4G issue with Optus and Galaxy S7

It didn’t take too long for me to find a problem with my new handset. At work, I was getting marginal 4G strength (like 1 bar and it sometimes dropped to zero bars) and the browsing speed was terrible. It would take seconds to load a simple website like Google.com. But when the signal strength drops below some set threshold, it would automatically switch to 3G as it should (I think the data is HSPA+ as it shows an H near the clock) and the speeds returned to being very good. I’m only talking about browsing speeds here, not SpeedTest speeds.

Getting lower 4G speeds than 3G speeds is a messed up situation to begin with. The Galaxy S7 wasn’t helping to make the situation any better either. I wish I could override this fallback threshold, but it is not possible. The only way to get good speeds was to manually limit Network mode to 3G from the Settings app. Once that’s done, it works pretty well. But I lose features like VoLTE because of this. Whether or not it is a useful feature is yet to be seen, but it is a feature the network and the phone support, so I would like to make use of it.

Near the office, these are my LTE and 3G Speedtest results.

• LTE: http://i.imgur.com/MFwwtmA.png
• 3G: http://i.imgur.com/w6ZdwWJ.png

The S7’s software has some location based automation capabilities built in, but it does not let me switch the Network mode. That’s a shame, otherwise I could do this automatically based on my location.

This was a non-issue with the Nexus 5 because I have never seen it operating in 4G mode at work. Either the radio transmitters aren’t good or that fallback threshold is higher than what’s set in the S7. Either way, I still got good speed with the Nexus 5. Good speeds in the sense, there was no perceptible lag.

[Rant] Finally decided to Jailbreak the iPhone 5S

When I Jailbroke my iPhone 4S last time, it got a bit slow (not all the time) and the battery seemed to do weird things. One day I would get decent battery life, the next day the battery life would be so poor. I couldn't find the culprit. When Apple released iOS 7, I switched to it ASAP, which made me give up the Jailbreak.

I was never happy with the performance of iOS7 on the iPhone 4S. When I upgraded to the iPhone 5S, I immediately felt the speed improvements. But even then, the UI on iOS 7 is laggy. Actually, it is the animation part that is laggy. The fade in and out part. Sometimes it drives me insane! I like stuff that works quickly - stuff that responds quickly. Even if it is only a split second, I can very much notice that.

There is only one fix for this. Jailbreak and use a tweak that speeds up animation. But I don't know if the tweaks available on Cydia for this purpose are compatible with iOS7. Well, there is only one way to find one. It's time to Jailbreak and see.

[Article] iPhone 5S LTE vs WiFi performance

The best thing about the iPhone 5S is LTE. It’s a massive upgrade from the crappy 3G speeds of SoftBank. Even though it is still SoftBank, maybe because the LTE user base is low, the speeds are very good. When iPhone 5 was released, I’ve heard some people in the US say that their LTE performance was better than their Wi-Fi performance. That could be because I they have shabby internet at home. I wanted to see if this is true with me as well.

But I’m in Japan, hence I get very fast internet at home. 100~200Mbps both ways, provided by OCN via NTT’s fiber network. I have a NEC Aterm 8370N Wireless router at home. Unfortunately, my router only supports single band Wi-Fi. That means, only 2.4GHz spectrum. It does not support 5GHz spectrum. With dual band support you would get much better speeds in the short distances.

So the Wi-Fi speeds are not optimal. Here are my results.

Wi-Fi

4G LTE

Even with single band Wi-Fi, the LTE performance is lower when checked from my apartment. LTE performance would definitely differ from place to place.

Unfortunately, because it would cost me a lot of money to check the 3G speeds of my iPhone 4S, I cannot provide them for comparison. But I measured them a year ago, and they were pathetic.

[Article] iPhone 5S is awesome.

Well, at least compared to my old iPhone it is million times better. I'm sure people with the iPhone 5 won't notice the difference.  Or the hardcore Android guys or Windows Phone guys. I love Windows Phone, but I cannot get one in Japan, so I have no choice.

The biggest improvements I see are in the areas of UI fluidity, app launch speeds, network speed and battery life. Screen is largeer but it is not that noticeable. 

The A7 processor in the iPhone 5S is almost 4 times faster than the iPhone 4S's A5 processor. I'm sure the improved GPU is helping with the fluidity of the UI animations  I thought the animations of iOS 7 were so slow but I don't feel that with the iPhone 5S. I don't play games on the phone so I really cannot comment on the gaming performance. However, I'm sure I will get used to the speed and start feeling that this is no big deal after all. That happened with the iPhone 4S as well.

The biggest difference I see is with network speeds. LTE is way better than 3G - especially 3G on SoftBank because it SUCKED. With LTE, now I can stream YouTube, webpages open super fast and download apps quickly. For example, the Coursera courses page took ages to open on my 4S, but it opens within a couple of seconds on the 5S. On the day that I bought the 5S, I downloaded almost 700MB of apps on the way home from work, on the train. I wonder if that 7.5GB limit won't be sufficient for a month. It's possible that the amazing LTE speeds that I see are because most people are still on 3G and that the network is not congested. Or it could be a feature of LTE. I have not looked into LTE, not even a bit. (I should!) The quality/speed might change in the near future though because of all the people upgrading from their iPhone 4S to iPhone 5S.

Then the battery life - it's way better than I expected. If I leave home with a 100% charge, I can return with a 25-30% charge remaining. On the 4S, maybe because of the terrible 3G speeds, I couldn't get by a day with a full charge. Because of that, I had to charge the phone at work almost every day. It could be because its battery was worn out. But it could also be because LTE is so fast that it can go into idle state quickly. Besides, the iPhone 5S has a much bigger battery that the iPhone 4S. However, if I drain the battery, I won't have a charging cable with me. I wonder if the cheap Chinese rip-offs can at least charge the phone. I don't want to access the content of the phone from the PC.

Other than that, the finger print reader works really quickly. I thought you would get a lot of false positives with it but that is not the case. But I'm still not used to the whole idea of it, and I only remember I can use the finger almost half way through to entering the passcode lock. 

I haven't had time to use the camera yet. Hey, I am not a photo guy. I don't think it will be as good as the PureView camera in the Nokia Lumia 1020, but since they say it is better than the previous generation, which was even better than the 4S's, I'd take that as a "vastly improved camera". Hehe.

The Windows 8 tablet experience - web browsing

Browsing and watching videos are the two most important things that I do with the tablet. If either of these experiences are sour, the entire tablet experience become sour for me.

 

Google Chrome

I was planning to use Google Chrome when I received the tablet, because that way I could get the full browsing experience that a full blown desktop browser offers. I could integrate LastPass, sync my bookmarks and settings with my desktop PC, block ads (the screen is not large enough to allow ads on a tablet, even though I'm not against advertising) and integrate Internet Download Manager to download flash video off the streaming sites.

But those plans got irradiated the second I found out how pathetic the Google Chrome's UI was as a touch UI. The interface is very slow as well. (I have noted on PCs too, if you have a fast PC the UI feels fluid, but if you are using an ancient PC from the Pentium4 days, the UI performance starts to crawl.) You cannot zoom with two fingers without using the f-word. The Metro version is no better. Metro version is pretty much the same thing as the desktop version, only made to run under the Metro environment. Nothing's done to improve the touch experience.

 

What about Firefox? They have a Metro version too right?

Then I checked Firefox Nightly build that comes with a Metro version alongside the desktop version. It wasn't that great either. There definitely were some attempt to improve the touch experience, but the UI wasn't smooth -or responsive- enough. And the UI acted erroneously most of the times. For example, when I set focus to the address bar, the virtual keyboard wouldn't come up. Also it is currently lacking a lot of features. Add-ons are not supported yet. Until they start supporting add-ons there is no way I can recommend Firefox over IE10.

But since Firefox is at least on the right track-on the UI perspective at least, I will continuously monitor how their Metro version of the browser evolves. Who knows, I might end up ditching Chrome on the desktop and completely switch to Firefox, if Mozilla gets their Metro version of the browser right, because I want uniformity between the devices I use.

 

An update on Carbonite Backup status

About 2 months ago, I signed up for Carbonite. I got an extra 2 months of free subscription thanks to the offer code from Leo’s TWIT network. So, 14 months, plus the 14 days trial period. Unfortunately, I had to break the backing up spree after about 10 days into the trial period because I visited Sri Lanka. Even though it was originally supposed to be a 2 week break, it ended up being 3 weeks.

The price being reasonably cheap for unlimited size of storage, the only problem that remained was how long it would take to backup all of my data to the Carbonite servers. The speeds seemed to be good for the initial few gigabytes of data but it would slowly crawl down to 2Mbps. (With a capacity of 200Mbps in my internet connection, that’s so much wastage.) Given that I have over 1TB of data to be backed up, it would take a couple of years until all of that data was safely stored in the cloud. I won’t be running my PC 24/7 just for Carbonite.

Accurately speaking, I first subscribed to Carbonite on 2012/12/11. We left for Sri Lanka on 2012/12/23. So I ran Carbonite till 2012/12/22 evening. That’s 12 days. Then we arrived back in Japan on 2012/01/13 and I actually forgot to install Carbonite straight away. So the backup resumed from 2012/01/15. That’s another 18 days. So, in total, it’s been only 30 days - a full month – of backing up time.

So after 30 full days of uploading, this is the state of my Carbonite backup.

Note: I have no idea what that file it is uploading in the above screenshot.

113GB of my data has been uploaded. That’s actually better that I imagined. That means, after full 10 months of use, I might be able to upload all of my data to the Carbonite servers. It states that I only have 616GB remaining – I probably have to add more files to the backup queue manually. It doesn’t add those clunky files such as huge video files and ISO files to the backup by default. I just have to force it.

Should I just get the iPad Mini and put an end to this tablet misery?

Softbank Japan announced today that they were starting selling the iPad Mini and iPad Retina from 30th of November. Like usual, I paid them a visit. I had tried the iPad 3rd generation previously and felt it to be really heavy if you hold it for too long. Hence I wanted to see how the Mini felt in the hands. On paper, it doesn't even weigh half as much as the regular model, so the weight loss will be very much noticeable and welcome. (Note: The iPad Mini weighs less than even the Nexus 7)

 

And it is...very, very light indeed. I think this is the ideal size to a portable tablet. The small size comes with another advantage. You don't have to strain your fingers while reaching for the keys when typing. Still, it is not as easy as on a phone, but I guess it is because I'm not used to the form factor yet so I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. However, you cannot hold it and type with just one hand. But that should be obvious. It is hard work even on a big screen (4.5-inch plus) Android phone, so it should be impossible on the iPad Mini with much larger screen.