My Samsung Galaxy Note 4 arrived today. I am officially a phablet user.

This is the first phone that my hand can’t reach the upper-right of the screen. This has proven, thus far, to be less of an inconvenience than I had feared. I have to re-evaluate where I put things on the screen, which fortunately I have the ability to do. The only place it’s turned out to be a problem is that some apps put menu options up there.

I am rootless, which means that this is a problem. However, Google plans on addressing it for the next Android release. I have a workaround in the meantime.

I’m mostly looking forward to having 3GB of RAM. I was really hoping it would be 4,

As is often the case, there have been some compatibility issues with software that I use. I can’t use Astroplayer anymore (my backup all-media player), and neither Nova Launcher nor Holo Launcher work with it yet. So now I use Apex Launcher. All of which are very similar. Which on the one hand makes one think “What use is it to have all of these identical launchers?” and the answer is “Because when one doesn’t work, another does!”

Unfortunately, it didn’t fix some of the Bluetooth problems I had with the previous device. Somewhere in between the S3 and S5 they inserted what I believe is a battery-saving feature (a laudible goal) that turns of AVRCP (the part of a bluetooth that lets you pause and restart media).


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2 Responses to New Phone!

  1. Wow, you’re the second person that I know to get one of these.

    I can’t use Astroplayer anymore (my backup all-media player)

    In contrast, us Apple types just yell at Apple to make the Apple supplied player better. Yeah, you can jailbreak an iPhone, but it’s one of those things that just doesn’t make sense to even the more advanced users of iPhone.

    • trumwill says:

      Well, I do wish the default players were better. But I also have some specific requirements that make it really good for me that I don’t have to rely on the default player. I prefer to deal with music, for example, in folders rather than tagged libraries. So at some point I downloaded twenty-someodd music players and found the best ones, then video players, etc.

      Which I’m glad I did, because as soon as it became evident that Astroplayer wasn’t an option, I knew immediately what my #3 was (Meridian Player). This is a lot more work than a lot of iPhone people (or Android people, for that matter) want to go through, but I do enjoy the ability to do so.

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