Android phone battery lifetimes suck, but you knew that already. A few weeks ago, I was visiting the heart of downtown Tampa, FL. I stayed in a beautiful hotel across from the Convention Center, and had no Sprint coverage. ”But Greg,” you say, “one of Sprint’s first WiMAX 4G towers is there! Their coverage map shows ‘in-building 4G’ coverage!” Yes, my Internet friend, I do see that, but alas, I also saw the prohibitory icon on my phone, the Samsung Galaxy S Epic 4G, for an entire week.
Posted in: Life - Technology | Tags: android, customer service, epic 4g, galaxy s, samsung, sprint
At first, I thought to myself that this must be some isolated display glitch, but I didn’t have time to restart the phone. Today I did. Several times. No difference. Then I thought, let’s ask the Internet if anyone else has seen this. Looks like people have. Again, Samsung, it’s the little things…
Posted in: Technology | Tags: android, epic 4g, galaxy s, samsung, sprint
I haven’t been messing around with the Android SDK for too long but I’ve already found some things that I think are worth sharing. Android has a concept of Services, or a process that can sit in the background and run a task without needing to interact with the user. There’s plenty of reasons why a Service might not need to be running all the time (say an alarm clock app with no alarms scheduled), but for the most part, Services need to be started at boot. Here’s how, tested from Android 1.5 to 2.2, since no other example I could find on the Internet was complete for this ever-changing SDK.
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Posted in: Technology | Tags: android, boot, broadcastreceiver, intent, manifest, service, start