Database Users

A few OmniaII -> Epic 4G transition issues/questions

On balance, my new Epic wins hands-down. I love the device, Android, Linux, and it seems to be a far better gaming platform (a bonus -- not what I bought it for, but I'm having a blast with the portfolio of Gameloft 3D FP games -- amazing!)
However, I am lost on a few things. So, here's a thread to get some help. To start, some video questions:
If there's a media player to handle one's video library, I can't find it. The only way I've found to open and watch local video is to find the file with My Files, and open it there. This brings up the native video player, which is rather limited in features.
Once the video player is up, I can't figure out how to get back to it if I task-switch to something else for a moment. Can easily happen with a phonecall, for example. Sometimes the window "stack" facilitates using the back button to get back to it, but under more circumstances than not, you can't.
This is a real PITA, because I lose my place in the video. I have to re-open it, and seek around to find where I was. Am I missing something here?
I was a major CorePlayer fan on the OmniaII. It had it's own problems (lack of graphics acceleration support, the biggest), but those warts were far outbalanced by the rich featureset. I plan to get CP for my Epic when (if ever) it becomes available, but for now I'd like to get something similar if it's already out there. Any recommendations?
I've read a lot about the "lag fix". Do I need to do that? I've got a very new Epic, running DI18 (a week and a half old).
I fell asleep on my Epic, and now it seems to me the slider rails are "loose". I can skew the screen portion of the phone clockwise and CCW, back and forth, when opening, to as much as +/- 5-10deg. I paid no attention to this earlier, so it may be no different. The slide seems otherwise solid and fine, but for this. Are your Epic's similar?
Sprint bloatware: Is there an easy way to disable much of this (services, etc.)? For example, Amazon MP3, Sprint Nascar, and a dozen or so other services/apps that are started at boot and respawned if killed. I won't ever be using this junk, so I'd rather they not be consuming resources, slowing things down. Do I have to root the phone and manually edit Linux startup files to get rid of this junk?
Thanks for helping out this noob!

Was omnia2 android?
Out the box Epic plays more file types than other non Galaxy S phones. On the market "Rock Player" plays all file types, followed by an xda dev's app "vplayer" I think it is. Other choices inlclude Act 1 Video Player and Meridian.
Instead of "My Files" to browse files to use with default player and other function try one of Astro File Manager(my primary), IO file manager, Androzip and more.
Most problem you may have can be solved in the "Market"
Sent from my "Wheres my 2.2 Epic 4G" using the XDA App

Omnia II! I really wanted this phone when it first came out. Omnia II runs Windows Mobile.
+1 on rockplayer
No lag fix needed on the Epic, there are lots of threads on this.
Not sure how to fix your slept on epic part, you'll have to read up on that.
As far as bloatware, you can follow this thread
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=780333
Be Careful, if you want to use sprint updates you have to leave certain apps like sprint hotspot, Amazon mp3, etc or else you'll get a validation error when doing updates.
This has become such a pain for me I just leave those apps on the device. There are devs, who have great workarounds too you just have to read up on it.

My Kindle Fire Review (after 12 hours usage)

My experience: I have an iPad1, iPad2, HP Touchpad, and three Archos 5" Android tablets... So not too much of a n00b.
Keyboard: The keyboard doesn’t always work for me.. When I first got it, every time I hit the spacebar, it would automatically go down two lines.. And when I hit the delete button, it would go back one space, then it would stop deleting and just repeat the same letter over and over.. While testing this, the Fire crashed.. and when it reset, the keyboard worked better without these issues.. but I still had a lot of typing mistakes as it would be too sensitive.. (kinda crazy that the Fire crashed in the first hour I opened it while typing up an email)
Video: Playing videos from Amazon Prime was fast and sweet! Amazon made it very easy to watch their videos on the Fire. I have not tested MP4 videos I have made for my iPad yet.. Because of size restrictions, I may not do this.
Home screen: Why can you not change the "last viewed" stuff on the top of the Fire.. this is horrible.. I came to work today and of course everyone wants to play with my new Fire.. so they could all see every single website, book, PDF, movie, etc I had viewed last night.. and now because they played with it, I have all the stuff they viewed there as well now.. There should be some sort of incognito mode.. I know this is a personal tablet, but whether someone is behind me when I am in the home screen or someone picks up my tablet at my apartment.. I don't need them seeing what I have been looking at.
Apps: There are a nice amount of apps available already for the Fire.. BUT.. why can’t I remove the apps that the Fire came with? Also, the PDF viewer that comes with the tablet is no good. I side loaded some PDF magazines into the Fire, and they were unreadable on the screen (all jaggy). I then installed the Adobe PDF viewer from the Amazon Market, and the text is much better.. but zooming in and out on a 7” tablet does not make for smooth reading. And why don’t the PDF thumbnail the first page images? The iPad does this right away… all you see on the Fire is the text name of the PDF written over a white sheet. Lastly, I installed Touchdown for the Fire (as the built in email does not include MS Exchange support).. and it works well..except that the client does NOT sync while it is not open.. What the heck is that??
Web: Loading pages like Gizmodo.com was quick.. but it was another issue reading the site.. scrolling down was very jerky and slow.. I know the page is long, but most tech blogs are.. and that is what I would like to read in the back of a cab.
Misc: I wish there were hardware sound control… It would make playing videos/music easier to control, as well as offering page up/page down control for reading. The Fire is a bit heavy and thick.. but for $200, u can’t complain.. I will probably keep using my iPad for reading websites and PDFs… and using the Fire for books and Amazon prime videos.
If anyone knows how to fix the issues above, please let me know.. I know that there is a root out now for the Fire, but I am hoping that there are faster/smoother solutions.

I was able to side load a .m4v file on the Fire, but it wouldn't play until I renamed it .mp4.
The videos were HQ rips for my iPad so that worked great.
I agree on the last item viewed being on the shelf. Wish there was a way clearing that.

EvanWasHere said:
I wish there were hardware sound control… It would make playing videos/music easier to control
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On my Nexus I use Mobiplayer and I can control volume by swiping on the screen. I wonder if you load (or sideload) Mobi or a similar video player if you can get this. Anyone know or can anyone check?

Thanks for the review!

the source code will save us!!!

esoh said:
On my Nexus I use Mobiplayer and I can control volume by swiping on the screen. I wonder if you load (or sideload) Mobi or a similar video player if you can get this. Anyone know or can anyone check?
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Yes I sideloaded Mobiplayer and the soft volume swiping does work for the Fire. So at least for video playback I can live without a hardware key. Btw I need to enable software decoding by default or some files won't play... maybe I needed to install a Mobi codec but I don't know which one works. Maybe someone can point me to the right direction...
Cheers,
W.

Agree with you. I'm facing same problem.

I installed Swiftkey and feel it is much better than the Amazon default keyboard.
You can remove the items from the Carosel. Refer to instructions at http://mazurk.net/KindleFire.htm

It's a fun toy and I'm glad I didn't pay anything for it (won it at an office raffle) but I'm still kind of lost as to what I'm gonna use it for as I have an iPad 2. Still, I'm having a blast trying to mess with it and hopefully gonna get TWRP installed here soon.

Born-Again Nook Color Noob

Hello All
This is sort of a lengthy post and I do apologize for that ahead of time. I've been idle on the Nook Color front since I first bought and rooted one during the 2011 holidays and am looking to do a fresh setup. Just have some questions and concerns first to see if I'm being realistic here.
SETUP
OS & Hardware Tweaks
After reading through several posts and guides, it sounds like the best OS (performance & stability-wise) is the latest stable CM7.2 (http://download.cyanogenmod.com/?device=encore&type=stable). I intend to run this off a SDCard. Do I need to do anything after installing other than the Nook Tweaks app to modify the clock settings such as installing a "kernel"? Additionally, is there a generally agreed upon clock/voltage setting I should choose? I've read that setting the minimum clock to 600MHz is ideal to prevent some idle lag, but I have no clue on how I should handle the voltage side of things.
Themes
I was going to follow joenathane's awesome guide on installing a Transformer theme (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1130271), but I've heard that Beautiful Widgets can cause the NC to become glitchy. Any truth to that or is it just a memory-hog sort of deal?
USING
For daily use, I'd like to access the internet, check my stocks, and start getting into some other features I've found sort of frustrating such as eBooks, gaming, and media.
eBooks
I've used Aldiko in the past and loved it for its ease of use and compatibility. But when I try viewing some PDF, the simple act of turning a page can become extremely slow and frustrating. Is there something I can do to circumvent this such or is this the NC's limit? This is more noticeable on graphic PDFs like magazines than actual books in PDF format.
Games
Besides Angry Birds and Words with Friends, I haven't found anything I'm happy with. I'm definitely not a big gamer, but am just looking to get into some other things. Most notably a good copy of chess that plays like the stock one on Windows 7 and perhaps some emulators. I see the N64 and GameBoy Color emulators, but is there anything that would play GameBoy Advance? Additionally, when playing these emulators, do you need to pair a remote?
Media
On my current setup, I basically have Google Music and that's that. I like having the cloud music idea, but would also like to have some tunes that might be available offline. Is there a good program that would allow me to easily manage music files? And then there's the videos. This is what I've very anxious about. I am a Comcast Xfinity subscriber. Am I able to actively watch OnDemand on this device? Also, is there a list of video formats supported so that I might be able to load this thing up with some videos before a car ride? I have a Aimersoft video converter on my PC and it has a bunch of presets. Certainly wouldn't mind converting if need be before moving over to the NC.
One Miscellaneous Thing:
Is there a feature that makes a user enter a PIN from the lockscreen?
So that's that. Again, really sorry this so wordy but I want to tackle this once and for all and really optimize my experience with this. I'm hoping to perfect my build before doing the same thing for my mother's NC. Thanks for any advice!

[Q] Is there a family mode for NP?

I feel like this product wasn't thought out well. As in you have to link it to your Google account and then you have YouTube spitting out very strange recommendations to watch things that you have never even looked at on YouTube.
So what I'm asking is if there is some way to have a family profile on the NP that is separate from your own Google data?

I would *love* a way to block some stuff from being blasted into my kid's eyeballs just by turning on the TV. I plugged this thing in, turned it on, and boom. Sons of Anarchy and American Horror Story's covers will now give my 4 year old nightmares. Great. And I've never seen the shows.
Now, I don't want to report things as "inappropriate" though, because... well, they're not. I just don't want them on my screen... Now, before I get flamed with comments like "be a good parent" and "you shouldn't let your kids watch that stuff anyway" - that's exactly what I'm saying. I just didn't know that I was going to be blasted with the stuff as soon as I turned it on.
The good news is that as soon as I launched the PBS Kids app, most of the stuff I don't want to see was pushed off the screen by Wild Kratts and Curious George... But really - what if Google decides that I should watch a Victoria's Secret fashion show? WTH?

Have you tried enabling content filtering in the Play store? I would think that it should remove any suggestions from the Play store above a certain rating. Have not tried it myself but I guess I could give it a test later. I was looking to put 2 of these in my kids rooms but hadn't really thought that part out.

There are also restricted profiles... Might be better for your case.

I guess my point was more along the same lines as the poster above. I look at some comedy videos and stuff on YT. My GF came in the other day like what's this college sex prank video recommendation on the NP (from some channel I never watched)
It's very embarrassing. I don't need a restrictive profile. There are no kids involved, but I would like the NP not to show recommendations like that. In the meantime I turned off YT recommendations, but I would like to see some sort of profile separation where you can have a family profile that doesn't pull from your own recommendations.

I had this exact same problem with questionable recommendations from Google Play Movies and YouTube and it turns out you CAN remove them by disabling notifications for the app.
Just got to: Settings --> App --> App Name and change notifications from On to Off.

PhyerFly said:
I had this exact same problem with questionable recommendations from Google Play Movies and YouTube and it turns out you CAN remove them by disabling notifications for the app.
Just got to: Settings --> App --> App Name and change notifications from On to Off.
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Yea, I did that already. I would like to see a different profile for the TV though so you aren't getting strange recommendations. Turning off recommendations completely defeats the purpose of even having them...

EcPercy said:
Yea, I did that already. I would like to see a different profile for the TV though so you aren't getting strange recommendations. Turning off recommendations completely defeats the purpose of even having them...
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I can't imagine how complex the controls would need to be in order to be able to be able to screen every possible type of recommendation from every app ever, especially when we're talking about a single google account associated with the history it's built based on your usage.
I feel your concern and I think Android TV and Google's apps have already done some damage in terms of what they surface on my TV (ex. the Google Music app shows a full-screen background of Mariah Carey with her tits falling out of a dress when I play her Christmas songs), but realistically I don't know how else I'd weed out everything unless they had some kind of rating system that all apps respected

My thought was a separate profile that isn't pulling from your email account. I suppose the other option would be to just make a new gmail account and sign the NP into that.

I have Rift Apps ready to publish, except for Locomotion. Please help!

I just want to know how to use the touch controller to control 3-axis flight. Pretty much like AIRCAR at Oculus Store..
It should be so simple, but I meet impossible roadblocks everywhere I go. I got some 'help' at the Unity site, a guy sent a random, non described script. His only instruction was 'attach to object, run'. When I do, and push 'Play' in Unity Game window, instead of FLYING, I can only make some NUMBERS CHANGE in the Inspector, by moving the thumbstick, trigger, etc on the touch controllers. I'm sure I am step closer, but it doesn't feel that way.
With multiple apps ready for Dashboard submission STUPID TOUCH LOCOMOTION has held me in Stasis for MONTHS!
PLEASE FOR THE SAKE OF GOOD VR, HELP!