Category: Tech

So I’m rocking a Samsung Galaxy S III 4G now and have been for a couple of weeks.

I also have an Eye-Fi Pro X2 8 GB hooked up to my Canon EOS Rebel T2i. All the kickass pictures I’ve been posting since January have been with that setup.

Through the magic of computers and Al Gore’s Internet, this means that when I take a picture with my fancy pants camera, it shows up on my phone. The process is roughly this:

1. Take Picture.
2. When/If near my home wifi network, the picture is automagically copied to my media server.
3. Once on my media server, they Eye-Fi software compresses the picture and uploads it to a Picasa web album, using the date the picture was taken to create a new album name.
4. The album is then synced to my phone.

This is all entirely automatic. I literally have to do nothing but take the picture and a couple of minutes later it’s on my phone. It’s very, very convenient.

Well, yesterday I went to show someone a picture of Casey (our Belgian Malinois) and none of my Picasa Web Albums were on my phone! Poof! Gone! TRAGEDY!

As it turns out, this was an easy fix that took me two days to find. There seems to be a rebranding of Picasa to Google Photos in the midst. When I updated the Google+ App the other day, it turned on “Sync Google Photos” under System Settings->Accounts and Sync->(your google account). That broke the Picasa sync, apparently.

I unchecked that guy. Then I unchecked and re-checked “Sync Picasa Web albums” and voila! Now I have my pretty pretty pictures back.

I’m putting this out there in the hopes that someone else who has this problem won’t have to go to the third page of a discussion board on the fifth page of google results in order to find this.

Alternate title: Why I’m keeping my Samsung Galaxy S III

I did mention I bought one, right? It came in yeterday. Should be available in stores June 28th.

My first test was 19mbps! NINETEEN! I’ve had recent cable speeds slower than that! It averaged out to about 14 after several tests, but it beats the pants of Sprint’s service at a measly ~200k. I love living in the future.

Like I said in my post about returning the EVO, some people might say it’s not fair to compare AT&T’s 4G network to Sprint’s 3G, but again these are real-world results. I don’t actually care what Sprint’s network is capable of if I can’t actually get that level of service.

On the left: My two year old Nexus One on AT&T’s throttled unlimited plan. 3120kbps download speed.

On the right: My brand-spanking-new HTC EVO LTE 4G. 59kbps download speed.

That is ridiculous, infuriating, and completely unusable. These tests were done in my home at about 6:30pm last night. On my drive home I decided to download EverNote, and 25 minutes later the ~7mb file was still downloading. That prompted me to do this test. I ran it several times, and the highest speed the EVO got was 80kbps, while the lowest speed the Nexus One got was the one you see there. At 5:30 this morning, I was able to get about 400kbps with the EVO (and 3900kbps with the N1), but by 7am it was back down to about 70kbps. Unlimited data does me no good if I can’t theoretically hit the 5gb cap other providers have.

I’m starting to strongly consider the advice commenter a leap at the wheel gave me last month. Since the great AT&T throttling, I’ve gone from ~5gb/month average (8gb peak) to ~2gb/month (2.4gb peak) so getting a 5gb or even 3gb prepaid data plan is starting to make a whole lot of sense.

$149 for the Sprint Version.

Holy Crap $49 for the Verizon version.

I’m holding out for the next Evo, which went on pre-order today. I wanted the Nexus, but the delay from the time it was announced to the time the Sprint version was actually available allowed HTC to convince me to buy one of their phones. It’s a fine phone, especially at the price point Amazon is offering them.