Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Samsung Galaxy Grand Review

I got a Grand one week back and already did intensive testing and already have workaround for many issues. Let me list it down


  1. Dual SIM not working: All of a sudden i noticed that i cannot SMS from either SIM. Sadly using dual sim to tide over redundancy of network operator does not work always as both can be down if the handset behave like that. It may have to do with Smart SIM setting though i have not verified it but i have disabled it for now. Workaround: reboot and it works. May be it has to do with HSPA in SIM-2 as someone was mentioning to me that he also had to reboot as soon as he migrated to HSPA. Now i see as per specs only SIM-1 supports HSPA. I started with HSPA only in SIM-2 as i was not aware of this restriction. Maybe i should now test the other scenario as well.Will keep you posted. 
  2. Complete shutdown of handset even though battery is not fully discharged: In this case even if you try to reboot nothing comes up. Workaround: take the battery out and replace it after some a small duration. It seems this is even seen in Galaxy note 1 and the frequency of doing this battery swap goes down over the life of battery. This also may be linked to SIM-2 being in HSPA.
  3. Google Drive Spreadsheet Not working: In this case spreadsheet there is an option to open up through a browser by using the left button.
  4. Battery draining faster: Open up the battery setting and it will show all the application burning all the battery power. For screen set auto brightness or reduce the brightness. Google+ somehow consumes a lot of power, so go to google settings and discontinue all automatic notifications. Switch off GPS, WiFi, mobile data whenever not using them through the notification panel. After doing all this battery on an average stays for 25 hrs. Also remember battery can support 500 charge/discharge cycles and more you can keep it alive will prevent your wallet getting lighter. Anyhow plan to change battery in 1.5yrs and plan for a 2000 rupee budget.
  5. Samsung Dive: Enable this from security section and it allows to track your mobile if it stolen and allows to remotely delete all you confidential data and passwords. Also enable other security features like SMS to two nos once you change the SIM.
  6. Text editing: In case you have old text document, it does not reads with Smemo and it only reads .snb. Jota text editor is a good option for txt editing.
  7. Contact streamlining and Merging: All of a sudden i have a large set of contacts as it pulled things from google, outlook, facebook and so on. At least google has an option in its contact section in gmail to merge similar contact.DO that on gmail and automatically it gets sinked up. Also you have an option to join the contacts manually from the contact editing option. But this is a manual process.
  8. Large upload: If you are not careful with photo/video, soo you will run out of memory and in case you are syncing you photo to drop box with a bounded plan one may soon run up a huge bill as the video and photo are configured at peak resolution by default. You may want to change this to keep a tab of memory growth.
  9. Missing Memory: Only 4GB of internal memory is usable as the other half does not even show up in your file manager. All your apps can run only from internal memory so don't dumb lot of photo and video there and push these into dropbox or external memory.