The "New Toys" Thread

Think I'm gonna order one today, really interested in the sleep tracking and call vibration features.
 
Adunaphel said:
I hate having to make a selection, because it's usually the usuaul suspects that end up in those selections, and I miss out on the rest of the stuff, all the rarities and b-sides and stuff that makes me download a complete discography with singles for the artists I really like. So I decided that I'd rather pay a little extra on my data plan to be able to stream about 2.5-4GB of music per month, than having to go through that process of trying to make a fair and balanced selection every other month. And Google Play music is much more suited to handling a large music collection than most car audio systems are.
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Google music is pretty cool, even for the offline stuff, but the app simply won't let me use it :dunno:

prizrak said:
Our DOT fits the above description pretty much to a T
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In Belgium it's usually like this.
County A has some money left over at the end of the year, and won't get new funding unless they spend it. They choose road X to renovate, making people take road Y as a diversion.
County B is in the same situation, and want to renew road Y at the same time, without informing County A.
Anyone in County A or B finds a set of distracting and confusing roadworks, leading you to a diversion that doesn't go anywhere. The result is everyone needs to drive through the city centre of county C, ruining their roads and making the cycle continue endlessly.

Also when road X is finally done, county A forgets to inform county B or C, so even though the road is perfectly fine, they still make everyone take the city centre.
 
Oh NYC is much simpler, there are a few roads around here that have been in perpetual state of being worked on since before I moved here (1997) and people who lived here longer tell me they always has. One person is 40 and cannot remember a time when one specific road hasn't been under construction.
 
I ran a side-by-side test today after a meeting in San Francisco. I got in my car in a parking garage, and set both my phone's Google Maps app, and my car's built-in nav to get me home.

My iPhone 5C had zero cellular signal. The arrow indicating my car was floating over the San Francisco Bay. Not only did my car's built-in nav correctly pinpoint my location, but the map also rotated with me as I drove up the ramps from 3 floors underground in the parking garage.

Before I got onto the street, my car told me that I had to turn on the very next corner. My phone didn't even give me a correct-ish location until I had already made my first turn, and was a full block towards my next turn, which was only 1 block further away.

When waiting at the traffic light, fully stationary, one block away from next turn, my phone changed my location twice, bouncing me around to different locations and calling out the next direction...which were all wrong.

My phone never caught up to my car until I was on the road leading towards the freeway.

Over the weekend in a rental car, it also got me turned-around in Portland several times.

I gotta say, I'm really loving my car's nav. In one screen, it shows me the names of all of the next cross-streets, the name of the street I'm on, the speed limit of the road I'm on, the services available at the next 3 exits (gas, auto shop, parks, food) and their distances, what lane I need to be in for the route, what my next direction is. All on a screen large enough that it doesn't seem crowded, at a height that is very close to the normal line of sight. It can also tell me when I'm speeding, repeat the next directions on my heads-up display, and it's easy to change the route type (fast, easy, short, free of tolls, etc) with one hand. I can be listening to FM radio (or any source) and my car lowers the music's volume to give me the direction in the speaker nearest the driver.

I'll admit that a stand alone nav unit could possibly perform even better as a navigation unit...but damn, I'm loving the system in my car, and I loooooove not using my phone for navigation. Plus, by not using the nav, my phone charges much quicker when it's plugged in.
 
NecroJoe said:
I ran a side-by-side test today after a meeting in San Francisco. I got in my car in a parking garage, and set both my phone's Google Maps app, and my car's built-in nav to get me home.

My iPhone 5C had zero cellular signal. The arrow indicating my car was floating over the San Francisco Bay. Not only did my car's built-in nav correctly pinpoint my location, but the map also rotated with me as I drove up the ramps from 3 floors underground in the parking garage.

Before I got onto the street, my car told me that I had to turn on the very next corner. My phone didn't even give me a correct-ish location until I had already made my first turn, and was a full block towards my next turn, which was only 1 block further away.

When waiting at the traffic light, fully stationary, one block away from next turn, my phone changed my location twice, bouncing me around to different locations and calling out the next direction...which were all wrong.

My phone never caught up to my car until I was on the road leading towards the freeway.

Over the weekend in a rental car, it also got me turned-around in Portland several times.

I gotta say, I'm really loving my car's nav. In one screen, it shows me the names of all of the next cross-streets, the name of the street I'm on, the speed limit of the road I'm on, the services available at the next 3 exits (gas, auto shop, parks, food) and their distances, what lane I need to be in for the route, what my next direction is. All on a screen large enough that it doesn't seem crowded, at a height that is very close to the normal line of sight. It can also tell me when I'm speeding, repeat the next directions on my heads-up display, and it's easy to change the route type (fast, easy, short, free of tolls, etc) with one hand. I can be listening to FM radio (or any source) and my car lowers the music's volume to give me the direction in the speaker nearest the driver.

I'll admit that a stand alone nav unit could possibly perform even better as a navigation unit...but damn, I'm loving the system in my car, and I loooooove not using my phone for navigation. Plus, by not using the nav, my phone charges much quicker when it's plugged in.
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I hate it when my phone does the "bounce between two locations thing." It's annoying when you're at a light, not moving and it's jumping 1 step ahead, but there's nothing like missing the exit because the phone insists you're on some secondary road that happens to run parallel to the fucking highway so it's blaring wrong directions at you for a while...then as soon as you pass the exit "recalculating...."

The phone charging is another biggie. Since I drive old shit that expect to only have a cigarette lighter plugged in (or in the case of the 98 Accord, a Nokia candybar phone) at worst, if i do anything on the phone while it's plugged in, most of the time it'll merely maintain the phone's current state of charge.

In a high power draw situation (Screen on, Nav running, podcast app or streaming audio app running) then, in some somewhat rare cases, it'll even DRAIN the phone's battery. When I was driving 2x hours away to look at various cars both this time, and when I was looking at the replacement for the Taurus, I ran into this. Nothing like going to take photos only to find the phone at 2 percent battery and the camera refusing to launch.

This happened in every car I owned across at least 4 different smartphones so it's gotta be just due to the low power. Even today though, it'll happen on modern stuff: The Verge reviewed Android Auto in a 2015 Hyundai Sonata and reported that their test phones would show that they were plugged in but refused to charge. I cannot recall if the Sonata's USB port is high powered or not (some cars have USB ports powerful enough to charge iPads and tablets).

Then there's situations where the phone doesn't charge because it so happens to be in a spot where the sun beats on it and heats it up....

If automakers gave you x years of map updates, it'd be a easier pill to swallow for many.
 
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On the other hand, my new phone is the first navigation device I've used that managed to get a signal inside my house. Everything else failed so far. :dunno:
 
Just ordered this little lot:

Stuff2.jpg

Removes the need for a PCI SATA 3 card and should stop me running out of memory for a while. :)
 
:thumbsup: Well chosen.
 
rickhamilton620 said:
I hate it when my phone does the "bounce between two locations thing." It's annoying when you're at a light, not moving and it's jumping 1 step ahead, but there's nothing like missing the exit because the phone insists you're on some secondary road that happens to run parallel to the fucking highway so it's blaring wrong directions at you for a while...then as soon as you pass the exit "recalculating...."

The phone charging is another biggie. Since I drive old shit that expect to only have a cigarette lighter plugged in (or in the case of the 98 Accord, a Nokia candybar phone) at worst, if i do anything on the phone while it's plugged in, most of the time it'll merely maintain the phone's current state of charge.

In a high power draw situation (Screen on, Nav running, podcast app or streaming audio app running) then, in some somewhat rare cases, it'll even DRAIN the phone's battery. When I was driving 2x hours away to look at various cars both this time, and when I was looking at the replacement for the Taurus, I ran into this. Nothing like going to take photos only to find the phone at 2 percent battery and the camera refusing to launch.

This happened in every car I owned across at least 4 different smartphones so it's gotta be just due to the low power. Even today though, it'll happen on modern stuff: The Verge reviewed Android Auto in a 2015 Hyundai Sonata and reported that their test phones would show that they were plugged in but refused to charge. I cannot recall if the Sonata's USB port is high powered or not (some cars have USB ports powerful enough to charge iPads and tablets).

Then there's situations where the phone doesn't charge because it so happens to be in a spot where the sun beats on it and heats it up....

If automakers gave you x years of map updates, it'd be a easier pill to swallow for many.
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Sorry to disappoint, but it's not much better in modern cars. It's more of a factor of the power draw of a smartphone with the screen on, running GPS software, streaming data for maps and possibly playing music among other additional tasks. My Galaxy Note 3 is better about it than my Galaxy S II was though.
 
NecroJoe said:
I ran a side-by-side test today after a meeting in San Francisco.
I'll admit that a stand alone nav unit could possibly perform even better as a navigation unit...but damn, I'm loving the system in my car, and I loooooove not using my phone for navigation. Plus, by not using the nav, my phone charges much quicker when it's plugged in.
Click to expand...

Very interesting to read. Got me thinking about getting a portable nav again, even if it's only used rarely, it'll slow down my phone battery killing process.
I've got a 2.1A charger in the car which charges it fine (even with BT and GPS on, which you need if you're navigating), but as soon as I get a call it won't even hold its charge but slowly drops. As I don't call for hours on end this is not a big deal, but would mean I'd have to say to a caller "I gotta go now, navigating and only have 3% left" which would kinda suck.

rickhamilton620 said:
This happened in every car I owned across at least 4 different smartphones so it's gotta be just due to the low power. Even today though, it'll happen on modern stuff: The Verge reviewed Android Auto in a 2015 Hyundai Sonata and reported that their test phones would show that they were plugged in but refused to charge. I cannot recall if the Sonata's USB port is high powered or not (some cars have USB ports powerful enough to charge iPads and tablets).

Then there's situations where the phone doesn't charge because it so happens to be in a spot where the sun beats on it and heats it up....
Click to expand...

Well iPads and tablets require a hefty amount of power, my iPad won't charge if I plug it into my computer, and will charge very slowly on a normal plug, you need the big fat plug to be able to charge properly. I think your problem may be due to the charge plug you're using (assuming you've been using the same one all the time). Nowadays you can get 2x2.4 amps charging power for relatively little money, which will make a big difference. Also, the cable you use does make a big difference, I used a long (3m) cable before, and now I use a shorter 1,5m one which has only charging (no data transfer) and the difference is really noticable.

As for the heat, I've had something similar happen after a 5 hr drive where my phone gave me messages in Spanish for a while and then killed itself... only thing you can do at that point is direct cold air from the air con directly to the phone and let it cool down I guess :dunno:
 
I had my iPhone overheat too once. Spotify (streaming, not cached) and bluetooth streaming to a travel speaker. It was a black phone, too, in the sun in July.

I put a baseball cap on it for shade. Much better. :D
 
NecroJoe said:
Verizon, but my girlfriend also has issue with her Nexus 5 on T-Mobile.
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That's really surprising, Verizon is ridiculously solid everywhere I tried it so far.

I never had my phone overheat on me, the longest drive I did was middle of summer NYC to Carrie, NC (12 hours) with Spotify and Navi running and as you can imagine going south in the summer there was plenty of sun ;)
 
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I've had every phone I've owned (OK, so...4...but still) overheat. Once, just having it my back pocket. [/totally not a "I must have a hot ass" joke]
 
JakeRadden said:
:thumbsup: Well chosen.
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ASUS and Corsair have served me very well in the past so there was no reason to go for anything else. I was talked out of an i7-4790k because I wouldn't see the benefit for the additional cost. :)
 
thevictor390 said:
Sorry to disappoint, but it's not much better in modern cars. It's more of a factor of the power draw of a smartphone with the screen on, running GPS software, streaming data for maps and possibly playing music among other additional tasks. My Galaxy Note 3 is better about it than my Galaxy S II was though.
Click to expand...

Well that's a bummer. :p

NooDle said:
Very interesting to read. Got me thinking about getting a portable nav again, even if it's only used rarely, it'll slow down my phone battery killing process.
I've got a 2.1A charger in the car which charges it fine (even with BT and GPS on, which you need if you're navigating), but as soon as I get a call it won't even hold its charge but slowly drops. As I don't call for hours on end this is not a big deal, but would mean I'd have to say to a caller "I gotta go now, navigating and only have 3% left" which would kinda suck.

Well iPads and tablets require a hefty amount of power, my iPad won't charge if I plug it into my computer, and will charge very slowly on a normal plug, you need the big fat plug to be able to charge properly. I think your problem may be due to the charge plug you're using (assuming you've been using the same one all the time). Nowadays you can get 2x2.4 amps charging power for relatively little money, which will make a big difference. Also, the cable you use does make a big difference, I used a long (3m) cable before, and now I use a shorter 1,5m one which has only charging (no data transfer) and the difference is really noticable.

As for the heat, I've had something similar happen after a 5 hr drive where my phone gave me messages in Spanish for a while and then killed itself... only thing you can do at that point is direct cold air from the air con directly to the phone and let it cool down I guess :dunno:
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I've been using a cheap one from wal-mart...or actually it could even be from 5 below (think kinda chic dollar(-ish) store). Yeah I've done the AC thing in the 2 cars I owned that had working AC (the Failturn and the Honda) but when you don't and it's summer....

The Jeep does have AC, but I haven't had to point it at the phone yet. The test will likely happen next weekend when I drive to philly....GPS will be on the entire way there and back unless I bring my brother along who goes to Temple.
 
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