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Concerns before buying

J

jmac1

Lurker
Hello everybody. I've been reading the forum for a few days trying to make up my mind about the Captivate. Obviously there have been some issues and I am wondering if anyone out there is not having any of them. Generally people speak up about the negatives.

Here are the issues that I have read about that concern me:
Email syncing
Music stuttering
Phone shutting down
Batterly life (though it seems to getting better?)
GPS (I'm confident that a fix is on the way)

One other concern that I have after playing with it for about an hour in the store is the web-page rendering. On the iPhone (I have a 3gs), the double tap to zoom works very well and the words are large and wrap nicely. On the Captivate, even though the screen is larger, the words are much smaller in some cases because they don't wrap the same way. Do the non-stock browsers handle this any better?

My last concern is the uncertainty of when Froyo will officially be released.

Anyways, I'm REALLY looking forward to making the switch to Android, but I'm just not sure if now is the right time. Any thoughts would be appreciated (and sorry for the long post)!
 
jmac1 said:
Here are the issues that I have read about that concern me:
Email syncing
Music stuttering
Phone shutting down
Batterly life (though it seems to getting better?)
GPS (I'm confident that a fix is on the way)

One other concern that I have after playing with it for about an hour in the store is the web-page rendering. On the iPhone (I have a 3gs), the double tap to zoom works very well and the words are large and wrap nicely. On the Captivate, even though the screen is larger, the words are much smaller in some cases because they don't wrap the same way. Do the non-stock browsers handle this any better?

My last concern is the uncertainty of when Froyo will officially be released.

Anyways, I'm REALLY looking forward to making the switch to Android, but I'm just not sure if now is the right time. Any thoughts would be appreciated (and sorry for the long post)!
Click to expand...

Email syncing with Gmail works great. With twitter and facebook the syncing has some software problems. With Exchange it has some real limitations such as not supporting Exchange policies (if your corp tries to enfore a policy it will probably FC the email client) and only the inbox syncs automatically.

Music stuttering is a lag issue with the touchwiz interface. Supposedly Android 2.2 will fix this and most other lag issues due to supporting the full amount of memory in the captivate.

Phone shutting down is a one-off issue, if yours does this, exchange it.

Battery life is pretty abysmal, it does take a good week for the battery to settle in but even after that the 3G radio sucks the most of the battery and you can't turn off 3G because AT&T forced it to constant on. If you can use flight mode + wifi that will help. Hopefully someone comes up with an app to manage the 3G radio. AT&T won't do it because they have their data leeches running the background to artificially push up your monthly data usage. Luckily the battery is replaceable and spares are $40.

GPS is broken, badly. Supposedly there is a fix in the works but Samsung won't commit to anything or even estimate a timeline. They'd be stupid not to fix it promptly, but then again, we don't know whether or not they are stupid.

Web page rendering is about normal for mobile browsers. The pinch zoom is not quite as accurate but what you are really seeing is the difference in the display - iPhone retina display lets you read the small text much more clearly. But if you zoom to a normal font size it's about the same. Do you really want to ruin your eyes by reading text that small anyway?

Froyo probably won't be around until December sometime.
 
So the music stuttering is universal? That would be a bigger dealbreaker for me than the GPS. I really like the Captivate and want to buy it, but it's difficult to rationalize if it doesn't work as it should. Does anyone NOT have problems with the music playback (I hope)?
 
There is an app that lets you switch off 3G by renaming some configs so the phone can't find 3d (no root access required, and this is all done with a button).

Battery life though is GREAT on mine if I do not run apps that are crappy (and they are facebook and Yahoo Mail - YM sucks battery laike crazy).
I usually do an hour of movies, 2 hours of browsing a day (mostly on wifi) and up to an hour of calls, and it lasts all day. In fact it is getting better for me since I started full charge/recharge cycles. Last night I went to bed at 2am because the battery did not drain by my usual bed time and I had to stay up 2 hours watching bad movies just to drain the batt.

If you are not satisfied with batt drain and do not care about auto sync, you can even switch autosync off - check your mail by opening up the app once in a while, not relying on notifications. This is a solution if you do not care about timely email delivery.
I bet if I switch auto sync off, and do not play with web/movies a lot, this phone will last at least 2 days.

Yeah, and one more thing, if you are in an area with BAD reception, and the phone is constantly looking for a signal , that drains the battery more. If you have a large house with WIFI in one corner, and you run around the house, and the phone loosing and acquiring wifi frequently, that will drain the batt too.
the worst things is the apps however - make sure you do not run crappy apps like Yahoo Mail that drain the batt quickly. If batt suddenly became bad deduce what caused it - what app did you last install that may have effected the batt life?
 
Well I'll through my 2 cents in. I have had my phone for a week now. I did a lot of tweaking from this site, but I'm new to android, so I'm sure I made some mistakes. I would have given up sooner, IF At&t had a comperable phone without having to wait for the iPhone 4 for a couple weeks. So, I plugged away. I ended up doing a hard reset on my phone yesterday and that really fixed things for me.

I can successfully sideload apps.
I have no problems with shutoff, and didn't before either
I don't have any music stuttering problems, and didn't before.
I admit I'm just playing around with GPS, I mainly drive in my town, so I know where I'm going - Not a major issue.
Video playback is awesome.
I love the 4inch screen.
I love reading ebooks on this machine.
In a pinch I edited and submitted a term paper thanks to a little bigger screen and Docs to Go.
I like the web browser, firefox, and find it very easy to pinch to zoom and expand.
I love Swype for texting. Even my 37 year old fat fingers have figured it out and it is so accurate.
I love how you take a picture and can automatically upload to facebook and/or twitter with caption. I love how the software is integrated in Android.
I love that Android, at first confusing, is different and offers access to files and folders for modifications.
The 1ghz Hummingbird processor is fast.
I'm impressed with Android Market. It offers a lot and is very streamlined.
I am a fan of the 5mp camera and its features as well as the 720p video camera. I have a lot of kids and hate having to drag my Sony Camera out everytime for a quick picture.
I like multi tasking and the phone doesn't get bogged down.
The 4 inch AMOLED screen really is the seller for me.
I like the potential of having 48gb of micro sd space if I wanted it. Pretty cool for a phone.
This is before the graphics and rendering. I have a couple games on my phone I wanted to try out and it is exceptional.

I admit I was really contemplating returning mine, but the phone specs were so cool and At&t has nothing but this and the iPhone, IMO. So I gave it another try and I'm glad I did.
 
My music doesn't stutter. I've noticed about a 2 second delay between changing songs though. Battery life is okay but people complain too much about battery life on nearly any phone you buy. It could always be better I suppose.

I just plan on keeping a charger in the car and one at work as well as home. If you are constantly on the road you can use the charger or at work you can plug it in on breaks or what not (or in your office).

You could always buy the phone, try it out and if it doesn't work return it on a few grounds:
1. gps doesn't work like it should
2. music player causing problems

The GPS not working would be a pretty good way to get out of paying a restocking fee. Especially, since we have not heard anything from Samsung and probably won't.
 
jmac1 said:
So the music stuttering is universal? That would be a bigger dealbreaker for me than the GPS. I really like the Captivate and want to buy it, but it's difficult to rationalize if it doesn't work as it should. Does anyone NOT have problems with the music playback (I hope)?
Click to expand...


I have a 1000 songs and don't experience any stutter. It may be because I don't leave many apps running in the background. This problem is most likely a memory issue. This phone has 512 MB of RAM however the OS (Android 2.1) is limited to 256 MB usage. Froyo will allow the phone to use more memory. I say "more" because Android's website says memory usage > 256. It doesn't specifically say that it will support 512, but it is a VERY safe assumption that it will since that's the next binary increment (adding another binary digit to the address space).
 
Thanks for the input so far! I'm feeling a bit better about email since I use gmail.

Are their other widgets for twitter and facebook that work better than the stock set up?

I'm not all that concerned about the battery as long as it can last a full day (7am-10pm). I would not call myself a heavy data user so I don't think it will be a problem.

Any other good news to share? If you can't tell, I'm trying to be convinced!
 
jmac1 said:
Thanks for the input so far! I'm feeling a bit better about email since I use gmail.

Are their other widgets for twitter and facebook that work better than the stock set up?

I'm not all that concerned about the battery as long as it can last a full day (7am-10pm). I would not call myself a heavy data user so I don't think it will be a problem.

Any other good news to share? If you can't tell, I'm trying to be convinced!
Click to expand...


Yeah... here's some good news (from another post):

http://androidforums.com/samsung-captivate/137106-samsung-releases-captivate-source-code.html
 
skinien said:
I have a 1000 songs and don't experience any stutter. It may be because I don't leave many apps running in the background. This problem is most likely a memory issue. This phone has 512 MB of RAM however the OS (Android 2.1) is limited to 256 MB usage. Froyo will allow the phone to use more memory. I say "more" because Android's website says memory usage > 256. It doesn't specifically say that it will support 512, but it is a VERY safe assumption that it will since that's the next binary increment (adding another binary digit to the address space).
Click to expand...

So If I hypothetically have gmail updating every 15min, widgets for Twitter, Facebook, Google voice, weather, and news, do you think I'll have a problem with stuttering? Also, is that gonna be too much as far as battery life goes? Thanks!
 
optendo said:
The captivate code is open source now!
That is huge plus across the board.
Click to expand...

I'm not a developer, but I'm guessing this means that a developer can create their own "Skin" so to speak? How long in your estimation before we start to see these pop up?
 
jmac1 said:
Thanks for the input so far! I'm feeling a bit better about email since I use gmail.

Are their other widgets for twitter and facebook that work better than the stock set up?
Click to expand...

For facebook, just make yourself a bookmark to touch.facebook.com - all the facebook apps suck. There are several twitter apps. And I wasn't saying the music stuttering is universal, it's just another overall "lag" symptom that may or may not happen to you.

You can get a motorola P513 rapid rate car charger on amazon for $5.85, and a blackberry 700ma wall charger for $4.09, don't pay retail for extra chargers! (since you'll need a lot of them, lol)
 
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