Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Just brought my new Galaxy S4 home...
- Thread starter Krimsonmyst
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
If you're gonna try Nova, just go ahead and pay for Nova Prime (the paid version of the launcher). It's got tons more options and is completely worth the couple of dollars.
Also, if you want to be able to switch back and forth easily between launchers, grab Home Switcher off the Play Store. It allows you to switch back and forth between launchers with a tap.
Another popular launcher is Apex. I used to use it until I tried Nova but I've been using Nova ever since. It's much more fluid than TouchWiz and you can change just about anything on it. If you've ever been jailbroken on iOS, think of Springtomize. That's what Nova can do for your Android phone.
BTW, yes you can do turn-by-turn with voice right out of the box. You actually have two maps apps..."Maps" and "Navigation". I typically just use Navigation but you can switch to Maps without ever leaving the app. Just tap the drop down at the top left of the screen and you can go to a whole host of other maps related functions or apps (including straight to Maps).
Not exactly true. Yes, Google Maps itself doesn't handle turn-by-turn real-time navigation but Google Maps Navigation does, at least on my Galaxy Note 2. It's an add-on to Google Maps, came preinstalled on my Note (pop-up note says it's in Beta) and works just fine. Considering it'll open up the navigation directly from Google Maps, that fact that it's a separate app really is not relevant.
It's no secret that oem skins do chew up memory, but again I have to stress that the amount of memory being used is not obvious at all in performance.
Last edited:
Just the fact that you guys need to keep checking your RAM worried about your phone slowing down and thinking of ways to baby it if it does should tell you Android is still problematic. Have fun with that though. This thread is making me seriously re-think going back to Android.
The iOS app contains both navigation and maps. The android one is only maps and direction. Google has a separate app called "navigation" that does the navigating for you.
And it has been doing turn by turn with voice for ages in my experience.
----------
Does touchwizz stutter here and there? I found the GS3 to be "fast" but i hated some of the stuttering which was gone when i loaded AOKP. Also when i bought the N4 on 4.2.2 it was blazing fast, it was hard to believe i was using an android phone lol.
I have a feeling all the samsung bloat features (this is my opinion about them being bloat, lets leave it at that) and the skin is going to hinder the performance. I have seen a note 2 lag despite monster specs and the nexus 4 completely outpaces them all unless they are rooted and running custom AOSP ROMs. I almost feel like buying a nexus again lol.
I will try to help.
I have very slow wifi in my home per se. I had broswer sessions opened, Candy Crush, a few other things and I was still able to stream nexflix movie perfectly with no lag. And I did not notice any lag at all doing other things as well when I had lots of apps opened either.
I have very slow wifi in my home per se. I had broswer sessions opened, Candy Crush, a few other things and I was still able to stream nexflix movie perfectly with no lag. And I did not notice any lag at all doing other things as well when I had lots of apps opened either.
There is maps and navigation. The maps app is just maps and directions. For turn my turn you use the navigation app or within the map app choose navigation.
Its normally close to the 1GB mark, however my Nexus 7 with 1GB of RAM occassionally gives me the out of memory error if I don't close apps from the background ritualistically. My friends GNex at work does it too.
I doubt you have ever seen an out of memory error...seems more likely your running out of actual storage space on your device. Android manages memory automatically..there is no need for you to manually close apps from the background as Android will take care of that for you as it is needed.
Me too, I have never seen a out of memory message in the 15 or so Android devices I owned.
That's running out of space message. Android will not ask you to close apps. It will do that for you automatically. As the other guy said RAM in android unusused is Ram wasted.
I only think that this is the case because Android actually has a memory monitor. I don't want to get into a whole ios v Android thing here, but I think you'd find people worrying about the same sort of thing if ios had a memory usage monitor. I'm sure people would be wondering why their ram usage was high
Like I said though, the ram usage, while relatively high, doesn't seem to slow the phone down at all.
----------
The biggest complaint I had about the gs3 was that while it was still fast, the 1 gb of ram held it back (I live in Australia, so we had the quad core with 3g model initially before getting the 4g).
It was still fast, but I would semi regularly have issues with launcher redraws and dropped frames. The extra ram in the s4 seems to have fixed that though...so far this is a really nice smooth experience.