Essential Android Apps

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tom_e said:
Turn off auto haptic feedback in the phone settings.
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I don't want to turn it off as I like it when I press the buttons on the bottom of the S3.
What an odd feature, I'd have no idea why people would want their phone to vibrate while their phone rings.
 
Deep said:
I don't want to turn it off as I like it when I press the buttons on the bottom of the S3.
What an odd feature, I'd have no idea why people would want their phone to vibrate while their phone rings.
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It still will, there are separate settings the auto setting means it'll vibrate for things like the music. I'll double check once my nandroid backup has finished.
 
tom_e said:
It still will, there are separate settings the auto setting means it'll vibrate for things like the music. I'll double check once my nandroid backup has finished.
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:O Never saw that option before.
I went into it and turns out Winamp was unticked, I've disabled auto haptic so it's done the job.
The soft keys at the bottom vibrate but nothing else does.

Cheers!
 
I've just installed Dolphin and it seems great, but I'm missing my OcUK black theme! Any way of getting the stylish theme on an Android phone at all?

Cheers.
 
If you install xScope Browser, you can set the whole browser to dark mode (or night mode, can't remember what they call it now...)

That sets the background to black and the text to white so it looks similar, but not quite the same :)
 
I saw a colleague's S3 today that he modified with a custom install (ROM?) and has tweaked it to the extent that when scrolling through apps, it's nothing like the standard OS, it scrolls as if it's a 3D Box - it looked amazing. Every font and the way you interact with the phone was different to my standard S3. It said it took him less than a day to tweak his phone to his spec. Have to say it did look impressive - AND because it's not standard he is able to install apps onto his SD card! That's about the only thing that's tempting me - as with over 8gb used it would be nice if I could move some of the bigger apps and remove some of those I don't need.

However.... I'm not comfortable with doing that stuff - any of you know whether or not they'll add that functionality later on in later releases of the OS?
 
Doubt it very much. It could happen though.........


He was probably just using a 3rd party launcher like apex or nova or go for the 3D (cube) transition method (you don't have to be rooted in order to have that)
 
3D box etc... - it's a custom launcher. There's tons, ask him what he has, you can have it too. Samsung will always have touchwiz (what you use currently).
Move to SD card - less of a problem as time goes on, in the app manager some apps can be moved but if you mean the entire package then you can't do this without root. This really isn't that big of a deal, its much better for your phone to have apps on the phone, music/vid on the card. This will not be implemented by default going forward because technically, most of it already is. Doing so can introduce some MAJOR problems for apps when the card gets unmounted too.

If you don't have much experience with root etc... I'd try the custom launcher to start with, it will allow you to customise the homescreens, dock (bit at the bottom of the homescreen) and app launcher screen.
 
Thanks for the advice, not bothered about the "look" of it - though I guess it's fun for a laugh. :)

I see your point with regards to installing to the SD card. All my vids, pics and music are on that as we speak - some of the apps are just massive (asphalt for example!), and others are over 300-400mb.

Do they keep the data and what they can on the SD card by default then?
 
Freefaller said:
Thanks for the advice, not bothered about the "look" of it - though I guess it's fun for a laugh. :)

I see your point with regards to installing to the SD card. All my vids, pics and music are on that as we speak - some of the apps are just massive (asphalt for example!), and others are over 300-400mb.

Do they keep the data and what they can on the SD card by default then?
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It's down to how the installer is programmed to be honest. The problem is a bit more complicated and your friend was technically right so here's a better explanation. On Android there is basically 3 places we care about when it comes to apps and I'm going to call them

/apps - a drive you can't write to, but the OS can. Think /program files
/sdcard - a drive you and the OS and Apps can write to. When they are told to write to the "external sd card" they actually write here. This is what you see when you connect it to a pc under "phone".
/sdcard/external_sd - this is the external sd card but note it's mounted under /sd_card. Joy. This is the true external card, and when your mate said he could move apps to the external SD he meant he could move them here, from /sdcard (above).

If we go back to the wayback machine at the start of android the problem was that only the /apps and external existed so stupidly they mounted the external as /sdcard. Then along came onboard memory and the makers decided to call the onboard /sdcard and external cards were mounted under it on /sdcard/external_sd. This huge bodge is why this mess exists. So, apps do currently install to /apps and /sdcard (which, as i tried to explain, is really more like /onboard_memory). You have to use root to fix the filesystem to use the external for apps to install there.

Why is it bad? Because the external card is a megaton slower, it can be unmounted, it's not really officially supported so the OS gets in a tiz about it sometimes etc... The SGS3 has 16gb onboard, I'd always just allow it to install apps onboard for now, if you get issues with space further down the line then I'd do this fix later.
 
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