I bought a Samsung Galaxy S3 over the weekend from the T-Mobile Shop on a 2 year contract and this is my first smartphone having come up from a six year old Motorola RAZR pay-as-you-go mobile phone. I absolutely love the S3 for its huge sharp, vibrant screen and versatility compared with what I had before. I'm constantly checking out new apps and games as there are so many to choose from. The ability to check my email and browse the internet on my phone's unlimited data plan are very nice to have as it the ability to check my bank balance, my gas/electric accounts, Hull FC news, and so on. Brilliant. Two things I don't like though are: 1. the battery life as coming from a phone which could remain on standby for up to a week (i.e. not turned off in that time at all) to one that seems like it wouldn't last a day and half under the same conditions was a bit shocking. Using the Mobile Data or WiFi for an hour to browse the net and/or download apps and stuff can drain the battery by 20% so it seems that carrying spare batteries, recharging cables and docking stations are a prerequisite for this phone especially away from home. I intend getting a dock for both home and work plus I've ordered some larger capacity (two 2300 mAh batteries) as well as longer USB cables (why is the one that comes with the phone so ridiculously short?). That said, I've noticed the battery life seems to getting longer the more I use and recharge the phone. The first day it dropped to 32% by the time I got home, the second 54% and yesterday it was 68%. On each occasion the phone had been used the same with approx. 35 minutes of MP3 music for the walk to and from work and an hour browsing the net on 3G at lunch time. 2. I've fitted a 64 GB microSD card to increase the storage from 11 GB to 75 GB but it seems that only MP3s, photos and videos can be stored on there, not apps or games which is annoying as I've practically used all the internal memory downloading several large games such as N.O.V.A. 3, etc. Although I have 1.2 GB free on the internal memory, if I download something that leaves, say, 450 MB free then I find that I can no longer download any other apps even if they're under 10 MB in size! Huh? I've also bought several cases, including the official Samsung one at £10 from Amazon (hopefully that will come today). I'm currently using a cheap clear one that gives me extra grip on the sides, which is most welcome, but makes the Volume and Power buttons harder to press and also has a hole at the bottom that is not big enough to take the official micro USB lead (which is silly when you consider that the case is designed only for the S3). Fortunately one of the spare cables I bought from Amazon does fit but I've found that the 2m one I also bought doesn't. Annoying. That's not a fault of the phone though, just the manufacturers/designers of these cases.
Not sure you can do on SG3 but on SG2 i can isntall or move apps to the SD card. However not all apps have option to be installed on SD card. If you go to Setting -> Application and select and app, some of them should have option "Move to SD card". E.g. i am looking at Angry Birds now and that option is enabled, but lets say Facebook wont let me do it.
1. Battery life is the worst thing about going to a smartphone, and its hasn’t improved over the last few years as screen/resolution has increased as has cpu speed/cores. It might settle down for new phones, as you can’t make the screen any bigger than the S3. A lot of why the battery drains quick is down to the user though, I would hazard a guess you barely looked at the Razr, but your probably messing with the S3 a lot, and have apps that monitor your emails, I even have the Steam app set to push through deals. If you haven’t pick that up I would recommend it, very easy to buy games, though matter of opinion if that is a good or a bad thing 2. As per above, you should be able to move some, but not all app/games to the SD card, it depends on the app. I’m using ICS, but on the original Galaxy, but sure my GF has that option on her S3, if you don’t find it Darren I will check when I get home. ICS on this, it’s System Settings, then Apps and you should see three tabs, Downloaded/OnSD Card/Running, and you should be able to move to the SD Card, or stop or uninstall it.
have fun with ur new phone by the way. i left my blackberry 9900 and using s3 again. great phone. im hoping at future, stupid Development departments of smartphone companies focus on HOW CAN WE EXTEND THE BATTERY LIFE instead how we can put useless sit pls.
I've just downloaded Angry Birds (v2.2.0) and I cannot see any option to move it to my microSD card, only a Force Stop and Uninstall option. Where is this "Move to SD card" option please? Thanks.
I noticed an annoying issue with using Kies to copy loads of my MP3s (320 Kbps quality) over to my phone in that it copies the files all into a single folder rather than copying the folders they are stored in on my PC (Artist / Album / Song.mp3). That meant that any songs with the same title as another, say, from the original album and then a compilation, would not copy over. I then used MediaMonkey, which I use to play my music on my PC, to transfer the music over instead of Kies and it DOES copy over the folders and the phone still picks up the tracks in the music players. Unfortunately, I realised this too late to correct the 15 GB I'd copied over using Kies so I'll have to delete those and re-transfer everything again using MediaMonkey. I just thought I'd mention that in case anyone else is having the same problem I had with the Kies software refusing to copy MP3s with the same name. Normally, you wouldn't want duplicate files on a device with limited memory but it is unavoidable if you want to listen to complete compilation albums.
Thank you, Redemption80. I've not used Skype before but is it basically free video calls over the premium ones offered on smartphones and mobiles? For example, it would costs me 51p per minute to make a video call but if Skype does the same thing but is free then I'll install it.
Yea it should look like in that screenshot..ALso i dont bother with Kies...it is ermm lets put it nicely a pile of poo! I use good old copy/paste to SD card.
Well I just picked that from Google images as an example, so don’t know much about Skype. I did have it installed before my GF moved in as my place seems to have a poor signal indoors so Skype sound quality over wi-fi was much better than making an actual call also had zero drop outs, not to mention being free. Never tried video calling though, so unfortunately don’t know about that. Yeah, Kies isn’t really needed, music can be copied over manually, my contacts are backed up on my Google account, and I think there are apps that do the same with SMS etc….. Even Android updates can be done OTA within the phone, though I’m not sure if they are rolled out at different time to Kies.
Yes, I've found Kies to be a bit unstable and is prone to freezing up or even crashing, for example, when I clicked on Contacts. It seems the software is only good for doing firmware updates really, not that I have any choice as it is a T-Mobile phone so the usual Settings > About device > Software update option isn't available on my phone. P.S. I've just downloaded Skype v2.9 and it does not have the option to Move to SD as shown in that picture above. Why?
I just tried and it let me move it to the SD card then back to the phone without an issue. I am using a rooted Galaxy S though, so might be either a Samsung or T-Mobile restriction, would be a strange one though, but I never knew T-Mobile restricted OTA Android updates either. If no one else can help, I will have a look at her Vodafone S3 when I get home.
@ Redemption80 - I went through ALL of the apps and games on my phone and not ONE had a Move to SD Card option, not even Adobe AIR which claimed it had such an option on the download page in the Play Store.
Hmmm, some quick Googling brings up people saying that moving apps to the SD card can't be done on the S3. Some claiming it’s something to do with a change in how the phone deals with storage, and others saying it's an ICS thing. It’s not a problem on a modded ICS on the original Galaxy or the S2, so either it’s a hardware issue, or it’s a Samsung problem/feature. Sucks if that is true, will check when I get home but would put me off getting one for myself in the future.
Yeah, same here with her S3, looks weird as the bit where Move to SD card is just empty. Need to do some reading to see if CM10 changes things on the S3.
while I'm a storage nut I never even got close to filling up the internal memory from applications only. Either way you can move them by using various apps in the app store that'll force them to be moved. If it still won't move rooting will let you move. Lastly, certain apps get a bit wacky when moved off the internal memory and can cause issues.
I'd like to be able to move games onto the SD card for temporary storage even if I cannot play them from there. Some of the games are 1 GB+ in size so having to delete them and redownload them every time I want to play them would be a pain. Being able to move them to and from the SD card would be a boon IMO. As it is I have bought two games which I cannot play without deleting other games because I have insufficient space to install them: Asphault 6 and Real Racing 2, both of which are over 1 GB in size. I realise that the S3 is not a games machine but I thought having 75 GB of storage space would mean I could have loads of MP3s and large games on my phone and still have tons of space left for photos and videos as well. Seems I was wrong about the games. I've read also that Jellybean (Android 4.1) does not support Flash so does that mean websites and YouTube will no longer work on the S3? If so then I hope that it doesn't come out any time soon...
Furthermore there's a weird bug with ICS in that even if I have 500 MB of space left on the internal card, it won't let me install apps, even if they're less than 5 MB in size. That means that you don't really have 11 GB of free space to play with but more like 10.5 GB. I guess you might be able to use the 500 MB for MP3s or photos or something but without the ability to save apps the phone becomes less useful. I kind of wish I'd bought a 32 GB model now but I think that one is exclusive to Vodaphone here in the UK and T-Mobile only have the 16 GB model as I was only asked which colour I preferred (pebble blue!) and not what size I wanted.
