 18-Jun-2011 14:52

Piscator:
nzgeek: The WiFi antenna appears to be at the bottom ot the phone, somewhere near the capacitive buttons. If you hold that end of the phone you'll get a weaker signal than if you hold the top. Makes life a bit hard if you're holding the phone in portrait orientation, but not so bad in landscape.

Cheers, i had tested that and did get a slight improvement but it's not really a practicle long term solution for what is fantastic phone in all other repects.

I wouldn't about it too much - the phone is still very young, and I'd anticipate some big improvements with firmware in the coming months.

Brendan

716 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#482577 18-Jun-2011 15:32

nofam: So I’ve been thinking (as you do). Is there any reason, given the low cost of flash memory, that smartphone manufacturers couldn’t include a standalone recovery ROM chip in their phones that contain a factory-default firmware. If you managed to hard-brick your phone by Odin/Kies crashing while overwriting your bootloaders, or flashing the wrong bootloader so the PBL/SBL no longer matched, you could depress a small reset button inside the phone case (paperclip style) which copied the read-only contents of the chip back to your NAND, effectively giving you a hard factory restore?

As long as there was no physical damage to the PCB/chips themselves, and you’re not relying on the USB connector, is there any reason this wouldn’t work? It just seems like a good, cost-effective way to give you reliability – sure, you’d lose all your data, but sending it back to Samsung, and having them do a JTAG restore would amount to the same thing.

What they should have is a tiny boot ROM (NOT flashable) as part of the custom chipset in the phone. Few hundred kilobytes or something. It's the first thing the cpu executes after power on.

This ROM checks to see if some key-combo is being held in, if not it passes execution to the OS loader.

If YES, it loads a basic driver for the SD card, and flashes a uncompressed binary file on the root of it to the OS partition of the phone's memory and reboots the phone at the end.

Obviously, the binary file is a recovery image of the OS. It might be several hundred megs in size, doesn't matter.

If the binary file is corrupt or incompatible, no matter - the boot ROM is still untouchable. Simply put the sdcard into a PC, copy the correct binary file on to it, and try again.

It'd incidentally provide a neat way of rooting the phone, and some manufacturers are now staing they will support rooting/modding - so it fits in.

And if some carrier wants to do some lock in due to subsidising the phone? Well, that's best achieved with a contract anyway. They'l still get their money. Or they blacklist the phone as stolen I guess...

nakedmolerat

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#482710 18-Jun-2011 23:30

anyone here use the power pack?

jpanwala

72 posts

Master Geek

#482769 19-Jun-2011 12:42

One feature or rather the lack of it, which puts me off on this phone is when you go to the gallery and want to email multiple pictures taken from your camera or even upload it say using picassa, the phone does not automatically resize images unlike the iphone which optimizes images to be sent over email. Tried PicSay from market, it does one image at a time, I need around 20+ to be done and I am getting nowhere with it, There is not even a "select multiple items" thing in file manager. While there is on gallery, it limits the vast selections for sharing to only 1 item. Any suggestions?

Brendan

716 posts

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#482779 19-Jun-2011 13:15

jpanwala: One feature or rather the lack of it, which puts me off on this phone is when you go to the gallery and want to email multiple pictures taken from your camera or even upload it say using picassa, the phone does not automatically resize images unlike the iphone which optimizes images to be sent over email. Tried PicSay from market, it does one image at a time, I need around 20+ to be done and I am getting nowhere with it, There is not even a "select multiple items" thing in file manager. While there is on gallery, it limits the vast selections for sharing to only 1 item. Any suggestions?

Try quickpic off the market. Don't know if it does what you want, but it does plenty of other stuff.

jpanwala

72 posts

Master Geek

#482787 19-Jun-2011 13:48

tried quickpic and other app called reduce image size, neither have the ability to batch resize...

Sharesies

Trade NZ and US shares and funds with Sharesies (affiliate link).

Brendan

716 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#482789 19-Jun-2011 14:01

jpanwala: tried quickpic and other app called reduce image size, neither have the ability to batch resize...

Email the quickpic guy and ask for that feature?

ArtooDetoo

1044 posts

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#482790 19-Jun-2011 14:03

jpanwala: tried quickpic and other app called reduce image size, neither have the ability to batch resize...

Photoshop Express?

Galaxy S has gone to its new owner. HTC Sensation has gone to its new
owner. Galaxy S3 has gone to its new owner. Now using Galaxy Note 3. Skipping Note 4 I think...

Neets

1376 posts

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#482804 19-Jun-2011 14:51

My Skinomi protector arrived on Monday. I put off applying it until the dust settled (forget lint, in Chch you've got to be more wary of liquefaction).

It was a real bugger to get it to stick around the edges. Had to get the forgotten hairdryer out to try and dry the solution off the corners to get it to adhere. It took a long time to apply. And despite it appearing like I had all the bubbles out from the front this morning I see about a 1/2 dozen of them.

Hopefully over the coming days they will disappear like the skin I bought for the SGS.

The back looks awful. With the textured back cover the skin over the top just looks cheap and nasty.

Still, if it doesn't work out I can just rip it all off.

Oh, and it doesn't slip into the Sena case very well now either. But I guess that's not really unexpected.

Samsung Galaxy S5 SM-G900I

StephenNZ

48 posts

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#482820 19-Jun-2011 15:50

Does anyone have any hot tips on where to get a good price on a Case-Mate Barely there case for the Galaxy S II?

Neets

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#482834 19-Jun-2011 17:09

StephenNZ: Does anyone have any hot tips on where to get a good price on a Case-Mate Barely there case for the Galaxy S II?

I don't know what "a good price" is because I've not looked around to know.

But you can get them from the official site here.
Or you can get them from ebay Aus here.

Samsung Galaxy S5 SM-G900I

nofam

1094 posts

Uber Geek

#482837 19-Jun-2011 17:12

Have just flashed Cognition S2 v1.05 due to terrible battery life on Lite'ning 1.4 (fully charged when I went to bed, 53% this morning, 3G sync on, but with 80% used by the screen when I hadn't touched it overnight!)

Anyone using this?

booyah

82 posts

Master Geek

#482838 19-Jun-2011 17:12

id rather have the genuine samsung ones with the vent holes as it gets very hot when browsing.

nakedmolerat

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#482840 19-Jun-2011 17:17

booyah: id rather have the genuine samsung ones with the vent holes as it gets very hot when browsing.

I notice that too today. Very hot when I was downloading 1 gigabyte of data

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