Picking up Inspire today, a few questions :)

[gianmarco]

Edit: New question

I noticed that ALL of my contacts on my phone are flipped when i put in my old sim card. So, for example, if I had a contact named "Jon Smith", it now shows as "Smith;Jon". At tiems there is a backslash with numbers, this seems to represent the number of numbers under that contact. So if I had,say, 3 numbers under Jon Smith, it would read "Smith;Jon/3".

Also, how do i unsync and remove all my google contacts? As in i only want the contacts from my sim card.

Any idea on how to fix this? thanks!


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ORIGINAL POST
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Good afternoon. I have been researching for a new phone for days and have decided on the Inspire. After reading through hundreds of posts on the Inspire and its battery, I am not all that worried on the battery life. I will give it a week of getting used to it and getting the "newness" factor out of the way before I feel that I will be using it on a "regular" basis.

I am going to pick it up later today. However, I have a few questions:

1. I read how one member drained it out of the box near completely (less than 10%) before giving it a full charge. Is this advisable? Or am I better off charging it straight off the box?

2. It seems that the screen backlighting seems to be the main battery drainer while things like wifi take up very little (60+% for the screen and 2% for the wifi....if I recall a post that I read on the battery stickied thread correctly). What apps would you all reocmment to best monitor and adjust battery usage? And, if the stated usage is correct (i.e. wifi uses 2% of battery), will having the wifi on all the time make any difference? The reason I am asking is that there is a lot of (fast) public wifi where I am on a normal, daily basis (on campus and work).

3. May someone elaborate on the "pushing" for widgets such as gmail, facebook and twitter (which are the main 3 I plan to have streaming on one of my home screens)? Is it just whent he phone updates the selected widgets to the frequency you set it to update? Also, is there a way so that it only shows things like fb status updates and tweets from certain people you already are friends with/follow? I mean I follow some 350 accounts on twitter, but I dont want all of them streaming on my phone (i'll save that for when i get on my computer), just a select few for my phone.

4. Would you recommend getting a different launcher? I read how many people using the Atrix replace Motoblur with some other launcher (It hink it was called LauncherPro or something, correct me if I am wrong). On taht note, would you recommend any monds to it to make it a better phone? When I talked to the cell phone guy about the Atrix (the one other phone I was considering) and Inspire, he compared it as cars: The atrix is a really nice car, but you cannot really cuztomize it. The Inspire is a lower end car, but you can customize it a lot (the Inspire is $20 at Costco and the Atric is $120, the AT&T store had them both for $100).


Thanks!

 

[2manyPHONES]

Good afternoon. I have been researching for a new phone for days and have decided on the Inspire. After reading through hundreds of posts on the Inspire and its battery, I am not all that worried on the battery life. I will give it a week of getting used to it and getting the "newness" factor out of the way before I feel that I will be using it on a "regular" basis.

I am going to pick it up later today. However, I have a few questions:

1. I read how one member drained it out of the box near completely (less than 10%) before giving it a full charge. Is this advisable? Or am I better off charging it straight off the box?

im not a 100% sure if it really matters but i always charge mine right out on the box then let it drain completely before i plug it back in

2. It seems that the screen backlighting seems to be the main battery drainer while things like wifi take up very little (60+% for the screen and 2% for the wifi....if I recall a post that I read on the battery stickied thread correctly). What apps would you all reocmment to best monitor and adjust battery usage? And, if the stated usage is correct (i.e. wifi uses 2% of battery), will having the wifi on all the time make any difference? The reason I am asking is that there is a lot of (fast) public wifi where I am on a normal, daily basis (on campus and work).

a lot of people use an app called juice defender to help with battery life. i use widgetsoid and create widgets i can just tap to turn what i want off like bluetooth/wifi/gps and a screen brightness widget

3. May someone elaborate on the "pushing" for widgets such as gmail, facebook and twitter (which are the main 3 I plan to have streaming on one of my home screens)? Is it just whent he phone updates the selected widgets to the frequency you set it to update? Also, is there a way so that it only shows things like fb status updates and tweets from certain people you already are friends with/follow? I mean I follow some 350 accounts on twitter, but I dont want all of them streaming on my phone (i'll save that for when i get on my computer), just a select few for my phone.

I dont use tweeter so i have no idea how to go about (or if that is possible) to do on the phone

pretty much yes the pushing would be the updates and you set the frequency of those updates

4. Would you recommend getting a different launcher? I read how many people using the Atrix replace Motoblur with some other launcher (It hink it was called LauncherPro or something, correct me if I am wrong). On taht note, would you recommend any monds to it to make it a better phone? When I talked to the cell phone guy about the Atrix (the one other phone I was considering) and Inspire, he compared it as cars: The atrix is a really nice car, but you cannot really cuztomize it. The Inspire is a lower end car, but you can customize it a lot (the Inspire is $20 at Costco and the Atric is $120, the AT&T store had them both for $100).


Thanks!

This is completely up to you i would say try all the free versions of launchers you are interested in. i ended up with launcherpro plus but each person likes different things so try as many as you can before you buy one then later decide another better fits your needs

 

[RigelX]

There seem to be as many opinions about if and/or how to condition the battery as there are Inspire owners. I drained mine to failure out of the box, charged to full and repeated several times that first week.
Was all that necessary? I don't know, but I figured it couldn't hurt anything, and if it WAS beneficial, I wouldn't get another chance without replacing the battery.
I'm a fairly light user and regularly get 48hrs or more off a charge. There are many free battery monitor widgets, too, which will show your available power as a percentage rather than "full", "3/4", "1/2", "1/4", dead.
I use WiFi whenever possible, and have a toggle widget for it on my home screen right next to the internet launcher so I only have it on when I use it.
You can set most applications like email, and facebook (and I assume Twitter...I don't use it so I don't know) to update when you launch them or on various schedules. I started long and have been shortening the intervals as I see how it affects performance.
I can't comment on alternative launchers yet. Sense does everything I want so far. There are tons of threads about the options out there though.

 

[gianmarco]

Thanks for the input, ill look into the recommended apps as wlel as do some researchign ont he launchers.

I use WiFi whenever possible, and have a toggle widget for it on my home screen right next to the internet launcher so I only have it on when I use it.

How do you tie it so that it only activated when u use the launcher?

Also

You can set most applications like email, and facebook (and I assume Twitter...I don't use it so I don't know) to update when you launch them or on various schedules. I started long and have been shortening the intervals as I see how it affects performance.

Are you saying that battery performance is really not that affeted if the intervals are shortened? What is your current interval if you dont mind me asking.

Thanks again!

 

[2manyPHONES]

I think what Rigel is talking about for the wifi toggle next to his Internet launcher is that he just taps the wifi toggle to turn it on and off as needed right from his homescreen without having to go into the menu and wifi settings to turn it on and off a needed.

And I have my refresh times set at its shortest time whereas my cousin has them all set to manual refresh or like 6 hours and we still get about the same battery life. We both have our screens set to time out at like 30 seconds when no activity is being done. And inside I usually have the screen brightness set to 10-30%, outside on a sunny day I tend to need it at 100% to be able to read anything on the screen

 

[gianmarco]

I think what Rigel is talking about for the wifi toggle next to his Internet launcher is that he just taps the wifi toggle to turn it on and off as needed right from his homescreen without having to go into the menu and wifi settings to turn it on and off a needed.

And I have my refresh times set at its shortest time whereas my cousin has them all set to manual refresh or like 6 hours and we still get about the same battery life. We both have our screens set to time out at like 30 seconds when no activity is being done. And inside I usually have the screen brightness set to 10-30%, outside on a sunny day I tend to need it at 100% to be able to read anything on the screen

awesome thanks! should be fun setting it up. After a week is hould be able to guge what i ned and dont in terms of apps and widgets.

 

[John Redcorn]

I've heard it said that wifi uses lots less power than ATT data when you have wifi connection available.

When there's no wifi you're using but wifi is still on its supposed to take a whole lot of power constantly scanning for networks.


I have a service/app called "y5" that based on connected cell-towers turns wifi on and off. If I'm within a mile of my house or work it turns it on, if I go a mile away from house/work it turns off.

I wish it was more accurate, I go a lot of places <1mile away from home and work where I'm not using wifi but it's still on. There are some services that use gps to turn wifi on and off more accurately to the locations but for some reason that just doesn't seem right to me, querying gps all day long has got to use more or just as much juice than the mile or so of wifi-on around my "zones".

 

[RigelX]

I think what Rigel is talking about for the wifi toggle next to his Internet launcher is that he just taps the wifi toggle to turn it on and off as needed right from his homescreen without having to go into the menu and wifi settings to turn it on and off a needed.

That's it exactly. Very handy.

I have my email checking once an hour. Didn't seem to make a difference, though now that I think about it, quantity may be as important as frequency. If I download 100 emails, they all have be written to the flash card. I don't get anywhere near that many.

 

[gianmarco]

That's it exactly. Very handy.

I have my email checking once an hour. Didn't seem to make a difference, though now that I think about it, quantity may be as important as frequency. If I download 100 emails, they all have be written to the flash card. I don't get anywhere near that many.

I have my social networking to be synced once every 30 min and emails are instant.

Also I have anotehr quesiton. I edited it in to the original post, but ill post it here as well.

Edit: New question

I noticed that ALL of my contacts on my phone are flipped when i put in my old sim card. So, for example, if I had a contact named "Jon Smith", it now shows as "Smith;Jon". At tiems there is a backslash with numbers, this seems to represent the number of numbers under that contact. So if I had,say, 3 numbers under Jon Smith, it would read "Smith;Jon/3".

Also, how do i unsync and remove all my google contacts? As in i only want the contacts from my sim card.

Any idea on how to fix this? thanks!

 

[2manyPHONES]

While in your contact list you can tap menu-view uncheck whatever you don't want to show up in your list.
Also on that same screen at the top tap view contact name and you can choose first name first or last name first

 

[gianmarco]

While in your contact list you can tap menu-view uncheck whatever you don't want to show up in your list.
Also on that same screen at the top tap view contact name and you can choose first name first or last name first

i got rid of the gmail account sync, but facebook still interacts with my contact lists. Interestingly, if i am friends with someone on facebook and they have their number listed on their fb profile, their profile picture, name, and phone number show up on my list when i click on the "phone" button on the bottom center. This may be an issue if I have their number on my phone already, but it seems nice and the names are structured correctly. I need to start deleting REALLY old numbers so I guess ill go through my whole phone list.

Another question (seriously thaks guys for all the help so far!). I cannot set my gmail to sync at certain intervals. From what i read in the "Hero" subforum here after searching, i read that the gmail application (NOT the HTC mail app) has "push". which, according to the person in the post, uses less battery since the mail is "pushed" to my device when it is ready instead of my app periodically/constantly checking for anything new in my inbox.

edit: here is the tread http://androidforums.com/sprint-her...ting/12613-email-sync-download-frequency.html

Now I foudn that I have to manually click the sync button to get my new mail in.

thoughts?

thanks again! and do be surprised if i have more things i cant figure out!

 

[2manyPHONES]

I don't have to manually refresh to get my gmail. From your main screen if you tap manu-settings - accounts & sync is the auto sync option checked?

 

[gianmarco]

I don't have to manually refresh to get my gmail. From your main screen if you tap manu-settings - accounts & sync is the auto sync option checked?

it is checked, and it seems that my emails are coming in now instead of me having to click refresh. off taht now it works and it wasnt for hours earlier.

So was i right about the "push" of gmail using less battery though? in a way it makes sense because it is kind of acting like my text inbox by not constantly checking for new things and instead leeting things come to it. right?

also, background dats is checked too. I have gmail, facebook, twitter, and cnn news. how does this affect meand my battery life?