Recent content by Rred

Unlocking should have nothing to do with bars and signal strength. It sounds like you changed the network settings and either you are using a carrier who has poor coverage in you area, or you switched the phone to a different band which has poor coverage in your area.

The parental kids at Google apparently felt their announcement was "fair" to everyone, and arguably it is. Which doesn't explain why they dropped recording on OUTgoing calls, which they used to offer as well. But I think Google is going to encourage lots of folks to abandon them as they make...

AFAIK, the only phones you can use with Verizon and the models made solely for Verizon. Some of the Verizon phones (like the Galaxy S4) also have a SIM card so they can work GSM overseas. But they won't work in the US on Verizon's domestic network. Bring up the exact model number of the phone...

OH. Thank you very much. Now, when I find the guy who took that option off the menus and put up a secret tap-x-7 to enable it...Would you like to hold them for me? Or shall I hold them while you beat them? And after we get warmed up, we find the folks who *approved* that programming, and...

I have no idea what that "7 times" comment means. But to answer the question, apparently USB debugging was either left on (as I had it) or is the new default, I've been able to re-root over the OTA 4.4.x

Oh, my phone is SO happy to announce wireless charging (Qi) has started. Except sometimes there are people sleeping when I've put the phone on the charging pad and all that celebration really interrupts the sleep and endangers me and the phone alike. Is there any way to either disable the...

I had rooted my phone out of the box, and last week installed the Android 4.4x OTA update. Which unrooted it, without protest or comment. Today I went to root the phone again, only to find the menu function for Settings/General/Developer_Options/USB_Debugging no longer exists. In fact, the...

Be careful about bulges If a battery "fits" but makes the back of the phone bulge a bit? Be very careful. These lithium batteries are made with very thin plastic separator sheets between their internal layers, thinner than most food wraps. If the separator is punctured, the battery can catch...

" the front flip cover part doesn't stay all the way shut. " That's probably why it was a RETURN aka REFURBISHED and why there was only one of it. Discounted.

" they claim it'll last longer than stock (3140mAh), but it's only 2100mAh." That's one tip-off that there's something wrong here. The other biggie is that they say the battery is FCC Approved. Which sounds real important, except, the FCC doesn't "approve" batteries in any way I've ever heard...

Elves came in the middle of the night, terribly evil elves, and they rooted my phone. So now I'd like to sweep out some of the stock apps that I don't use, want, or need. Does anyone have a list of the applications "by screen name" versus "by app name" so I can be sure of what I'm deleting when...

Google had said they used a special low-power audio chip to listen for the magic words. So if you enable "google now" on a phone without the magic chip built in, assuming it works, isn't that going to kill battery life?

The instructions to root the LG Optimus G Pro are posted in other threads and multiple pages on the web. And I thank the folks who have done all the hard work to make that possible. So tonight I finally got around to using those instructions and found that, as usual, a few key things were...

This is an unmodified AT&T Atrix4G, which is supposed to be unlocked, but it was a warranty replacement and I believe it was carrier locked by the first owner, before ATR&T gave it to me. Last year, AT&T's unlock code didn't unlock it, and they and Moto both claimed to be stumped when we found...

Simple. Marketing extortion. Really, you'll see all the vendors playing the same games with minimum memory onboard these days. Memory is after all cheap, so why not offer higher memory versions? Well, it starts with the cellular providers and their marketing plans. The cellular providers, like...