Galaxy Gear

I got a Galaxy Gear recently. Its a nice device, albeit slightly
ugly and has oodles of potential - with 512MB RAM and 4GB SD card,
its actually overpowered because theres not much you can do with it.
I like the home screen - nice and clear and big. But thats about it.

Samsung have really underplayed what this device can do and the
XDA forums has lots of stuff to keep hackers happy - from custom
watch faces to installing a browser and more.

I write this blog, not because I want to review or praise the device
but I just wish Samsung could write software.

For starters - the gear manager app is buggy. Very buggy. It corrupts
its own database - I have 4 "Touchwiz Home" apps I can add to my watch
and this grows everytime I visit the myapps/add-app menu. And it hangs
and crashes.

The Samsung app store hangs if I try to do anything in it - simply
appalling. No amount of reinstalling seems to help.

But theres two things that have driven me nuts -

The first was "Weather" updates. Took me a *month* to figure out
why it had stopped on Xmas day and not updated in the entire month
of January. (Solution: enable location services. Why? WTF).

Ok - thats fixed. I wish the weather app had more than a week
of data or could show graphs (like the Suunto watches could years ago).

This one has me beat: the settings app on the watch has gone missing.
This is fun. I cant find out how much battery life is left on the watch.
I dont know where the settings app has gone (despite restarts; I havent
tried reinstalls as yet). What is worse...trying doing a google search
for "Galaxy Gear settings". Not a fun way to browse the interweb.

My RSS feed (http://crisp.dyndns-server.com:3000/p.html) is now working
nicely - have used less than 20MB of mobile bandwidth in a week, rather
than 50-75MB in a day by visiting websites full of bloat.

And am continuing work on the ptrace (strace replacement) as I now
have the ability to sandbox the filesystem and manipulate files
which apps try to open. I'll update at a later time when more
of it is working, but you may see tweets of new releases going out.


Post created by CRiSP v11.0.25a-b6698