Recent content by rossmcm

By S4 has suffered from excessive battery consumption for some weeks now. It isn't all the time - I generally notice it because the top half of the phone gets incredibly hot -like, alarmingly hot. The graph shows the consumption after I disabled flight mode in the morning: ..so the...

I needed to free up some storage on the Tablet S so I thought I would try moving some apps to the 32Gb external SD card. I moved a group of the largest apps (Angry Birds, etc), and now when I try to start them it says "App isn't installed". The icons are still there, but the apps aren't...

My S4 bit the pavement and as the display and digitiser still seemed OK I opted for a cheaper repair and just had the glass replaced by a local guy. He was happy to report that the digitiser did indeed seem OK and returned my phone with only a new glass fitted. A couple of days later this...

Just acquired a Sony Bravia KDL50R550A TV. It has wifi and I am trying to get screen mirroring from the S4 to go. When I play a video on the S4 I have the mirroring icon in the top left corner: If I press it the TV responds immediately and the S4 displays this: When I select the TV as...

I took a video of around 2 minutes with my S4. The file produced is a MP4 of 152 Mb, resolution 1280x720, 2 minutes duration. The thumbnail displays OK, but when I try to play it with the stock video player, it reports: "play audio data only", which is does - no video. Same result with VLC...

I can't seem to copy files from the network to the external SD card reliably. If it is going to fail, it always fails immediately (i.e. the copy never starts). If the copy starts it always completes without problems. If I use X-Plore or ES Explorer I can scan the wifi network to find...

The instructions at How to Create a File Shortcut in Android outline how to add a shortcut to your desktop using ES File Explorer. The shortcut can either be to a folder or a file. It seems to work for LAN folders as well, but I can't seem to create a shortcut to a network file. The context...

If, like me, you had your phone put into a boot loop by the GMail update of early October 2013, here is how I recovered mine. The main problem is that you need to disable sync in the short time between when the phone finishes startup and before it reboots again. On the occasion I tried...

Just a warning that the latest GMail update (4.6 (836823)) as at 9 Oct 2013) introduces a new setting "Auto Sync" and it is displayed when GMail starts up after the update. DON'T TURN IT ON. If you do your phone will start boot-looping. My S4 is currently unusable. I would appreciate any...

Anyone know if there is a secret key binding or magic button press to capture a screen shot on the S4? I have noticed a couple of images in the gallery under "screenshot" so I have managed it some stage by accident. Can you do it via a PC and one of the Samsung PC apps? Don't want to root...

The S4 seems to produce AMR files for "normal" quality voice recordings, and M4A files for "high" quality. VLC media player can handle these files without complaint but I haven't yet successfully got iTunes or Windows Media Player to recognise them. I thought I was able to do this with AMR...

We have 2 S4 phones at work. They spend most of their time connected to WiFi. On thumbing through my phone today I noticed it was showing 6.45 GB used last month (August). Seemed a bit high though we notice a blip earlier in the month when an android update was pushed to both phones, but that...

From day one, my Sony Tablet S has regularly reported the "Social Feed Reader" needs to close. I never use this. It won't let me uninstall it as it treats it as a system app. The other day I got a data traffic monitor, and it reports "Social Feed Reader" is responsible for significant...