A few questions on Android phones

I have the S6 now and have been wasting bits of my life setting it up

Here is a picture quality comparison, for now, against the Nokia 808. Obviously the S6 colours are over-saturated; this is a complaint in all the reviews also. I am trying to find an alternative camera app which offers saturation control; so far I have not found one that actually works on the S6 (android v5+)…

The S6 camera is otherwise very good. Here are two 1:1 zoomed image sections from the above link

The 808 image is much closer to the real scene in terms of colour. That image is 12MP (reduced from the 40MP sensor) and the S6 image is 16MP which is why the S6 image is bigger as an image despite its jpeg file being 1/2 the size! The 808’s camera app was set to “100% jpeg” (which is all one can do if the phone API is crippled to not deliver RAW) while the S6’s camera app has no config and I would estimate the jpeg quality is about 90%.

Other comments:

Phone is much too slippery to be used without a “serrated” sleeve. I’d say it is completely useless without some kind of case – except when lying on the desk. It is too thin to hand hold without one’s fingers slipping around to the edge of the screen and then they trigger some function. So I installed Nova Desktop which has a feature for freezing the desktop layout

I ordered several cases to see which one is any good. The first one arrived and went in the bin within 2 minutes (didn’t fit over the phone).

Camera click cannot be disabled “for privacy reasons” – one has to root the phone and rename
/system/media/audio/ui/camera_click.ogg and shutter.ogg files to say .ogg-old
This is obviously ridiculous. I was trying to see how far I can get without rooting it; the answer is not very far. Some S6s have that menu item present and some don’t. My phone came from Germany and in that firmware Samsung removed the shutter sound config item from the camera settings.

The S6’s LED flash is much less powerful than the 808’s proper flash. That was to be expected I guess, but I never found a review which actually measured this.

Rooting the phone was easy (30 mins) but had to be done twice – again this is documented on the hacking sites. A lot of the google hits on the process contain advertising traps so one has to be a bit careful.

I will post which case actually worked. Normally, Nillkin ones are good but mine has got lost in the post.

This one was useless – would not fit.

In that case they should ban camera phones – the biggest breach of privacy ever, as the girl in magaluf will tell you

I am having some fun with the official dropbox app. It doesn’t auto-download (“sync” is perhaps the word) anything beyond one file at a time. The PC version downloads everything, and even the Symbian one (CuteBox) had an option for that. There seems to be some way to make it work for the Gallery (i.e. photos or movies) – if you can find where the config for that is – but nothing else.

I guess this is yet another “usability committee” kind of crap i.e. no normal person would want to download anything which the phone (which is primarily a multimedia consumption device) doesn’t handle so no way to download general files

A quickie: the successful rooting procedure for the S6 was found here

It had to be done twice, for some reason, before RootCheck reported the device as rooted.

it was quite public from the get-go!

Sure, but it’s hard to imagine a non-public setting where the camera shutter sound would be regarded as preserving privacy. The only difference I see is whether there is so much ambient noise that the shutter cannot be heard

What basically p1sses me off is that you buy a phone in one country (or from some “UK” Amazon retailer who has succeeded in concealing the fact that he is in fact in Portugal, or better still in China) and you get a phone which has been crippled for the laws of that country, or that country’s dominant cellular network’s demands that tethering must be disabled.