Monday 8 July 2013

Root and Toot

Getting Rooted!

So I have had the Samsung Galaxy S3 for a month and as I said in my last post, I am generally quite happy with the phone and the Android system. I am a little bit bothered with the fact that I have had a few of crashes of the phone and sometimes it will restart itself without me asking it to. So there are occasions when I look at the phone and I find that I need to put in the PIN and I don't know how long the phone has not been working for. I am a member of a community on Google plus for Samsung Galaxy S3, a number of people on there recommend rooting the phone and also trying out other versions of the operating system. As part of my experiment and also because of general geekiness/nerdiness I will have to give a try to doing these projects. It will be another line of enquiry that I will be able to report upon in the NoStylus blogs.

 

Getting a tutorial for S3 rooting On YouTube

There are scripts that you can use on the Windows side of things and also there are some for the Mac. It seems that the scripts that will root your phone from your Mac are a little bit pernickety has to whether they will work or not. So I am following instructions on taking certain files from the Android SDK to be able to do a manual rooting of the Samsung Galaxy S3. I am a little bit bothered with the fact that I have to install Java, considering there have been some security problems with Java during the previous six months. I am going to do it anyway and just keep my fingers crossed.

Strike number two for Galaxy S3 rooting

Well I just followed the instructions in the YouTube videos in which I downloaded various files and I'm pretty sure that I did the steps of the job properly. I got close to the end of the process when I hit a roadblock. I was entering instructions into the Terminal window and up until that point everything was going great. The phone is still unrooted and I will have to find another way to root the Galaxy S3. It was all very geeky and nerdy and fun for someone like me and I haven't given up yet.
It is supposed to be very easy to do this job on a Windows computer, but I don't have one of those. I do know where I could probably get access to a Windows computer for a short amount of time and maybe I will give that a go. Before I do that I will have a look to see if there is any way that I can get around the problem that I encountered today.

Saturday 6 July 2013

One month with the Samsung Galaxy S3

The change from iPhone to Galaxy S3

Right from the start I loved the newness of the swap form one operating system to another. I was scary and refreshing. I love to find out new things about different technology so this experiment has be just brilliant for me. I have been using iOS and the iPhone for four years before this and making the change from iOS to Android has been interesting. Lots of new things to try and stuff to work out and sometimes make workarounds for things that I was able to do on the iPhone. So far nothing has completely stumped me and the plusses have been far greater in number and amplitude than any of the minuses.

Loading up with software

I got a photo app that came in from a place other than the Play Store and mostly it worked out. It has a great sphere photo function that is really easy to use. I just have to put the spot in the cross hairs and it takes the next picture for the 360 sphere. The first I did I was able to get online and spin it around, but the second one I did would go up as a sphere. I need to try out other ways of doing it. I must have forgotten exactly what I did to upload it.

Changing over from iCloud services to Google Services

Seemed that the best thing to do was to use Google calendar and contact apps / services as it was easier to get that data into the phone that it would be to get the iCloud stuff available on the S3. It needs some tweaking still to get it working just right but I don't have so much time to be able to work with it.

Audioboo Podcasts

I was doing these most days but I have less time and the App for Audioboo was not too reliable when I started using it. I have just done one Audioboo and it worked out great. Very easy and the boo was uploaded really quickly. I was kind of shocked.