Marshmallows are no good!

So, no, exchanging phones with my wife DID NOT fix the GPS issue.

Today I had to drive to a shop to get some furniture about 25km away from my apartment, and the GPS acted up again. This was on the Nexus 5 my wife was using earlier. The phone was running Marshmallow 6.0.1. It was freshly installed couple of days ago.

The GPS problem persisted with Google Maps as well as Nokia Here maps. The issue occurred several times throughout the 50km or so total distance.

Thankfully I did not have to do a U-turn and correct the route. If I had to do that, I would have been super pissed because we had to make it to the shop before 5pm. And it was 3:40pm when we started heading for the shop.

Guess I have two options.

• Switch back to Kitkat and enjoy a properly working phone, but look like a caveman.
• Buy a new phone, making a hole bigger than AUD700.

Whether or not I go for the 2nd option needs very careful consideration. For the time being, I am back with Kitkat. *sigh*

What if I switch phones with my wife?

After writing that last post, I got a great idea.

What if my wife's phone doesn't have the GPS problem my phone has/had? If her phone functions properly, I can simply switch the phones because she doesn't drive the car yet. We both have the same phone so she won't miss a thing.

Ideally, I should have tested her phone a few days to see if it was working properly, but I was impatient. I wanted to switch first and then test. Then at least I would be able to use Marshmallow again. The feeling of being able to use the latest OS makes me happy, even if it is slow.

I factory reset both phones and flashed the latest version of Marshmallow available on Google to both phones. I swapped the SIM cards and the phone cases.

I restored the applications from the corresponding latest backups to both phones. That meant installing a lot of applications than what Marshmallow was used to running on my phone, because my final backup was from KitKat and I had installed a lot of app on it because it never slowed down like its successors.

This immediately brought back the sluggishness I was so used to on my phone. I used the phone the whole day yesterday and it eventually became somewhat usable. Either the indexes/caches we constructed to make things faster or my body got used to the sluggishness. Or it can be both.

What about the GPS issue? Is it better on this phone?

Yesterday I had to drive for about 30 minutes (I had to visit a house in Mulgrave to check some furniture which was advertised on Gumtree) and I found the location to update without a hiccup on Google Maps. Does this mean the problem is fixed? No, because it is definitely too early to draw any conclusions just yet but the initial results are at least positive. I think it needs at least a whole week of testing but I don't drive much, so a week of good performance is still not a good indicator. We shall see. I'm sure you'll hear more about this topic soon.

Nexus 5 battery drain on Android 6.0 Marshmallow

One of the improved features of Android 6.0 Marshmallow is improved battery life. Be it the Doze mode or the polishing of the rough edges of its predecessor, most people – at least the reviewers – seem to be noticing that their devices aren’t as thirsty for juice as they once used to. Unless you have a Nexus 5 or 6 that is.

I finally switched back the Nexus 5 couple of days ago and I immediately noticed how fast the battery of my phone drained. Today at work, I was down to the 30%s in no time. When I checked the battery status from the settings app, I notice something weird. The item that was using the highest percentage of battery was Wi-Fi. Why it is weird is because I did not have Wi-Fi enabled while I was away from work. So how could the Wi-Fi feature be responsible for draining the battery.

Google search – ironically in this case – came to my assist. It appears that there is a feature called Wi-Fi scanning in Marshmallow which helps improve the location by letting system apps and services detect Wi-Fi networks any time. I am not sure if it really helps with anything, but all I know is that I am not getting my whole day battery life anymore.

Upgraded my Nexus 5 to Android Marshmallow

 

Android 6.0 which is commonly known as Marshmallow, came out only few days ago and I wasn't expecting to see the OTA for my Nexus 5 anytime soon based on my previous experience with how long gone Google took to push the updates for my device. Hence I was amazed to see the update notification by the time I woke up in the morning.

 

For whatever reason, my wife's phone used to receive updates sooner than mine but this time mine got the higher priority. It could be because my phone was being used heavily in the last few days because we were traveling overseas and my wife's phone didn't have a SIM card in it. Regardless, I'm glad that my phone received the update first.

 

Despite the fact that we were supposed to go out and I needed the phone to find my way around and back, I decided to press the update button. It took a little while longer than I'm used to because the Internet connection down here isn't as awesome as the connection back at my apartment, but I had a working system within 30 minutes or so.

 

Upgrading the Nexus 5 to Marshmallow VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

 

So how is it?