Official Android thread

i woke up and my phone was asking me to upgrade.

Edit: maybe it’s not gingerbread? http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/12/06/motorola-droid-x-android-2-3-340-gingerbread-update-hitting-soon-motorola-droid-x-to-get-new-android-update-but-it-might-not-be-what-you’re-looking-for/

This. Bad numbering scheme confuses users. The nexus S is the only phone with Gingerbread so far

Yea I’m downloading this update now for my x

Moto Droid users should see a FRG83B Build update soon. Still waiting for mine.

got mine the other day, nothing to go crazy for, i still have the same problems as before

hey guys, just got my first smart phone ever. Ill admit its a little overwhelming but im trying to learn how to use this thing. So i purchased the samsung fascinate, anything that i should know or need? dont feel like reading through 50pages of droid talk.

there is really nothing you need ( well maybe angry birds) but if there is something you would like your phone to do that it does not already there is probably already a way to do that since android is very customizable. just ask questions and we will point you in the right direction.

i would tell you to root so you can get 2.2 froyo on that damn phone but since it is your first smartphone i wont lol

lol, good idea. however other then task manager is there a way to prolong battery life? i noticed mine doesnt appear to last too long while at home and using it moderately. Ill have to see tomorow while im at work to get a good idea of battery life.

first dont use task managers they are a waste of time and can hurt battery life, turn down screen brightness, have apps syncing less often (if you even have any that do that right now), dont use live wallpapers while they do look nice they do kill the battery, if apps ask you to use gps location say no because obviously that will hurt the battery too, you can turn off the gps if you like.

on a day where my phone gets light use i can go through the day and still have like 40-50% left

Google battery tweak and do them… brightness and antennas will help a lot

I am going to upgrade from my BB Tour to a droid I think. I was contemplating the incredible as that is the one I have used and liked. Is there something better out there, or something coming through the pipeline that I should wait for? I will be using this for business and personal email, management of the forum on the go, camera gets used a lot, some games for when I am sitting in waiting rooms and the such.

Any suggestions?

I would wait until CES conference. Probably gonna be a lot of cool shit announced there.

yeah everything is pretty much old news right now except for the nexus s, there should be a bunch of new phone coming soon now with gingerbread announced and verizon’s LTE

how can i make my droid x make a sound when i get an email? how about a facebook notification?

Edit i found out how to get it to do it for emails, but not facebook notifications.

at the home screen of the facebook app hit menu and select settings

I’m using the “Task manager” widget to make sure everything is “off” when I’m not using it, is that consuming power being open?

You mean you’re killing open apps? That’s going to eat more battery, because android is designed to store running apps in memory without using power but if you kill something that’s supposed to be running it’s just going to fire up the CPU to restart it and burn more battery.

If you go into settings and check your battery manager you’ll see that the thing that far and away uses the most power is the screen, so keep that dim and make sure you don’t have it set to stay on for a long time before it times out. Otherwise make sure you don’t have things like facebook or whatever set to auto-refresh too frequently. Otherwise if you still dont’ have enough battery life get a second and/or bigger battery. The thing I’ve found is that android really does a pretty solid job with power management so there’s not a lot of room for improvement and things like auto-kill on advanced task killer will actually hurt battery life.

I even tried using setcpu to underclock my phone but android’s so quick with scaling down to 300mhz when not in use that it didn’t make a lick of difference.

Juice Defender severely extended my battery life(still at 65% when i get home from work at 5pm) simply by limiting how often it does data transfers etc… with 1 simple click of the button it was up and running and I havn’t touched it since. I’m impressed.

Also, Facebook chat capability now with the facebook app as of this morning… its amazing how many more people are on facebook during the day. Never knew since I can’t get to it from work.

that lets it notify you when you get messages, friend requests, or event invites, but not when someone comments on something.

this is just a status “widget”, click on it, check what’s running, and you can select to manually shut them down. “2 active apps”, click on the icon, “browser” and “messenging” and you can select to end the process. it’s not an add on, it comes with the phone ect ect.