Just got a mytouch 4g, some questions

[Tiamat]

My previous phone was a samsung d500 from about 6 years ago. I finally bit the bullet and decided that internet access on the go would be a cool treat. Tmobile gave me a free month trial of unlimited web, so I figured I could try it out along with a new phone.

So far, its pretty sweet, the battery life gets sucked dry pretty quickly, it lasts maybe 1 full day.

Some questions:
1. I tried to delete things like "Monopoly" application, but the option to delete was "Greyed out". It wouldn't allow me to delete it. I read the manual and watched the tutorials, but they only helped me to delete new apps that I downloaded, not the preinstalled ones that are wasting space and resources (and I would never use).

2. Any recommendations for a neoprene sleeve? I don't want to use any of the gel covers or anything that makes the phone bigger while in use (in hand). A slip-sleeve in my pocket would be enough to provide slight protection for the camera lens.

3. Is this screen protector any good? http://www.amazon.com/REALOOK-T-Mobi...f=pd_rhf_p_t_2

4. I tried reading some threads at XDA, but it was crazy 1337 stuff that I have absolutely no comprehension of. Rooting? I thought root was for linux stuff. This is Android so I was confused and I couldn't find a step-by-step (although I didn't know what to look for).
Thanks!

 

[rudeguy]

1. Its bloatware, you will need to root to get rid of it.
2. No. Naked phones are best
3. See #2


4. Rooting is very easy. All its going to do is allow you complete access to your phone. Here is the XDA thread for your phone:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=834225
Basically you just download Visionary from the Market and then follow the commands in the first post of that thread. It appears to be perma root, so its a one time thing. After you root you can delete all that bloatware. I recommend doing simple things like that, install some root only apps like Titanium Backup, Set CPU...heck just search for "root" in the market. Its a good way to ease into things and you won't break anything.

Your phone is still very new, so there aren't a ton of ROMs out there. By the time you get comfortable messing around with things that HTC decided you shouldn't, there should some great ROMs out there.

This kind of thing goes in their "general" forum. Those guys love to talk about their phones and are usually quick to help n00bs:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=794

 

[Bateluer]

1. Its bloatware, you will need to root to get rid of it.
2. No. Naked phones are best
3. See #2

This kind of thing goes in their "general" forum. Those guys love to talk about their phones and are usually quick to help n00bs:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=794

Well, #2 is debatable. I like naked phones personally, the cases and screen protectors I've seen make the phone just too bulky or retard the screen's effectiveness. Some devices, though, particularly those with screens made from plastic or regular glass, benefit from a screen protector.

HTC just released the source code from the MT4G/Glacier a few days ago, so hopefully we'll see some cool vanilla roms for it soon. I see at XDA there's now an OC kernel for 1.7Ghz. Not too shabby.

I'm going to buy myself a new phone for Christmas, I think, the Glacier is one of the phones I'm considering.

 

[Tiamat]

Thanks for your reply!

I take it there isn't an "App" out there that automatically does all those steps automatically with the built in "restarts" etc.?

I read several of the pages after the first page, and seemed like some folks had problems with the "root" sticking so it seems a little nervous to me. Maybe I'll wait until my phone is a little older than 2 days old before I mess with it

 

[vshah]

i'm really tempted to swap my nexus for a glacier to get the ffc and better GPU but i'm forcing myself to hold out for something dual core from HTC.

edit: visionary is as close to a "one click" solution as you are going to get, for now. the chances of you doing irreparable damage to your phone are almost nonexistent, so once you build up the courage i say go for it, if only to get rid of those pesky pre-installed apps.

 

[Tiamat]

Well, #2 is debatable. I like naked phones personally, the cases and screen protectors I've seen make the phone just too bulky or retard the screen's effectiveness. Some devices, though, particularly those with screens made from plastic or regular glass, benefit from a screen protector.

HTC just released the source code from the MT4G/Glacier a few days ago, so hopefully we'll see some cool vanilla roms for it soon. I see at XDA there's now an OC kernel for 1.7Ghz. Not too shabby.

I'm going to buy myself a new phone for Christmas, I think, the Glacier is one of the phones I'm considering.

So far it seems pretty good. The only thing I don't like is that it doesn't autocorrect spelling. The swipe feature also inputs spaces in between swiped texts, so some longer words are not possible to use the swipe feature especially if there are multiple repeated letters. It also tries to correct your spelling in this particular swipe feature, making it impossible to use words of different languages romanized. It takes me about twice as long to type an email on the mytouch 4g than on my ipod touch. But that amount of time is dwindling as i figure out some of the oddities and work around them.

Edit: within 30 minutes of playing using swipe, my typing of full words has quickly increased in speed. The learning function seems to be quite good as long as you are consistent with the way you write and grammar. Punctuation is what takes the longest for me to find and type out...

 

[thescreensavers]

OP, you cant tell how good your battery life is for the first 2 weeks or so, Since you keep using your new phone!

 

[Tiamat]

OP, you cant tell how good your battery life is for the first 2 weeks or so, Since you keep using your new phone!

lol! I can't help it!

slightly off topic, The salesman tried to sell me 30$ chargers. I went on amazon and bought a usbA-usbBmicro for 1$ lol.

 

[vshah]

lol! I can't help it!

slightly off topic, The salesman tried to sell me 30$ chargers. I went on amazon and bought a usbA-usbBmicro for 1$ lol.

i did that too, but be warned that if you stick the adapter on a wall charger, the phone will for some reason still think it is charging over usb and will charge much slower.

 

[Tiamat]

i did that too, but be warned that if you stick the adapter on a wall charger, the phone will for some reason still think it is charging over usb and will charge much slower.

The wall wart that came with my phone has a USB-A on it. Unless the cabling is internally different, it should operate as originally intended I believe (correct me if I am wrong). The cable I bought looks very similar to the USB-A / USB-microB cable that came with the wallwort...

 

[rudeguy]

The wall wart that came with my phone has a USB-A on it. Unless the cabling is internally different, it should operate as originally intended I believe (correct me if I am wrong). The cable I bought looks very similar to the USB-A / USB-microB cable that came with the wallwort...

Be careful with the cheapy cables. I use them too, but they don't charge properly. There is something about the different resistance and.....that's all I know. I constantly mess with my phone so its not going to last a whole day no matter what. I keep a charger in my car, at work and at home.

As far as root not sticking, its the nature of the beast. Visionary will give you temp root until you reboot which is fine. You don't need to go any further if you don't want to.

 

[vshah]

Be careful with the cheapy cables. I use them too, but they don't charge properly. There is something about the different resistance and.....that's all I know. I constantly mess with my phone so its not going to last a whole day no matter what. I keep a charger in my car, at work and at home.

As far as root not sticking, its the nature of the beast. Visionary will give you temp root until you reboot which is fine. You don't need to go any further if you don't want to.

i thought visionary had been updated to give perm root, or was that just on the g2?

 

[rudeguy]

i thought visionary had been updated to give perm root, or was that just on the g2?

I only know from what I read skimming over the my4g forum. It said Visionary gave temp root.

I could be 100% wrong. Not claiming to be an expert on that phone.

 

[Tiamat]

I only know from what I read skimming over the my4g forum. It said Visionary gave temp root.

I could be 100% wrong. Not claiming to be an expert on that phone.

So, I can just "temp root" delete all the crap, then restart and I don't need root anymore since all I needed was to delete the crap? Or does the stuff reinstall itself upon restart if I don't have root?

 

[Raduque]

There's a way to disable without deleting the pre-installed apps. You need a shell terminal and the temp root. Has something to do with the "pm disable <packagename>" command, you can find more information on XDA.

I thought somebody on XDA had adapted the eng SPL process from the G2 perm root to the MT4G now? Might be worth jumping back into the MT4G section and checking it out.

Oh, and there's no "rootkit" and nothing is "reinstalling" itself - the device simply has write-protect on, and any writes you do to the /system partition (temp root, deleting preinstalled apps, etc) are being re-directed (and the write failures hidden from the kernel) to a cache that gets dumped when you reboot, or when the cache gets too full.
The engineering SPL turns the security (and thus the Write Protection) off, allowing you full write access to the storage chip.

 

[rudeguy]

what he said

 

[Tiamat]

Thanks for the followup. I just got a firmware update. If I were to root the phone, would I expect future problems when new firmware comes out?

Thanks guys!

 

[vshah]

once rooted, you shouldn't install the OTA as you will lose root. usually a couple of days after the OTA comes out, the devs on XDA will have a pre-rooted zip for you to flash, which will apply the update but retain root.

 

[Raduque]

Actually, right now, they're saying that you need the OTA to use the perm root/s-off instructions on XDA for the MT4G. There's even a "as close as you can get to one-click root" perm root process.

 

[Tiamat]

Actually, right now, they're saying that you need the OTA to use the perm root/s-off instructions on XDA for the MT4G. There's even a "as close as you can get to one-click root" perm root process.

I'll be waiting for that "as close as you can get to one-click root" process. That sounds pretty perfect for a noob like me

 

[Bateluer]

I'll be waiting for that "as close as you can get to one-click root" process. That sounds pretty perfect for a noob like me

Not counting the root/OTA questions, what are your impressions of the phone?

 

[Tiamat]

Not counting the root/OTA questions, what are your impressions of the phone?

So far I like it quite a bit. I used an apple ipod touch for a couple months. For individual letter typing, the apple ipod touch was faster. However, this swipe function on the mytouch4g is really something. It is pretty accurate at guessing the word I want after a couple days of using the phone. I have to manually type in probably every 1 in 40 words. When I have the tmobile High speed network, the rate has been between 2-5 mbps with ping between 60-100 ms. I've been quite satisfied with the speed. I used a friends iphone3G in Boston 1 year ago, and the 3G speed was horrifically slow for me -- although ATT speeds have improved quite a bit over this year. My fiancee has a iphone4 and generally gets between 0.9 - 3 mbps.

The screen on the iphone4 is better, but not earthshatteringly so. The voice commands on the mytouch4g is something I haven't played with yet, but seems to be interesting.

The build quality of the mytouch4g is quite good. The rear battery panel is metal, which adds weight, but is worth it, the phone is made more physically solid.

I really like the optical button on the mytouch4g that allows to fine-tune where the cursor is so you can go in and fix individual words. The iphone4 has the magnifying glass, but many times for me, it doesn't work as smoothly.

At first I was concerned that the phone would feel weird in my pocket. I'm a very slim guy and do not wear baggy pants. The phone isn't uncomfortable in my pocket and walking up stairs isn't a painfull experience. If it was 1cm shorter in height without sacrificing any of the features, it would be close to perfect in terms of compromise of size in pocket with features like screen size.

The flashlight can be very bright, the camera seems to be pretty decent (I don't really use the camera that much).

As true with probably all smart phones, I can see where immense leaps in battery technology need to occur soon. Also, the hardware needs to be made more power efficient. It is somewhat of a bother to have to plug in every night (for me with light usage, gets down to 60% over 12 hrs).


Cliffs:

Things I like: Swipe function, responsiveness of unit, it just works w/o fuss and intuitive.
Things I wish improved: battery life without compromise, bloatware needs to be deletable by user, smaller dimensions without compromise.