I’ve come across an issue for the past 10 days that Waze kept losing its GPS fix. This meant:

• constantly switching between 0 and 120 (or whatever) km/h
• constantly zooming in & out on maps (dynamic zoom level depending on speed)
• being in a field/not on the road for most of the time, or stuck to a location of many minutes ago
• often & randomly losing GPS fix (ie middle of the highway without any buildings blocking the line of sight)
• I could do a 45 minute trip with Waze never getting a GPS fix
• not knowing road issues (accidents, traffic jams ahead, speed traps, etc)

• nothing changed (no new car window, didn't move my phone location in the car, etc)
• not moving (ie parked car) didn't really improve the GPS fix
• even left my phone with Waze on in the car for 30 minutes parked (got a fix, but later that evening when driving home it started to lose its GPS fix again)
• clear Waze cache
• uninstall Waze completely
• GPS Essentials showed a fix with 3 or more GPS satellites when Waze couldn't get a fix
• I was about to find a way to reset my GPS and/or clear its cache (???)

What I did notice, however, is that in Google Maps the arrow (clicking the pin point button twice or something) was pretty much showing the opposite direction of how the car was moving (thus driving backwards at ~120km/h). This made me think, as I know the GPSes in smartphones are quite cheap and aren’t always on (to save battery – my phone is always being charged in the car though) and the phone uses the accelerometer and other sensors to “guess” current path (or rather, path changes, ie taking a turn or slowing down/accelerating).

I then recalibrate my compass using this method with the free app GPS Essentials (compass tab). I noticed two things

• my compass was showing south as north
• calibrating it in my room (no known magnets here) gave a mixed result (it sometimes pointed north, and sometimes stopped doing so)
• moving around gave me a better calibration (more accurately pointing north)
• question? Is the compass chip fucked? broken? cheap ass crap?

• Waze almost instantly has a GPS fix
• Waze doesn't lose its GPS fix most of the time but ...
• Waze still occasionally loses its fix (but regain it after a second or two, three)

Edit: the problem comes back after ~1 day. Compass often stuck and doesn’t really point north. Ever. Calibrating sometimes helps, but it ends to get stuck again after a while. Nexus 5 chipset issue? Google Navigation works (way) better (it doesn’t remain at the same location for ~10 minutes), but it’s not very precise either (always lagging behind a a street or cross road or something). Perhaps Google Navigation is better at using GSM localisation and doesn’t use the compass to figure out so much?

Edit 2: It works “fairly ok” if I calibrate my compass just before driving. It still loses its fix a few times, but all in all it was acceptable.

I’ve seen in tools like GPS Status that north always points to the bottom right (“south east”) unless it finds a GPS fix. When it’s stuck “finding GPS location” my compass is entirely off and Waze is seeking a fix. When it has a GPS location Waze is fine.

Note that while it cannot find a GPS location, it does have a fix with 3+ GPS satellites.

So I’m not sure if it’s a compass issue, or a GPS issue, and what the definite difference is between both (a smartphone compass not being a magnetic compass if I understand correctly).

My Nexus 7 (1st generation, 2012 model, with 3G) is encrypted, so I guess that might also slow everything further down.

Three things I did to solve the lagginess:

• Wipe cache (howto),
• Clear space (I had some movies left on it, deleted a few big files and it seemed to instantly pay off),
• For some odd reason turning off WiFi optimalisation (advanced settings of WiFi) seemed to have the biggest impact on speed.

I’ve now done a complete wipe again, but have not encrypted the storage (and removed more useless apps). And it is noticeably less laggy.

Edit (8/2/2014): It’s actually very smooth again, I can run and use the tablet in a decent way. Encryption on Nexus 7 (v1) is a no go.

It worked and booted, but the battery got drained in ~8 hours (100% to 0%). And it felt a tiny bit warm on the cover, just above the battery (battery area was normal). Especially in my pocket it would get quite warm.

At 0% it wouldn’t turn off though (but it did anyway after about half an hour of being at 0%).

I was hoping that entirely draining the battery a few times would fix whatever it was, but after the 2nd drain, the red light of death popped up again, and I haven’t been able to boot since.

I’ll attempt to RMA it (I don’t know if they’ll notice I swapped the battery, as that would kind of void my warranty… Well done, LG, well done).

Should probably clean the display before taking a picture next time. ;)

Edit:

I've read on XDA-Developers this might be a product error. My girlfriend also has a Nexus 4 (about 3 months old, mine was 5 months), and that one hasn't caused any problems (although, it seems less smooth, and the battery is drained quicker, than mine).

I'd generally suggest, if you have a red light of death (and it's not flashing) to just RMA it. Not sure if I'll ever see my N4 again. :(

I had about 60% of battery left when I turned on the GPS. I tend to recharge my battery every night. It’s times like these I usually just use the GPS without using the car charger. I don’t mind my phone being at 10 or 20% when I arrive home, late at night, as it will be charged overnight anyway.

Almost home, the notification of 14% battery left popped up; I dismissed it as I had 10 more minutes to go. About 5 minutes after that, my phone suddenly switched off. Like, just, suddenly black. No shutdown or anything. It caught my attention, but I left it at that.

Finally home, I quickly unpacked some stuff, checks some mails, etc, and about an hour later I headed to bed.

That’s when I took my phone and plugged it into the charger and a red led popped up. I had never seen this one before.

From there on, I was unable to turn on my phone (my entirely drained Nexus 7 has the same behaviour, it requires being plugged in for 10ish minutes before booting up). I decided to let it charge 10 minutes. Nothing. Hitting power button didn’t change a thing.

As my Roomba seemed to have had a fight with the charger cables under the bed, I thought it might have half ripped the cable or something, so I tried a USB cable and a PC: same. Another charge: same.

Fair enough, I left it charging for the right. Waking up (yes, these things kind of keep me awake – or rather, wake me up) several times during the night, I tried turning it on… but alas. And still a constant red light turned on.

I just had the latest 4.3 bis update (the 7 or 9 Mb update) like 24 or 48 hours before. And I don’t think I had rebooted the device since. Was this causing it?

I started Googling, got in touch with my Amazon.de seller (as it’s ridiculously expensive in Belgium, and I think when I got it, it wasn’t officially for sale here yet) and bought Skype credit (yep, didn’t have a backup phone) to call Google Play support.

Amazon told me to try to do it via Google, or it will take a “very long time” to RMA it.

Google told me to do it via Amazon as it wasn’t bought via the Play store (and send me a troubleshooter to try to “get it out of deep sleep” – but that didn’t work).

I tried several steps, including the hard reset (volume up + power for 60 seconds), but nothing helped.

As it was still under warranty, I didn’t want to really mess up too much, but I couldn’t imagine having to miss this device for another day, let alone weeks…

Drove to my parents to get a backup phone, and there we opened the device (with those odd you-are-not-supposed-to-open-this screws) and, as one post stated on XDA-dev, to unplug the battery.

The multimeter showed 0 volt on the battery (but the connector was so small we weren’t sure it quite touched the copper.

However, reconnected the battery cable and inserted the USB charger… And the screen lit up, a charging icon popped up, and no red light of death. Yay.

Let it charge for ~3 hours (the battery felt warm, but not sure if it was anomalous) and so far so good. We’ll see tomorrow whether it drains faster than usual.

Some people pointed out a product issue, either causing the battery to overdrain (which is bad) or to be too strict on it (and refusing to recharge when it’s quite safe to do so). But the battery itself could also be dying.

I have a phone mount on my dashboard, and during the summer, in full sunlight, using my GPS, and the phone being black, I noticed the back side got quite … hot… So did this cause any permanent damage?

EDIT:

After being fully charged, I noticed a drop of about ~10% per 60 minutes. Which seemed a lot. I let it discharge overnight, and when I woke up it was indeed entirely dead again.

Attempting to recharged caused the red light of death again. Unplugging the battery (for 5 minutes) didn’t solve the problem anymore. It seems like it’s really dead.

We managed to read the voltage with a multimeter, stating 3,15V (instead of 3.8). Unsure whether it’s the battery or the charger of the phone… Unplugging the battery and attempting to charge also causes a red light of death.

I’ll get a new battery on Monday, and do my best to swap it (apparently they glued in the battery… sigh).

EDIT 2:

This.

It started during the night of the press conf when I was catching up on my mails when I got home of a whiskey tasting evening/“apps for whiskey” event.

It suddenly rebooted (the screen lit on showing the usual boot animation (“X”)). I didn’t pay attention.

A couple of minutes (twenty ish) later again.

Odd… I did a reboot myself (hold power button, turn off, turn on).

After booting up for about 30 seconds, it rebooted again… Annoyed but busy with other stuff I didn’t pay that much attention.

This time I unplugged the battery, hoping that would help anything, and tried again.

By the way, this is all on a stock Android 4.2.1.

After booting, I had to refill my pincode each time (so it was not one of those infamous reboots where it saves its session/state/whatever… The cache-thing-whatever was cleared). I first thought some mail over IMAP was causing this (as I was directly thinking of my previous mail issue). But I made sure that I read all my mails and deleted what wasn’t relevant on my Macbook Pro and Nexus 7. It should sync.

Then my attention got caught by the WiFi. While it was connected pretty instantly, it took a long time to change the icon from its grey “I-am-unable-to-access-the-internet” to the usual blue color. Either way after about one or two minutes into Android itself, it rebooted again. Irritating.

So I was starting to think about odd kernel panics or memory problems.

The furthest I got after that was unlocking (pattern) my display, and it would reboot… Not even making it to the settings pane.

After that, it would just loop-reboot. At first I would still see the lock screen popping up, then only the Android boot animation. And after a while it would just loop the Google name and flick black for a second, and (presumably) start over.

No matter what I did (pull battery, try without battery, get closer to the wifi, recharge battery, connect it to my mac, …) it kept on doing that. I decided to head to bed and left my GN off by removing the battery. But 8 hours of rest didn’t really help my phone. The next morning it was still behaving the same.

I saw no other option that going into the boot menu (holding power button + volume down and up) and doing a factory reset. Wiping all my data (well, mainly just my settings (I am lazy), and I don’t have any fancy apps, but it did delete all my pictures which I hadn’t copied to my mac in a long while).

After the data wipe/recovery, I started reinstalling my apps, reconfiguring, and restoring my text messages backup (best app: SMS Backup+) and everything was pretty much okay. No hardware issue, no more reboots…

Note: those with a laggy Galaxy Nexus, this helped me to improve speeds; but a total wipe brought my GN back to about 90% of it’s 4.1 speed (no scientific proof for that though ;)).

Anyway… All was fine until Thursday night. It suddenly started to reboot again, and random. With intervals of, well, sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes 10. I didn’t get to the reboot-loop yet. Turning off wifi or turning off data didn’t seem to help. I tried airplane mode, but I had to make phone calls/text, so I didn’t wait until/whether it rebooted. I tried getting closer to the wifi hotspot, change rooms (yea, whatever) and none of that helped. It kept rebooting during the night (I reentered the pin code twice when I woke up that night). And it kept doing that in the morning…

And as I stayed a couple of days at my parent’s house for Christmas (where everything was fine), I was starting to think my new apartment/steel-tower was bugged (or the Proximus cell tower in the neighborhood).

At this point I was panicking. Looking for options to buy a Nexus 4 and Googling about this (and well, apparently I’m not the only one having this problem). Random reports pointing to random apps, lock screen, GPS, etc.

I noticed for some reason Latitude stopped reporting my location (I hate when it does that for no apparent reason… Already happened 4-5 times the past 2 years) for this device, turned it back on and since then my device hasn’t rebooted yet…

Haunted shit for sure. Google please fix your crap.

To be continued…

Edit: about 24 hours later it rebooted again. When I attempted to insert my pincode it rebooted again. After that I managed to get past the lock screen. I received Whatsapp messages, Twitter crashed, and it started to update apps. After that it (2-3 minutes after booting) it rebooted again.

My phone was running hotter and battery life was suddenly crappier than usual. But not really paying attention, until my cell provider (Proximus) texted me I was over my data consumption limit…

As it was the beginning of the month, so that was unusual. I checked data usage in settings, and noticed ~7Gb of traffic by mail app over WiFi and ~3Gb over mobile data.

The day after I noticed the unusual usage (and as I reached 4Gb traffic) Proximus cut off my data connection around 14h00 (leaving me stranded in the middle of Brussels, unable to use my GPS)…After phoning them I got my access back though.

Not sure where to look (some attachment problem? some fucked mail?) I cleared my inbox, and removed all mails from the folder that IMAP syncs on the Android… Still it was downloading continuously. I started to try to debug the IMAP servers, to see what commands my client was sending, but not finding anything interesting there, I started to wonder what to do…

Then I tried something I really didn’t want to try (yea, now that I think of it, I probably should’ve tried that first, and well, something to do with hating to change settings; and it took me 3 days or something before I tried this): I deleted the first of my 2 IMAP accounts, checked back after ~10 minutes to see if data consumption increased, and no, it hadn’t.

Yay. So now I knew the problem was one of the 2 accounts. I restored my mail account (and to my amazement it actually wasn’t that much settings I had to put back) and kept checking on the data. It didn’t increase anymore.

Soooo, oddly enough that solved the issue (remove and readd the IMAP account).

No idea what happened there.

My bill is 145ish euro’s because of this by the way.

4.2.1 came. It solved 5% of the lagginess.

However, it was still unbearably slow. With 4.1 I had an amazing phone, 4.2 made me want to shoot it.

But after 4ish weeks I found something out… Go to Settings and then Sync, click the Google account(s). Disable Google Currents syncing.

Enjoy. You might want to reboot to be sure, but for me this brought my phone back. It’s not perfect, it’s still a bit slowish, but it’s a lot better!

http://storify.com/tuinslak/christophe-launches-betrains-on-a-watch-1

This will be my short review about this Xoom.

First of all, this is a Xoom made solely for Google employees. It has the Google logo on it, and a green back side. As far as I know there is no public way to get the device with these colors,

Android

I received it the day Android 3.2 got released. First thing I did was upgrade from 3.0.1 to 3.1 and then to 3.2.

While Android is a pretty neat OS, it sure isn’t bug free. For example, turning Bluetooth on made my Xoom restart. I also wasn’t able to sync my Gmail account on that Xoom. Depending on the service, it gave different errors. In settings it basically said “unable to connect, try again later”, Latitude said “login failed”, Gmail was endlessly syncing, etc. I tried different WiFi hotspots, without success. As this is an US version and for Google employees I was afraid it would be locked to either US Gmail users or @google.com accounts… However, after a real reboot (and not a restart due to software upgrades) I all of a sudden managed to log in, and everything started syncing. Yay. Perhaps some odd DNS problem? No clue, but it’s working now!

Oh, and as it’s an US version. This means I have a US adapter, but also that updates are directly pushed by Google, and not by Motorola. Thus, latest Android at all times. :) (The EU Xoom is still on 3.0.x)

Buttons

There are only 3 ‘dedicated’/static buttons; power, volume up and volume down.

To compare, Nexus S has power, vol up and down, and the 4 buttons at the bottom, back, settings, search and home.

Which, so far, hasn’t really bothered me. The power button is at the back, easy to click on with your index finger, unless it’s lying down on the table or the tablet is mounted somewhere. The volume buttons are located on the left side but are pretty hard to push. Everything else is through the touch display, and works just fine.

Power

It’s recharging fast. Really fast. I believe I went from 11% battery to 90% in about 2 hours. But the fast recharge comes at a price… You can’t recharge it using the USB connector.

The USB connector is only used to transfer files (something I haven’t figured out how to do yet; apparently I am unable to mount the SDcard, like with my Nexus S). So you’re unable to recharge it “on the go” with for example a USB battery pack, or the USB connector from a car.

I’m using that battery pack to recharge my Nexus S by the way, as the battery dies way too quickly on that phone.

The power plug connector itself is also quite… Thin… And it doesn’t go in all the way. Seems quite breakable.

WiFi version

Do I want a 3G version? Maybe. I can use my Nexus S to tether, and that works just fine (as long as the battery aint dead ;)). But I was also playing with the idea to use that Xoom as GPS device in my car. Which would be easier if it directly had an internet connection. But that would also mean I would have to pay for an additional internet subscription.

Keyboard

The keyboard layout (azerty) in slightly different from the Nexus S (alternative character button for example, is located elsewhere; “-” and “.” are inverted, getting a “?” requires more clicks, etc). Makes it harder to hit the right button and will require to get used to it… Again. Shame though. Wish they had roughly the same layout as on a phone.

It also supposed to support Swype, but I haven’t tested that yet.

Weight

I don’t really have another tablet to compare it with. I “stole” an iPad 1 from work a few months ago for a couple of days, and I guess it’s roughly the same weight. So yes, it’s annoying to hold in your hands while lying down. It’s simply too heavy. Perhaps a Kindle would be better for this, but a Kindle somehow seems too .. “simple” and doesn’t have all the features/possibilities I’d want.

I also now carry one device too much. I have a phone, which I need with me at all times. But now, a Macbook Pro (with 5ish hours of battery, a real keyboard, all apps I want) or a tablet (longer battery, fake keyboard and limited apps…). I guess I’ll have to force myself to lock my Macbook up and not use it for a whole week, and see if I miss it at the end, or if I manage just fine with the Xoom.

Apps

The Google Market lacks tablet apps. Just like at the launch of the iPad, most of my apps are phone optimised apps, but stretched to fill the tablet’s screen. This includes certain Google apps (like Google Plus). But the apps designed for tablet (maps, latitude, mail, etc) are really neatly done.

But yes, please, Facebook, Twitter, IM+, Shazam … make a tablet app already !

I love mail, it’s simple and well done. And this time IMAP actually works. Clicking get load more messages actually gets new messages (on my Nexus that rarely fetches new mails). It also automatically downloads new messages correctly (on my Nexus mails sometimes only appear in my mail app one hour after I actually received the mail), and sent and deleted mails are correctly stored on the IMAP server (unlike on the Nexus, it’s stored in a local folder, you can’t sync. So I have thousands of mails stuck on my phone. Unable to access them from my Mac, for example).

However, it still doesn’t support IMAP’s IDLE protocol though.

Labs is a cool feature in some of the Google apps. You can enable certain “beta” features in certain apps. For example, the browser, which is a Chrome-like browser, capable of tabbed browsing, can be changed through labs to a full screen browser, controlled through certain finger gestures. Pwetty cool!

Speed

It's a dual core running at 1Ghz. And 1024Mb ram or something. Yet flash is pretty slow sometimes. Other stuff sometimes hangs a bit as well. Generally it's fast enough, but I wish it was a tiny bit faster... ;)

For example, transferring a big file (1,57Gb) from my Mac to my tablet while playing music (through Google Music) made the music stutter and my screen was unresponsive.

It also doesn’t really play MKVs. I see an image, though it’s distorted and hanging every few seconds. And I’m not getting any sound through. I’m guessing other movie types might work.

Well… Hard to tell for now. Will have to wait and see.

UI

I was a bit scared of the futuristic UI it came shipped with. Some odd modern font, pretty spacy. But I must say I quickly got accustomed to it, and I think the futuristic look is pretty cool now.

Cam

Pretty basic cam. Quality is... average. But I haven't seen a device that beats the Nokia N8 yet. Especially in dark places.

End

As always I’m very critical. So far I’m happy with the device, but it could’ve been better. Whether I’ll keep using it? It all depends if it manages to find space in my workflow.

As stated above, having a phone, a tablet, a Macbook Pro and a work laptop just… Is too much (I already gave up on my desktop 6ish months ago – have barely turned it on since). I have been playing a lot with the idea to step away from Mac (Lion seems … crappy, and Apple is becoming the new super vilain), but will a corporate Linux laptop (with certain policies) and a tablet make up for the loss of my own Macbook? No idea… Time will show I guess. And I bet I’d enjoy it way more when the apps actually have a “tablet mode”.

All pics are here.