Help Some questions I couldn't find answers on.

[Dexsting]

So I’ve spent the day reading the forum, searching the Inet and playing with my new Epic, but I’ve got some questions I haven’t been able to figure out and hopefully you nice people could help me out These questions all pertain to my new Samsung Epic 4G on Sprint network. Apologies if the answer is obvious and I’m a moron.

1. I hear different things from different people on battery life and charging. Is it better to keep it charging and plugged in often, or to have the battery run all the way out, then recharge all the way back. Main reason is I plan on using my Epic during the day at my desk at work to play music or videos…am I better served draining the battery or keeping it plugged in at my desk while I listen to music and watch videos?

2. Is there an easy way to uninstall an app other than going into the app market, finding the app, and then uninstalling? I use to have the Pre, and you’d just need to Fn-click the ap and it would bring up a menu to uninstall it…

3. In my SMS chatting and such, I don’t see emoticons…just the colon end-parenthesis etc…is there an app to change that? Also, no offense to droid, but I’m not a fan of the green droid default emoticons when I click the smiley…is there a way to change those?

4. The Samsung Buddies Now widget…I don’t know why, but the facebook-linked pictures for my contacts look HORRIBLE! It looks like they took the shrunk picture that’s in my contacts’ pictures and just stretched it out to be a larger icon…its blurry…is there a better widget out there? I like being able to see just a few of my closest friend’s facebook status quickly and have easy access to call or message them, but the pictures are just ugly.

5. How do you chose a default picture for a contact? It looks like for some of my contacts its using the google profile pic, and others using the facebook pic…I’m trying to get them all to use the facebook current profile pic. [I saw a question for this out there already, but it looked like just waiting for 2.2 was the answer…and it didn’t mention a different pic overriding the facebook pic…]

6. Anyone suggest a good place to see a list of apps, widgets, games, etc (and preferably separated out by type…widget, type of app, game, etc..)? Being new to Android I don’t even know what’s out there to be good and actually search for it, but browsing through the however number of items that are out there seems daunting on my phone, and would be less so on a computer.

 

[nchargreed]

#1--continuously charging your battery will not harm it. If you are using it at your desk all day and it is convenient to leave it on the charger, I suggest doing just that. Many people are reporting really bad battery life and one thing that I found to help was completely discharging my battery to the point where the phone turned off and completely recharging it. It added a good 3-4 hours to my battery life. It was something I did ONCE, that kinda re-programmed the battery. Non-OEM batteries are available on ebay for very cheap and they are getting great reviews. Get a couple as back-up.

#2 you can uninstall apps from the market by going into Menu>downloads. There you will see everything that you've downloaded and you will have the option to uninstall. Keep in mind that refunds are only available for the first 24 hours after purchase. You don't have to search the entire market. You can also go into settings (from your phone's home page)>applications>manage applications. You can also uninstall from there.

#3 not really clear about your question?? Emoticons can be found while you are in the messaging dialog box, go to menu>insert smiley. They are the green droid robots, which I hate, but that's where you find them. As for changing the default droid emoticon, I'll be awaiting that answer, as well.

#4,5 and 6--good questions, I'll wait for the answers.

 

[Dexsting]

#2 you can uninstall apps from the market by going into Menu>downloads. There you will see everything that you've downloaded and you will have the option to uninstall. Keep in mind that refunds are only available for the first 24 hours after purchase. You don't have to search the entire market. You can also go into settings (from your phone's home page)>applications>manage applications. You can also uninstall from there.

#3 not really clear about your question?? Emoticons can be found while you are in the messaging dialog box, go to menu>insert smiley. They are the green droid robots, which I hate, but that's where you find them. As for changing the default droid emoticon, I'll be awaiting that answer, as well.

#2 - Thanks, that's more helpful. Its mainly downloading a bunch of the free games and then pitching the ones that suck...and I only need one solitare batch of cards, but which one is best? So I get 'em all and hands-on determine what I like best and then pitch the worse ones.

#3. I get a text from a friend, and the message doesn't show a smilely or anything, just the actual punctuation. Every other phone/IM service I've seen will automatically detect the emoticon punctuation and replace it with a smiley...and yes, any changes to green droid things would be nice too so we'll see if anyone else has an idea.

 

[nchargreed]

#3. I get a text from a friend, and the message doesn't show a smilely or anything, just the actual punctuation. ....

hmmmmm?? Emoticons that I receive are changed to animations. They have send you a punctuation combination that is supported by our phone. Blackberries have some rather advanced emoticons and those will come thru as punctuation.

 

[Dexsting]

hmmmmm?? Emoticons that I receive are changed to animations. They have send you a punctuation combination that is supported by our phone. Blackberries have some rather advanced emoticons and those will come thru as punctuation.

It was colon end-parenthesis...

 

[nchargreed]

It was colon end-parenthesis...

all I can think is that maybe the phone only recognizes colon-dash-parentheses...not sure but mine are coming through as reboticons. I didn't do anything to set this up, it does it by default

 

[Dexsting]

Another question...and still interested if anyone has anything to add on the other questions...but:

I have Retro Radio (just for Shoutcast, didn't see anything better really for free unless someone has an opinion) and Pandora that I listen to, and I'm having a horrible time if I ever want to stop listening to one and start listening to the other. I end up with force close errors...just no music playing...or just unresponsive; I basically have to shut one down and wait awhile (not sure exactly how long, but more than an hour) and then maybe the other one will start working...any thoughts?

 

[badankles]

Another question...and still interested if anyone has anything to add on the other questions...but:

I have Retro Radio (just for Shoutcast, didn't see anything better really for free unless someone has an opinion) and Pandora that I listen to, and I'm having a horrible time if I ever want to stop listening to one and start listening to the other. I end up with force close errors...just no music playing...or just unresponsive; I basically have to shut one down and wait awhile (not sure exactly how long, but more than an hour) and then maybe the other one will start working...any thoughts?

how are you exiting those apps? maybe they are still running in the background and so eventually android kills it as other apps pushes them off the queue.

from pandora, i use the quit option from the menu if i'm done with it altogether.