New Phone: Samsung Galaxy S Captivate SGH-I897 via AT&T network

Well... today was a great day for FedEx finally delivered my replacement phone for the Samsung Infuse 4G I returned over a week ago to Costco.  My second Android phone is the... Samsung Galaxy S - Captivate (model# SGH-i897). Fortunately, I have a great co-worker friend, we'll call him "Lukas" and he was able to guide me through the steps of rooting my phone and installing the Gingerbread Beta 1 2.3.3 OS. So far, so good running the new or quasi new Android Operating System.  In between calls and e-mail I was able to quickly download the twenty-plus apps I was using on the other Android phone, synchronize my two e-mail accounts, and now Amazon MP3 player is download music from its' Cloud Player.


Instructions:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1127578

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=14851485#post14851485

http://www.samsung.com/us/support/downloads/SGH-I897ZKAATT

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1054690

Then, I updated my GPS by doing the following quick and easy steps

1. open up the phone app

2. dial the following: *#3214789650#

3. choose - Settings, SUPL Settings, and change the server to supl.google.com

4. finally, modify the server port to 7276

Now the GPS locator chip works much more responsively than previous

Favorite Apps

MyBackup Pro
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.rerware.android.MyBackupRoot&feature=search_result

Android OS experienced gained and lost?

The last twenty-nine days have been a fun, great, and learning adventure with the Android OS (operating system for those non-nerdy). The Samsung Infuse 4G via AT&T was an amazing phone! However, there were some major hang-ups that weighed my decision to return the phone back to Costco this morning.


Samsung Infuse 4G Android OS 2.2 Froyo
Positives
1. the 4.5 inch screen was major eye candy with clarity, high resolution, and Gorilla Glass to match

2. the super AMOLED plus screen was truly an innovation and far surpassed the viewing experience of an iPhone 3Gs or the latest iPhone 4

3. The Froyo version of the Android OS was... okay, it was still very buggy on a daily basis.

4. Android Market (app store) - awesome! I love the feature where I can shop online via Chrome browser and Google sends the recently purchased app or apps right to my phone!

5. Amazon.com Appstore - very cool as well. Not as great as the office Android store, nevertheless, a vast collection and many duplicate apps as the Android store. Moreover, the Amazon app store features a pretty cool daily-free app.

6. Music - I tried the Amazon.com playing, the Winamp player, and the Google Music Player. Just yesterday, Google sent me the official e-mail and finally invited me to use their "music beta by Google". The App was way cool and so was the PC interface on my Windows Vista workstation. I was able to finish uploading over 3,000 songs from my iTunes library and My Music folder after about eleven hours. The Google Music app even allows you to "pin" which songs or albums you want to save to your phone or SD card. The streaming music idea has made leaps and bounds over the past six months!

7. desktop interface - I simply loved the options, features, live screen savers, widgets, shortcuts, and the skins the Android OS allows. My favorite feature I already miss (very much) is the page of one-touch icons to call, text, or e-mail any contact [perhaps Apple iOS 5 will incorporate/liberate this Android features as well].

8. Google account integration - similar to the iPhone as soon as you purchase you phone the Android OS asked for a Gmail account. I entered mine in and wow - it was terrific! My calendar, contacts, documents, Picasa libraries, and information all was seamlessly synchronized to my phone.


Negatives
1. screen, the 4.5 inch sucks the battery juice like none other. About the most I was able to get was about 4 to 5 hours of use on Wi-Fi, and that was using the automatic brightness setting.  Outside, I was barely able to use my phone at all in direct sunlight. I resorted to the shade of trees or my body to cover the phone's face in order to see where I was typing.


2. The screen size is great, big, and little too big for pockets and the arm holder I use when running. However, for a 4.5 inch screen the weightlessness almost made up for this negative.


3.  Daily bugs example, the stopwatch feature of OEM application, I would start the stopwatch and leave it running; although, after some random amount of time it would just stop and reset itself. The phone would cause me to loose any lap data that had been saved. I even tried using the stopwatch plugged in, changed the screen timeout settings - no help. I downloaded two other highly rated stopwatch apps - no luck same error.  One would would Google or another programmer is easily able to duplicate such a simple program.


4. App stores contain apps that are not fully baked nor appropriately tested. Google needs to be more strict on which apps are approved and some version of Quality Assurance needs to be put into play by the developer or by the app store selling/hosting said app.


5. Music - I missed the ease of use of iTunes... however, with the new iCloud Google's Music website and app are getting close.


6. I didn't like the fact that I was unable to organize the icons via computer and arrange the five pages of widgets, shortcuts, and apps.


7. Password prompt for purchases - as much as I hated typing in my Apple ID password for each and every app I missed that security feature. My co-worker borrowed the phone and was able to quickly download any app he wanted. The Android OS should have an option to turn off or on the password prompt for app purchases.

Android OS and themes

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011


I dropped my new phone this morning in the parking lot when getting my things out of the car - bummer! Two weeks to the day and  now it is officially broken in...


Okay, so if you want to undo the default Android system launcher called, "TwLauncher" you need to go into settings, applications, click on the "Running" icon to view running applications, then find TwLauncher, near the bottom of this screen is the setting "Launch by default" - to allow you to choose Go Launcher EX as the default click on the "Clear Defaults" button. Now, click on the Home button and you should get a pop-up asking you to "Complete action using..." and now you have the choice between GO Launcher EX or TwLauncher. 
1. check the box "User by default for this action" 
2. make your choice to use the default Android system or the new them launcher/skin (no worries for you can always switch back)


Firmware Version: 2.2.1
Kernal Version 2.6.32.9
Build Number: FROYO.UCKE3

Android

GO Launcher EX vs TwLauncher
Today I tried a new theme schema on the Android OS to try our the Theme TronPro Go Launcher. My thoughts about are... interesting.  So, do until what I just did I would uninstall two different programs:
1. GO Launcher EX
2. the Tron theme