New phone

[deejayburnout]

I like rooting as you can do some good things like block all adverts in all apps and add some nifty features. O have a new moto x and actually liking the stock lollipop.

Marshmallow is version 6. What device do you have, and I can tell you if you will be getting marshmallow. However if you are on 5.0.2 it might not come. The latest version of lollipop (version 5) is 5.1.1.

[peterb]

Motorola G 2nd generation. It's about three months old.

Edit: just checked the Motorola website, looks like the new version will be available for my phone.

[deejayburnout]

Yup.

Possibly by December. Motorola are one of the better OEMs for releasing OS updates.

[DanceswithUnix]

I'm also miffed by the fact that I can't move all apps to the SD card - some can, others can't, which is irritating.

I think this should be improving too, thanks to an option being added to reformat your SD card in ext4 filesystem rather than the old fat32. Sounds like it was lack of decent file permissions that made it hard for some apps to run from sd card.

[deejayburnout]

Yes. Marshmallow will also offer better SD card management. Forgot about that. funny thing is that Google are making SD card support better yet this years Nexus devices have not SD card slots. ?????

Very few phone manufacturer's are using SD cards now. Samsung has dropped it this year.

[GreenPiggy]

Finally, does anyone have any opinions on battery use age apps? I have installed Battery Doctor, but apart from providing some glitzy graphics, some interesting but essentially useless information (like battery temperature, nothing I can do about) the ability to shut down some background apps, it seems to do little that the firmware does. In fact I have noticed a slowing in performance and it seems to be a memory hog - as well as pushing more ads in my direction. It is a candidate for the chop, unless fellow Hexites can convince me that it is useful!

Yeah get rid of that, it's not on my list of proper battery saving apps.
1. Greenify - it's more effective with root, and even more effective with Xposed framework, but it's still great
2. Some form of App Ops(I use app ops xposed so don't know others) - I don't know if this will work without root(I presume it will since lollipop has similar functionality) but it basically takes away the permissions of apps to do things(specifically keep awake and wake up, for the purposes of battery life)

[peterb]

Yes, battery doctor has gone. Didn't add anything and just another power draining app.

[peterb]

So 18 months on and I am getting incresingly frustrated by the phone.

I know many people complain at the trend towards the removal of SD card storage, but I'm beginning to see that this is not all it's cracked up to be.

I bought the Motorola with minimum internal RAM because it had an SD card slot, into which I placed a 32GB card.

First problem was that under the then version of Android (5) only some apps could use xternal storage for either installation or data storage, but I could live with that as 6 was supposed to fix that.

6 came along and I duly upgraded and reformatted the SD card so it was seen as internal memory - except it isn't.

Certainly some applications will use it at system memory but many still don't, so I am now in the ludicrous situation where I have 43 application updates pending, but I can't update them because I have insufficient storage, although there is 23GB free on the SD card.

Worse, some of the apps I don't need/use/want are ones that Google wants me to have and can't be deleted.

I was hoping that this phone would last me at least 4, preferably 5 or 6 years, but I am now thinking about changing it.

I like the phone as a piece of hardware. I've grown to quite like Android But it still feels rough round the edges. I don't know if the problem with applications and storage is because of incompetent developers who don't update apps to take advantage of new features, or it is poor implementation. What I have noticed is that some of the mainstream applications like Textr and typemail seem to have become less stable as new 'features' are added. Text RS 'lost' all my text messages after one update. In fact they are still there and can be seen in the native text app, but in textra I can only see those created after the update.

Bit of a rant, but just rather disappointed and frustrated.

[Jonj1611]

I know people will burn me at the stake but I have the iPhone 7, not that its really any different to the 6 but still. Having had many many phones over the years from Android to Windows to iOS, for me the iPhone just works. And works pretty well at that.

iPhone 6's are now pretty cheap and while I did really like my Galaxy S6 and 7 and even my Lumia 920 the iPhone was always reliable, though I would say get the plus version if you like bigger screens, I have the normal one and do miss the size of the LG G5 I had.

[peterb]

I know people will burn me at the stake but I have the iPhone 7, not that its really any different to the 6 but still. Having had many many phones over the years from Android to Windows to iOS, for me the iPhone just works. And works pretty well at that.

iPhone 6's are now pretty cheap and while I did really like my Galaxy S6 and 7 and even my Lumia 920 the iPhone was always reliable, though I would say get the plus version if you like bigger screens, I have the normal one and do miss the size of the LG G5 I had.

That is probably the direction I will go in. I already have an iPad mini, and going iPhone 6 0r 7 means only carrying one device with me, instead of two (unless I decide to use the Android phone as a music player, as I find the iTunes interface really clunky -probably because I try to control what it does instead of letting it do its own thing )

[Jonj1611]

I also have an iPad mini and I use icloud sync which has been pretty handy at times to be fair. I never could get into itunes, it just seems like its been thrown together over the years.

Most of my music is mp3 and I use mediamonkey which allows me to drag and drop straight onto the iphone.

Apart from iPhone backup I can't really say I use itunes for anything else.

[peterb]

I also have an iPad mini and I use icloud sync which has been pretty handy at times to be fair. I never could get into itunes, it just seems like its been thrown together over the years.

Most of my music is mp3 and I use mediamonkey which allows me to drag and drop straight onto the iphone.

Apart from iPhone backup I can't really say I use itunes for anything else.

I do use iTunes app to transfer MP3 tracks via my Mac, but it isn't intuitive, whereas the Android platform makes it easy!

[Jonj1611]

Yes completely agree!

[cptwhite_uk]

To be honest if I was buying right now I'd look at the OnePlus 3

Great camera
OLED 1080p 5.5" screen
Snapdragon 820
6Gb RAM
64Gb storage
Excellent reviews all round

Otherwise on a tighter budget probably the Nexus 5X which still has a great camera and decent specs for around £230

For a higher budget the Galaxy S7 can be had for £465 online ...arguably the best camera on any smart phone (defintely top 3) and great design, water proofing, 1440p AMOLED screen...

Honourable mention for the HTC 10 which incorporates microSD storage space correctly so your phone views it as a single volume of internal space. Even Samsung and LG haven't implemented this correctly.

[Smudger]

It may be that your SD card isn't 'fast enough' to be adopted as internal storage. When I got my Moto X force, I tried to make the SD card adopted, it came up with a warning that the card 'may not be fast enough', I ignored it and hey presto, although no updates failed (I've got 32gb onboard) Swiftkey must have stored my personal dictionary in adopted storage, and it didn't work, so I went back to the traditional 'extra storage' method and just chucked my music on there.

Strangely, my nVidia Tablet X1 is only 16gb, but it's adopted the SD card with no issues. I did make sure I got a faster one, not sure if that was the reason, or if it's cos it's on 6.01, whereas my X Force is on 6.0. Anyway, with SD cards being quite cheap, why not try the fastest card you can and see if that fixes the issue?

[DanceswithUnix]

Bit of a rant, but just rather disappointed and frustrated.

Kind of in a similar position here. I have ended up with a Sony Aqua M4, and it is nearly a really nice phone. It however came with the minimum 8GB of flash which just isn't enough, and although eventually I got an update to Android 6 the option to adopt the SD card as local storage doesn't seem to exist so it looks like Sony removed it as part of their customisation.

Then there are all the bloatware apps that Sony insist on including. I can disable them in the apps list and uninstall any updates, but they are still in the base OS image using up valuable flash storage.

It looks like 16GB of on board flash is a minimum now. I don't know how much of that is down to the change from Dalvic to ART, the general bloat that makes me wonder how the heck some apps can be so big when they don't do much. For now, it works well enough that it is just under the bar of having to spend money and I put up with uninstalling apps all the time. It does seem worse under Android 6 than it was under 5 when I got the phone though.