It’s a big honkin’ phone.
I knew that. I saw the specs. I saw them in the store. Until I started holding it my hand and carrying it around it wasn’t something I really appreciated.
Because of the size, I often end up inadvertently activating things when the palm of my hand touches the screen. Using it two-handed seems to be the best way to use it and avoiding messing things up.
So far I’ve just been getting everything set up: getting apps installed/reinstalled, filling the screens with app shortcuts and widgets and getting things configured.
For some reason Samsung decided not to build the GS2 with a notification LED, which is too bad. I found it very useful on my Cliq.
The only way to wake up the phone seems to be with the power/lock button.
Motion activation features are kind of neat. Flip the phone over to mute incoming calls/music, tilt to zoom.
Played a little bit with voice recognition. Seems to work pretty well so far. 100% accuracy, although I’ve only tried one short sentence. Still, it works. Was never able to use it on my Cliq due to microphone issues.
T-Mobile does include a lot of bloatware, which is unfortunate. Some of it is useful, but there are a few that are of pretty questionable value.
Not sure how battery life is yet. I was tempted by the case with built-in 1500 mAh battery (to supplement the 1850 mAh battery the GS2 comes with), but I had already ordered a spare battery and charger so I figured there wasn’t much point. Like the Cliq, I’m not terribly optimistic.
Visibility of the screen is pretty good in full sunlight. I was pleasantly surprised about that.
Haven’t spent any time playing with the camera yet. Planning to spend the weekend doing that.
The GS2 wakes up and notifies you when it’s fully charged. Not sure I see the point of that, but ok.
The internal 16 GB is set up as three partitions. There’s about 2GB for system storage (apps and such), 11.25 GB as USB storage (acts like a built-in SD card mounted at /mnt/sdcard) and the rest presumably for the OS. If you add in a microSD card, it shows up in the file system mounted at /mnt/sdcard/external_sd. It confused me a little when I went to look for stuff on the SD card and didn’t find it where I expected. There’s 784 MB of RAM used for running things.
Really liking the phone so far. Way better than the Cliq. It’s fast, responsive and has a gorgeous screen. The bluish tint takes a bit of getting used to though.
SGS II Unboxing
I finally bit the bullet and decided to dump the Cliq for a shiny new Samsung Galaxy S II.
The goodies inside the box: Phone, wall wart and cable, SIM card and battery. Interestingly, the antenna for the Near Field Communication (NFC) is integrated into the battery.
Here it is side by side with the Cliq. It’s a big phone, but pretty slim.
Power up!
Apparently I need to go get the data on my old SIM card transferred to the new one. The manual says it will allow me to upgrade to Wi-Fi calling when it becomes available. I could probably pop the old SIM in there I guess. At least the wifi works fine.
Update: After trawling through the T-mobile forums, I discovered there was an update to Androild 2.3.6 available (the phone came with 2.3.5). After a few hours of futzing around and staying up far later than I should have, I got the update downloaded and installed. Then the phone told me that Wi-fi calling was available, but that my SIM card (I put the old one in to test) needed to be updated. Off to the store at some point.
Thoughts on Digikam
Digikam is a KDE based photo manager. It’s a little more complicated than Shotwell, but can do quite a bit more with your indexed images. Just browsing through the menus it’s easy to see that Digikam has far more features and ways to view your photo collection than Shotwell.
Like Shotwell, Digikam uses a database to store metadata for each photo. Digikam can be configured to use SQLite (the default) or MySQL so I spent some time exploring both. MySQL 5.5+ defaults to using InnoDB tables, and scanning my photo directory (41k+ images) ended up taking several hours to finish and had the hard drive churning away the entire time. Switching to MyISAM tables makes the process much faster (a little over an hour) and was a lot quieter. The SQLite option is decidedly quicker, finishing the scan in just under an hour. In either case, the database can get pretty large if you have a big image collection.
Digikam lets you create a hierarchy of tags that you can apply to your images (didn’t notice if Shotwell lets you do thatShotwell 0.11 has this feature). One thing to note when applying tags is that the parent tag is automatically selected when a child tag is applied to an image. Selecting a parent tag automatically selects all the child tags under the parent. Not sure I like that behaviour so it’s something to think about when creating your tags.
Digikam synchronizes with nepomuk (KDE’s desktop indexer) so things like ratings and comments can go back and forth.
Despite the abundance of features like face and geotagging (haven’t tried those out yet) and more image editing options, Digikam isn’t difficult to learn. You’ll spend a little more time poking around checking out different things but if you’re looking for a little more out of your photo management software, Digikam would be worth a look.
Thoughts on Shotwell
The version of Shotwell in the Fedora 16 repo (Shotwell 0.10.1) is a little bit behind the current release (0.11.6) so some of my comments might have been taken care of already. If the new version doesn’t make it into the F16 repo as an update, I might try to install the new version and run it in parallel.
The first thing I like about Shotwell is the timeline or “Event” view of all your photos. You get to see all your photos in chronological order.
Categorizing photos by adding tags is pretty easy. Adding tags to a batch of photos is easy. Batch modifying tags isn’t quite so easy and is a little cumbersome. It would be nice if it worked the same way as adding tags.
There are basic image editing functions available: crop, red-eye reduction, auto image enhance. For more sophisticated image editing, you can right click and open the image in an external editor that you can specify (such as GIMP).
Built-in plugins let you upload photos to places like Picasa, Facebook, Flicker, etc.
Shotwell lets you remove items from the library or delete them by moving them into the trash. The first is useful if Shotwell has imported images that you don’t want it to manage, but if there are lots of them, it can be a bit of a cumbersome process.
The interface is simple and easy to figure out and the learning curve isn’t very steep. A decent little program for managing your photos regardless of how many photos you have.
Photo management
With over 100GB (43k+) of photos and images on my computer, I decided I needed a good way to manage and view all those pictures, rather than my usual navigating through the directory structure.
Shotwell and Digikam are both in the Fedora repositories, so they were obvious candidates to start with. I used f-spot briefly a while ago, and although the last release was over a year ago, I’ll give it a whirl too.
I’ll be spending a few blog posts exploring the three packages.