Android OS horribly crippled?

[chanchan05]

I have Firefox, Opera, and Dolphin installed. For the issue with the forum I've had issues on this site with Firefox for sure and I know I briefly tried one of the other browsers and also had problems with text entry...but I can't recall which one I tried.

All the browsers I have work pretty OK for just browsing, and I don't think I've really tried doing much text entry on any other site using my GN2. I did use other vbulletin sites with a Droid 4 for a bit without too much issue, and used my N800 for years on various forums, so this might just be an issue with this site, or an issue with my particular phone.

Try Boat or Chrome.

 

[!on]

Try a different browser, try a different keyboard app.

Go in app's settings & instruct it what you want to do.

The culture of things being "crippled" is an apple trademark!

That people come here from apple complaining of something missing is pure irony. Some people have been spoiled by apple & are just lazy.

 

[Davdi]

@ OP - It's the phone not Android (as has been said numerous times already). I use two phones, HTC Wildfire S (rooted, WildChild3 custom ROM, O/C to 806MHz) and a stock Xperia U (1GHz dual core, ICS). of the two, the HTC is much more fluid and responsive (no more Sense UI) and the Sony is very laggy in comparison. I've put off getting the N4 as I can't really justify the expense, even though JB is intrinsically more secure and smooth in use. At least it is on the N7 tablet.

 

[Gmash]

I've been posting on this forum from different browsers with my phones for two years without a problem. My first Android was a Huawei Ascend. You can't get much cheaper than that, and I still never had a problem with the full version of this site.

 

[heviarti]

You know, I fooled with an Ascend and the keyboard tanked. Other than that it was solid; though it did exhibit the same problems with text fields.

The only apple product I've fooled with is an ipad (recently), so I'm not coming from an iPhone. Fact of the matter is my previous smart phone was a palm centro. It was more crippled than the Android. I don't wonder but what I should try to take video of some of this stuff I'm talking about. I wonder if everyone is just used to it, and accepts it as normal.

 

[dylane]

Try a different browser, try a different keyboard app.

Go in app's settings & instruct it what you want to do.

The culture of things being "crippled" is an apple trademark!

That people come here from apple complaining of something missing is pure irony. Some people have been spoiled by apple & are just lazy.

Not sure if that is directed at me, but I have tried different browsers and have 5 or 6 keyboards installed. And really, the fact that I have trouble posting here from my phone is a pretty minor problem that I don't really care to spend much energy trying to solve.

The bigger issues I have seem to be more of a difference with the underlying design of the OS. The fact that Android seems to have been designed without real multitasking in mind, and the limited multitasking we have now feels tacked on and not really integrated well from a workflow perspective. For instance, even after having my phone for 2 months with multiple ways to bring up the recent apps list, I find I only use this maybe half the time with the other half relaunching the app from the desktop or the app drawer, simply because it is more natural and easier to find (this is partly due to Samsung not including a dedicated recent apps button).

I also find that when I do bring up a recently used app that I wanted to keep running in the background, more often than not it has stopped and reloads on me. This is true of apps I just used, like if I put a video in the background to buffer while I do something else. And really true if I don't use an app for a couple of hours or more.

The copy and paste thing has already been mentioned, but this feels like another area that was just added on as an afterthought, rather than being a core feature of the OS. On a desktop for instance, a single click of a mouse will put the cursor there, a double click will highlight the word, a triple click will get the line or the paragraph. Click and drag allows you to adjust this as needed. My first mobile worked in pretty much exactly the same way and was as easy as could be. Once you had highlighted the text, a long press would bring up a context menu with copy as an option (or you could use the physical buttons to bring up the same menu).

In Android it is generally a long press to highlight one word and bring up the handles which theoretically can be used to highlight whatever you want, but IME most the time trying to do that results in spastic swings of highlighting everything except what you want. Even when it does work as designed, good luck trying to highlight more than one screen of text at a time. Once the text is highlighted a toolbar menu is supposed to pop up at the top with the option to copy, although again this just doesn't happen 100% of the time. Many times I've highlighted something and no toolbar pops up, so I have to go and switch to hacker's keyboard so that I can use a keyboard shortcut to do the same thing. When the toolbar does popup it is just icons, with no obvious icon on which one you would click to copy to the clipboard. I've also found that different apps seem to handle copy and paste in slightly different ways, making me think that it is somewhat up to the app developer to make sure copy and paste works consistently.

There are a ton of other things that feel very inconsistent. Like the change to no longer having a context menu button officially supported, which again seems to be up to app developers and manufactures on how they want to handle. I've seen a few different apps that have 3 different settings menus with different (but overlapping) settings in each, depending on how and where you access them.

And for the record I'm no iOS user. I've used it a bit at work and found it to be very frustrating, so I've never considered getting any iOS device. Although that was a couple of software versions ago, so they could have improved by now...but in general I'm not a fan of any walled garden approach.

 

[Stuntman]

With regard to copy and paste, I just copied my largest amount of text earlier today. It was 450 words and I did not have any issues doing it. I have an SGS3. I didn't do it on a browser. I used my Note Pad app, Google+ and Facebook.

 

[dylane]

With regard to copy and paste, I just copied my largest amount of text earlier today. It was 450 words and I did not have any issues doing it. I have an SGS3. I didn't do it on a browser. I used my Note Pad app, Google+ and Facebook.

I haven't found a way to select text and scroll at the same time, which means that doing more than one screen of text is impossible. At least that's been the case for the email client and Polaris office on my GN2. Would love it if I was wrong and just hadn't figured out how to do this yet.

 

[Stuntman]

I haven't found a way to select text and scroll at the same time, which means that doing more than one screen of text is impossible. At least that's been the case for the email client and Polaris office on my GN2. Would love it if I was wrong and just hadn't figured out how to do this yet.

I originally did a select all. Right now, I just tried to do the select and scroll and it worked for me. I just long tapped, move the first flag to the top of the page, then drag the second tag to beyond the bottom of the page and it scrolled. I scrolled all the way to the bottom and was able to select my whole document. I did this in Notepad and I am using SwiftKey keyboard app.

 

[chanchan05]

I haven't found a way to select text and scroll at the same time, which means that doing more than one screen of text is impossible. At least that's been the case for the email client and Polaris office on my GN2. Would love it if I was wrong and just hadn't figured out how to do this yet.

Highlight some text, then drag the second handle to the bottom of the page and don't let go. The screen will automatically scroll.

 

[dylane]

I originally did a select all. Right now, I just tried to do the select and scroll and it worked for me. I just long tapped, move the first flag to the top of the page, then drag the second tag to beyond the bottom of the page and it scrolled. I scrolled all the way to the bottom and was able to select my whole document. I did this in Notepad and I am using SwiftKey keyboard app.

I seem to be able to do it in a text editor app I have, but still can't get it to work in email or in Word documents. I can't even get all the way to the bottom, I get about 1 line from the bottom and it just stops.

 

[chanchan05]

What office app are you using again?

 

[dylane]

What office app are you using again?

Polaris

 

[chanchan05]

Polaris has an odd quirk of having to drag up and down to continue scrolling downward. For example on my Tab Plus running ICS, when I enable highlight, the keyboard also pops up. I drag the second handle downwards, until my finger reaches to the level of the letter "m" on the keyboard (without removing it from the screen). Then when it stops highlighting, I drag my finger up back to the level of "i" then down back again to "m" and it continues highlighting for a few lines. I am able to highlight several pages worth of text using this. This only happens in polaris in my experience.

 

[dylane]

Interesting. Will have to give that a try and see if that solves my problem. Thanks for the tip.

 

[codylaws88]

My LGL75C always jumps to the top when im typing comments on facebook. this seems to be the only time it does it. ive tried older versions of fb and updated them and it still does it. I assume its a software glitch. idk how to fix it as I am new to this and just now figured out how to root and flash predeved roms on my zte merit. my zip is rooted but no roms yet sadly and I cant get cwm recovery to work on it. I wish I was as smart with these things as half the guys in this forum but im here to learn. any help with jumping to the top of fb would help. thanks guys yall are great!

 

[nickdalzell]

This reminds me of my first experiences with Android on lower-end devices.

 

[bjacks12]

Yup, you want a good Android experience, you need to buy a good Android. Almost everybody I talk to that moved to Apple because 'android sucked' did it because they bought the cheapest phone that VZW/AT&T/Sprint/T-Mobile offers on contract.

Then you have to consider the difference in 2.3 and 4.x+. My first Android experience was with a Galaxy S Captivate running 2.3. This was the top of the line phone in 2010 when it came out(I bought it in 2012). While it wasn't a bad phone for me, it was definitely a LOT less refined than 4.0. Now with the huge jump in hardware and software, my Nexus 4 is the smoothest machine I've used to date. I have never noticed any lag or any issues with it. I would put it against any iPhone.

 

[Stannis the Mannis]

You get what you pay for mate.

 

[Kaiser17]

Don't blame the OS, blame the manufacturer.

 

[TJGoSurf]

Did anyone else look at what 2.3.1 was? Gingerbread was so long ago.

 

[zuben el genub]

My LGL75C always jumps to the top when im typing comments on facebook. this seems to be the only time it does it. ive tried older versions of fb and updated them and it still does it. I assume its a software glitch. idk how to fix it as I am new to this and just now figured out how to root and flash predeved roms on my zte merit. my zip is rooted but no roms yet sadly and I cant get cwm recovery to work on it. I wish I was as smart with these things as half the guys in this forum but im here to learn. any help with jumping to the top of fb would help. thanks guys yall are great!

Probably not a glitch. I've seen this on various sites on a computer using FX, Opera and Iron. I think it gets coded in so you have to look at an ad that was on top of the page. You always have to scroll back down to where you were originally.

I can't say about the ads - if the site is extremely annoying, I turn images off in FX and Opera - so if the ads are normal images, I don't see them.