Category Archives: android

Battery life low on Android – EAR SPLITTING SOUND – Battery life low on Android – EAR SPLITTING SOUND

I love my Samsung Galaxy S4 except for the ear-splitting, marriage destroying notification that the battery is low.

The sound is loud enough to raise the dead. Thankfully I know how to use an axe.

So what’s the problem, you ask – just disable the notification.

Well it turns out that the notification is a system sound. Unfortunately there is no option to disable system sounds.

Enter google.

So I spent some time looking for the answer, and found many many other folks who were just as tormented as I was.

There were folks who proposed I recompile the entire Android kernel, then there was the folks who recommended I root my phone and remove the offending sound, and then there was the folks who recommended I discard my phone and buy an iPhone.

Fortunately, just as I was imagining what kind of ritualistic violence I could practice on my phone, someone recommended Sound Manager on the Android app store. Apparently this app, can disable system sounds.

The ear-splitting sound is a thing of the past.

And the folks at Samsung need to learn a lesson on usability… Or maybe they are deaf from the tone…

Damn you iOS

One of the coolest and amazing parts of the Android system is how trivial it is to create content in one application and share that content with another application.

I can trivially take a picture, and then use smugmug to upload it and wordpress to blog about it.

With iOS it’s a pain-in-the-ass to get the content out of the device onto the app I want.

Why iOS which is built on top of a BSD kernel has such an unbelievable and crappy file system abstraction layer is an enduring mystery to me.

edit: Why am I using an iOS device, you ask? Because I was given as a gift an iPad Mini. I am planning to replace that eventually with an Android tablet.

bing! I want – bing! to – bing! – tell you – bing! something

One of the most irritating aspects of the Android user experience is the bing-bing-bing of notifications.

When you buy a new phone, it downloads all the apps you had in the past. Those apps have default configurations that cause notifications to be put in your notification inbox and to make noises.

And so you play this game of whack-a-mole killing the sound notifications only to have it go bing! at the most inopportune time because some app you forgot about decided that it was the time to go bing! as part of some vain re-activation play.

I wish, wish there was a global way to control these frigging notifications globally…