iSwitched to Android Blog Day 7 of my 30 Day Challenge Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,801 words · ~14 min read
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this video is brought to you by coolermaster mobile featuring The Jazz
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proo notebook stand check it out at mobile. coolermaster usa.com welcome to
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day seven of my experience with the HTC1 so this is my first time taking a
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long-term crack at Android and I got to say the experience has been very
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positive so far so I'm going to start with the stock Gmail app which I
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absolutely love it allows you to easily and quickly switch between all of your
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different inboxes and it allows you to manage it through the notification
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screen to sort of navigate to each one individually it's very very seamless and
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speaking of seamless just I mean obviously it's a Google OS so it's very
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well integrated as far as Google stuff goes but YouTube is a fantastic
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experience compared to here I'm just going to go back to the very beginning
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compared to other platforms so you can see if I'm not signed into a particular
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YouTube account then all I have to do if I want to upload something is I go and I
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find something so in this case maybe there's a uh video tour of my motorbike
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which I'm planning to sell on Craigslist and I go okay I want to share this all I
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have to do is go oh look at that YouTube is in my top options now that I've done
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it a few times I can pick which one I want to throw that on Linus cat tips I
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select it I press upload and it is ready
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to go it is very very seamless once you're logged into YouTube you can
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see trending see I'm logged in now all
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of your uploads playlist favorites and all that good stuff so I just love the
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way that it's really well integrated I'm tempted to start vlogging based on how
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easy it is to just sort of take a video
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I mean it's 1080p it's extremely good quality I'm really enjoying this phone
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it's has a 1080p front camera as well and uh just how quickly I can upload it
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whether I'm on mobile or whether I'm on Wi-Fi is absolutely great um automatic
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synchronization of all of my junk made switching extremely easy so all of my
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contacts were synced no problem I also I never dial any other way now this is
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amazing sifting through your contacts list is just stupid compared to this so
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check this out all I have to do is go select so I start there you go so I
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start typing and it finds the right person and just in case it's not the
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right person all you have to do is hold it down and it will give you the options
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of all the different people so in this case it's just multiple entries for slick so there's a WhatsApp entry and
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then I think one other one so absolutely awesome I love swift key so I'm using a
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hold on I'm using a 30-day trial of swift key so let's go ahead we'll just
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go go right here um it's just much snappier much more responsive than the
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stock keyboard there's no weird sort of delay as the letter pops up showing you
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what you press the predictive text is amazing within a couple times of typing
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out things like Linus Tech tips it had learned it it was suggesting it for me
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um A+ for swift key definitely worth the $2 or $3 or whatever they're charging
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for it on Google Play uh power toggles is another great one one of the first
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things I complained about with this particular phone running sense 5.0 is
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that I didn't have a quick way to turn auto rotate on and off oh well now I do
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so I mean this is this is the strength of Android if you don't like something
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about it and there were things I didn't like on day one the odds are excellent
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that there's a way to fix it uh power toggles also addressed my uh distress
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that I couldn't see the uh the battery meter with a more exact percentage based
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readout boom power toggles adds a little battery meter you can customize it you
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can decide which things you want here so I went with data rotation
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synchronization Wi-Fi flash yay need a
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don't need a flashlight app anymore I can just scroll down from the lock screen and I'm ready to go GPS and
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Bluetooth so that does absolutely everything I need it to do which is
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great uh sliding notifications away without actually open anything is a
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relief from iOS this worked on Windows phone as well but there you go I'm
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offline on Skype apparently but that's extremely handy and now that I'm used to
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the multitasking interface I use it all the time so a double tap on home gives
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me all of the things that I've used recently and I mean it'll even do things
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like pause a video that I was in the middle of which exiting the app and
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reopening it doesn't necessarily do so for example emit the app that I use for
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uh video playback oh there you go um
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sure so something like that if I just go like this I can go okay I need to reply
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to I don't know an email really quick blah blah blah blah blah YouTube service
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something something and back to my video and I'm ready to go so it's very very
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fast it took me maybe a day or two to actually get used to but now I'm using
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it every time pretty much um I still don't really care for blink feed very
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much I'm more of a producer than a consumer of sort of Facebook LinkedIn
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this kind of Social Media stuff so I'm not finding this that useful for myself
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but I can see how if you didn't have such a busy feed it might work pretty
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well for you so it's the same reason I didn't end up using the People app on
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Windows Phone 8 I'm not saying it's a bad thing it's just not necessarily for
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me and speaking of other things that are unique to sense 5.0 I'm not sure whether
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I prefer the more traditional Android side to side scrolling or the more honey
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uh rather honeycomb uh the more gingerbread style up and down um I find
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myself actually using this one a fair bit and once I figured out that all you have to do is go in here and manage your
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grid size so you can add more icons to the screen it's actually not a lot of
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scrolling even compared to the side by side you can see I haven't properly
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arranged everything in folders yet these are still a lot of the stock folders but
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I've been super super busy so yeah there
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you go U another multitasking thing that I absolutely love is Chrome's tab
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switching so compared to um any other mobile OS that I've used
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this is outstanding and then if you're switching between two tabs quickly you
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can actually do it quickly you just swipe from the side and boom you're on
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mobile YouTube Boom you're back on social blade boom you're back on mobile
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YouTube looking at a completely different mobile YouTube your own your own live stream archive if you're
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narcissistic like that I want to get into the phone itself
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a little bit because the HTC1 really is a Unique Piece of Hardware I did drop it
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already which was extremely distressing so I was running to get something that
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was overflowing in the kitchen and I was like whoop I'll put it in my pocket whoop oh it fell on the ground so it
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actually fell from pocket height which fortunately for short people like me
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isn't that high to the tile floor and
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there's a dent uh where is it can't find
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it there it is so there's a dent right here you can probably actually see it a
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little bit better from this angle where this corner is kind of flat now and then
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there's another small dent on I think it's the opposite corner right there so
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it did survive it didn't crack the fact that the edge you can see it's actually
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a little bit wider at the butt compared to the screen is that's probably helpful
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for protecting it from a fall I mean if you dropped it straight flat on its
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glass like they did in that one drop test on YouTube then yeah obviously the
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screen's going to break but if it were to hit at any kind of an angle it would
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have to be a pretty extreme angle for it to contact the glass first so I don't
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know whether HTC thought of that or whether the curve is so that it fits
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more naturally in your hand um but there you go either way that's uh an
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intentional or unintentional benefit speaking of the curvature in spite of
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its 4.7 in screen I have found that I am
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actually able to type one-handed it's not that easy see it's not that easy but
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compared to the 8X I can reach and since
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uh re okay it doesn't want doesn't want
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anyway um so since swift key does a lot of the work for me anyway that helps a
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lot you can see in my Twitter feed there's this is uh this is some scary
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game streamer that I follow it's a pretty scary tattoo that she's got going
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on there anyway um ah okay if I had to come up with one
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complaint about the phone it would be that the lock button on the top looks an
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awful lot like the micro USB port here
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and they're in the same proportion so if you were pulling it out of your pocket
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think about it this way if you're pulling it out of your pocket and you want know the orientation of the phone
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at first glance that could just as easily be your lock button as this yeah
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so I've had to I mean okay very minor complaint but I've had to get in the
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habit of putting my phone in 188 way and pulling it out the same way so that I
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know where my lock button is but there you go that's pretty minor uh voice
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quality on my end I would describe as outstanding maybe a little bit better
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than the 8X whereas people on the other side are anecdotally describing it to me
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as pretty good so take take what you will out of that so that's my my
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feedback on the speaker and the microphone um I decided to do a bit of a
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stress test on the battery now HTC wanted me to talk about their battery
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bar which is a 6,000 milliamp little it's one of those little USB charge
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things so you can carry around a little bit of extra battery capacity with you but what I found is I actually didn't
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really end up having a desire to use it because my torture test that I did on
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day two involved 6 hours 6 Plus so I'm
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being conservative 6 hours of playing music on the phone at a reasonable
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volume so I was sitting working on my computer I had it next to me playing
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back music um so 6 hours of that uh 2
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hours of streaming video with emit so bearing in mind most of the processing
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is being done by my home server not by the phone itself but either way we are
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being pretty heavy on the Wi-Fi um and
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then another two hours of listening to music on headphones with a few calls not
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a ton of calls that day but regular Twitter as well as regular emails on the
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phone and I had 35% battery left at the end of the day this is with automatic
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screen brightness and I am not using the power saving mode I haven't turned off
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Bluetooth I haven't really engaged any tricks or any of those battery saving
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apps to help me save more power so I'm
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extremely impressed and it's sort of brought to my attention that not all X
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milliamp hour batteries are created equal uh slick Galaxy S3 he he having
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only owned it for I think less than 6 months already doesn't make it through a
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single day on a charge like at all um in
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fact he sent me sort of an amusing screen shot of how how ludicrous it's
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gotten over time and I mean remember guys the thing about a battery is that
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um here let me just find this okay well I can't find it but he
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sent me a really funny uh screenshot of his phone saying 25% battery left 5
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minutes remaining um that's a little extreme it does last longer than that
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but it's been pretty unsatisfactory for him so I'm really interested to see how
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this lasts over the longer term because when you compare it to the Galaxy S3 at
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least you can replace the battery on the S3 whereas this one you have to rely on
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the battery inside being very high quality I mean my iPhone fored to last
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me an entire day even though it's 3 years old because at least the
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integrated battery that you can't change doesn't have a horrible memory effect
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that causes the battery life to go down uh dramatically anyway I'm pleased for
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now auto brightness is handled extremely well to the point where I've actually
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left it on any phones I've had in the past I've never left auto brightness on
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because I find it drains the battery too fast but it's pretty smart so if you
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cover up the light sensor it's going to go ahead and dim itself pretty quickly
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and it'll dim itself like right way all the way down to the point where it's not
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uncomfortable I find if you're like in bed watching a video and it doesn't dim
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it enough it's just kind of glaring and uncomfortable on your eyes and it
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actually takes it down to a to a good level so it's very readable in the day
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as well it heats up when I hammer it with tethering but I think that goes for
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most phones pretty much at all um
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because you are stressing both the Wi-Fi
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and the uh the mobile data chipsets and
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the antennas and everything's just kind of going crazy in there but we didn't see any kind of weird performance issues
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or anything like that unlike my iPhone 4 which worked with tethering maybe half
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of the time and with half of the devices we had a couple notebooks and at least
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one other phone Tethered to it all the same time so I think that pretty much
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covers it this is day seven of my Android I switched and I'm ruining the
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conclusion again but I think I'm pretty much going to be sticking with Android and I'm pretty much going to be sticking
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with this phone unless you guys really want me to try out another platform like
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maybe Blackberry or Ubuntu and then maybe I'll do a 30-day switch to that
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but in all likelihood I see myself going back to Android for the main reasons
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being app availability you can find an app for almost anything uh as well as
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the easy integration with services that I use extensively like Gmail and YouTube
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