6
Jul

Firefox 4.0beta2pre is finally here

I have played a little with Firefox 3.7a6pre and the speed test results were great compared to Firefox 3.6. On the Mozilla project page I have been following the roadmap where it said that Firefox 4 beta will be released on June 24th. It wasn’t, but the delay was only a few days. Of course, I have downloaded the install as soon as it was available and played a little with it. First thing, I’m glad that they called the version beta instead of alpha – it makes me feel safer when trying it out. Second, the first impression was good. I have run it on my testing profile which has no add-ons and it works perfectly. The tabs look a little different and unlike in Firefox 3.6 they are positioned above the address bar. Not that I would notice, really. I have noticed, however, that the menu doesn’t hide by default and that I don’t see a bookmarks toolbar. Again, it’s there but it’s hidden by default.

I have repeated the speed test I took on 3.7a6pre and the results were slightly better on Firefox 4.0beta2pre. Compared to Firefox 3.6.6, the improvement in speed was 1.3 times. Note that 3.6.6 is faster than 3.6.3 was.

One thing I’ve noticed and have first thought negative of it was automatic updating. I love it now, because it brings me a new (nightly) version every day, but at the start I thought why I need to update a nightly beta version with another nightly beta? Now I update regularly and when my favorite add-ons will be available I’ll switch to FF4 for sure.

So this is the main downside for now: the add-ons. If I open the main menu, then Tools, the Add-ons, I get a nice looking page that should make managing add-ons even easier. However, when I click on the Get Add-ons pane and Browse all add-ons link I only get the Forbidden page…

My current Firefox4beta is “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:2.0b2pre) Gecko/20100706 Minefield/4.0b2pre ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)” and I have just updated it when writing this post. I have run the Sunspider test again and this version seems to be even faster – 1.45 times than 3.6.6.

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2
Jul

My 6 months new Samsung Galaxy i7500 is already old

I have purchased my first Android powered phone in December 2009. It was good looking Samsung Galaxy i7500 that ran Android OS version 1.5.

My first impressions were OK if I exclude the camera picture quality, the battery problem and the fact that even after solving it my new phone lasted shorter time then my previous phone (which I replaced because of low battery life, ouch…). Overall, the phone was great since I got an internet enabled device with a full browser and a GPS device in it. Soon I discovered other features that were missing or weren’t complete, for example Bluetooth for file exchange was missing, I couldn’t connect to WEP networks protected with a certificate, the picture browser was very basic, NPS for phone synchronization didn’t support synchronization and similar. I was really satisfied with the number of (more or less useful) applications in the Market. I was disappointed with the GPS because it didn’t have navigation.

After some time of using the phone I have noted that the phone has become slow and inresposive. This might be because of a big number of applications that have installed, but this should not happen if I’m not running them.

I have also discovered several bugs on my i7500 that are still not solved.

But the real frustration began when Google started to release newer Android OS versions. I have discovered that Samsung doesn’t offer proper support for this phone. There were no bug fixes and absolutely no OS upgrades for this phone. I have read and wrote about the firmware with Android OS version 1.6 released, but I still didn’t receive it over the NPS updates.

Now the Android 2.2 is out and I’m still running my phone with Android 1.5. Samsung missed versions 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and is now missing 2.2 so I’m five version behind the world. All this might not be important if my phone wasn’t only 6 months old. I’m not able to accept the fact that I bought a top-end phone and after half a year I am looking forward to replace it because newer and better phones are available.

Recently, I got an answer from the officials at Samsung Slovenia saying that my Samsung Galaxy i7500 will never get the update to 1.6 or higher.


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25
Jun

The list of bugs on my Samsung Galaxy i7500 Android phone

As you might know from my other posts I have a Samsung Galaxy i7500 mobile phone and I have had many problems with it and with the official Samsung service company. Many of the problems I have with my phone are bugs. The phone doesn’t work correctly and they should be fixes. Some of the, in my opinion, are critical and influence the device and its usability as a whole. I have found solutions for of them, for example for draining battery. Some of them have become worse through time or maybe with the firmware upgrades that I’ve done (actually I’ve done only one firmware upgrade).

Here is a list of bugs that I experience on my Samsung Galaxy i7500 smart phone:

1. If I use the the original pouch for the phone the battery drains in less than a working day. I have found workaround for this bug, but it disables me to protect the phone from scratches.

Severity: Major. Embarrassment for Samsung for not trying to solve it or putting instructions on not to use the original pouch.

2. Sometimes the phone’s ringer stops working. I use my phone as an alarm clock and from time to time my alarm doesn’t ring. When I look at the phone the display says that the alarm was silenced after 2 minutes of ringing. When I try to change the ringing volume, the phone restarts. It is a ‘soft’ restart and it doesn’t require me to enter my SIM card PIN number to unlock the phone. If I try to change the ringing volume again, the restart happens every time. The ‘solution’ for this bug is to restart the phone (’hard’ restart by turning the phone off and on again).

Severity: Critical. I don’t know a way to reproduce it if it’s not happening already.

3. Lately (after a firmware upgrade?) I have discovered that many people claim that I was not available (no network) when in fact I was. I also receive an SMS from my service provider that I have had a missed call when I wasn’t connected to the network. I have also discovered that this happens briefly after I was in a call or when I was using data services. The scenario to reproduce this behaviour is something like this: I call someone and I stop calling before he could answer. He calls me right back and gets the signal that I’m not available. The other scenario is that I’m using data services, for example reading (or synchronizing?) e-mail messages. When someone calls me in between they get the message from my operator that I’m not available.

Severity: Critical

4. Not often, but every now and then it happens that when I’m in a call and the call quality is OK, the call is dropped. This can be the operator’s fault or the other call party’s fault, but the fact is that I see this behaviour with this phone alone. When I was using my older non Android phones this didn’t happen to me at all.

Severity: Critical, but it might not be the phone’s fault.

5. Overall low battery life.

The specifications say that this phone can be used for 492 minutes of talking time or 422 hours of stand-by time. In my measurements I get 2-3 days at most, which is less than 80 hours of usage per battery charge.

Severity: Critical

If the bugs were easy to reproduce I would send my phone back to the seller. Since these bugs are hard to reproduce I don’t (or can’t?) do anything. Samsung Galaxy i7500 has disappointed me and I’m not sure what my next phone will be. I have a feeling that I won’t stick with this one for long time (or other way around, the phone won’t stick long with me).


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