fxtec5
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Posts posted by fxtec5
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I have searched high and low for the mass of the Pro1, and as far as I can tell F(x)tec has managed to keep this a secret--until now!
Here is a comparison of the pro1 vs some other similar phones:
Pro1 - 244g
Iphone 11 pro max - 225g
Priv - 192g
N9000 - 180g
Iphone 11 - 181g
Droid 4 - 179g
Elephant U - 166g
G1 - 158g
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Why do you think it is a terrible phone? A lot of people, me included, do not agree with this opinion. So it would help to explain a little further, we may even be able to help you over some issues.
Having used the phone for a weekend now, here are my grievances listed in order of severity:
Hardware issues:
1. Function keys. Who thought this was a good idea?!?! If they had just put the ?/ key where the right function key is, they could have completely eliminated them and used a standard QWERTY layout. I am investigating options to remap the keys, but the keycaps are wrong and from what I understand not replaceable even if fxtec came out with a sane qwerty layout.
2. Lack of verizon support. The pro1 was clearly advertised as being compatible with verizon, yet is not actually supported in verizon. I have managed to get it halfway working, but coverage is terrible and sms delivery is intermittent. "Messages" shows an error "no SMS connection" all of the time, and sometimes messages come through but now always. I am currently investigating options to migrating to a different carrier since the whole reason I wanted a keyboard phone was for messaging and I need reliable SMS capability.
3. Keyboard spacing - the keyboard is too long to efficiently type on. I don't exactly have small hands, but I am often overextending my thumb to get to the keys in the middle of the keyboard. I also have issues with missing keystrokes, and for whatever reason the spellchecker only catches about half of them. Hopefully I will get used to it, but missing keystrokes is a really annoying failure mode for a keyboard and kills typing efficiency. If I ignore missing keys I am up into the 40-50wpm range for unformulated text, but with even simple formatted text I am down in the 10-20wpm range due to the terrible shift layout and missing keys that seem related to my relocating my fingers going from shift/function back to the home row. It also doesn't help that there are no home row bumps on the f/j keys so when you loose your footing there is no option but to look down at your fingers.
4. Phone is gigantic. I mentioned this before, which makes not only awkward to type on (need to bend wrists to get to fgh keys) but also a beast to carry around. It is the same thickness but much larger/heaver than my droid 4 or even the priv. I really hope the pro2 comes in closer to the size of the droid 4 because if they make it any larger you may as well just get an ultraportable laptop with real keys. I appreciate that it has a larger battery, but if the screen were smaller it wouldn't be necessary to have such a large battery.
5. Curved screen. The touch region of the curved screen comes into the number key region, and I am constantly creating false touches while typing. I hope that they are going to be able to fix this in software, honestly at this point I would rather have the phone configured to have the outer few millimeters of the screen blanked off and touch disabled so they always show black and the curved edge are effectively removed from the screen. Also, the color temperature varies wildly with brightness changes, so when auto-brightness control is enabled websites color pallets drift like crazy as the room lighting changes. It is especially noticeable on off-white websites like news.ycombinator.com
6. Notification LED is way to bright. I can use it as a flashlight at night, and see it through the fabric of my pockets... I am working on a way to add some black ink over the led to tone it down to a more reasonable level.
7. Middling processor. It has a snapdragon 835 which would have been a good processor back when the kickstarter was happening, but current gen phones in this price class have literally double the processing performance. It is still an order of magnitude more responsive than the droid 4, but at the rate we are getting keyboard phones these days I would have liked to see fxtec future proof this a bit better so that it stays usable until the pro2 comes out in the mid 2030's. (sarcasm)
8. Serial number label on the back. It looks like a serious afterthought, and the ink on my label is already starting to get worn off even though I have only had the phone for a weekend. I already peeled it off--luckily the adhesive comes off nicely. Why didn't they put it on the inside of the hinge?
9. Keyboard backlight is really uneven. It is functional, but the phone looks like the keys have been worn down or something and it distracts from the overall image. In particular ' and " are basically completely dark on my device.
10. Sim tray is really scratchy. I have used other phones with the same style sim tray and they weren't nearly this bad. Honestly it feels like I am inserting the tray in upside down or something--maybe there is some kind of misalignment between the outer case and the contacts in the phone on my device? I have a single active sim which I swap between several devices as appropriate and I am worried I am going to wear out of straight up smash the sim tray after the first few swaps.
Software issues: Maybe these will be fixed with time?
11. Lack of 3rd party OS. The marketing material prominently shows sailfish and lineage compatibility, but neither of these are actually usable. Hopefully the community will be able to get them working, but it is looking more and more likely that official sailfish support (and with it, the ability to emulate android) is never coming because that would require effort on fxtec's part. I specifically bought this phone to run sailfish and am highly disappointed that nearly 6 months after the phones release they still do not have a working sailfish port. It is amazing how far the community has come, but given the small userbase of these devices the community is also small and can only get so much done without official support.
12. Camera is terrible. Using the stock camera I cannot actually take pictures (after pressing shutter soft or hard button the screen blinks, but does not save a file) and the front camera is not even detected (pressing the flip button causes the screen to momentarily go blank, but then the camera resets to the rear camera). Using gcam the cameras both work, but it takes over 30 seconds to get an image (after starting gcam, the image is frozen for about 30 seconds before the camera starts to work), and the hard shutter button doesn't work. At least the front camera works so I know it is not a hardware problem. Yes I am running the most recent firmware.
13. Lack of a multiboot bootloader. As far as I can tell there is no way to have multiple roms loaded on the phone, which is a bummer. On my droid 4 I used safestrap which allowed me to swap between the stock android, a modern version of cyanogen, and an older cut down version of cyanogen without gapps. I really miss this feature, and dearly hope that the ability to run multiple roms will be added to the bootloader soon. It would really take the edge off of the unfinished Sailfish build if I could also have a working version of android with me in case I run into trouble.
14. Keyboard backlight doesn't work correctly. If the screen locks, you have to close the phone and re-open it and unlock it to get the keyboard backlight back on. Especially annoying since there are no homerow bumps so blind typing is nearly impossible. I also haven't found a way to get the phone to unlock on opening the keyboard, which would be a nice feature.
I can write another post on the positive aspects but it sounds like you guys already know them all. In the mean time my thumbs are tired
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anonim001 and I are practically twins - I am 154
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Yes I believe you are correct - the key here is that I already had a modern sim as a result of the plan change last year.
I am not sure of the exact timeline, but nanosims have been available since late 2012 so it is possible that late droid 4's came with them. VoLTE has been available form verizon sine late 2014, so it in general is possible that someone has a nano sim but a phone that predates VoLTE. The S5 I have is from the first batch of VoLTE phones (also late 2014) and despite having been on the verizon network on and off for 5 years now (both on my current pay-as-you-go and a previous contract based plan) was sufficient to get my sim provisioned for VoLTE.
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First of all, all of you guys saying the sidekick had the best slider keyboard are _wrong_. The droid 4 had *and still has* the best slider keyboard ever. 😁
Second of all, the ebay phone arrived today in one piece! Getting it to work on verizon was a piece of cake, see the verizon thread for more details
Finally - congrats to fxtec to producing a product and shipping it, even if they did produce a very mediocre product and shipped it months after they said they did. That said, I certainly won't recommend the pro1 to anyone but those sufficiently attached to a keyboard that they are currently using one of the existing ancient sliders, since it is a genuinely terrible phone with literally the only redeeming being the keyboard--which is mediocre. On the whole the pro1 is better than the droid 4, but only marginally since the droid 4 has a much more comfortable keyboard and if it was capable of interacting with the modern web I would still be using it.
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I posted this same response in the general carrier compatibility thread, but then realized it probably belongs in this thread instead....
I was able to activate mine on verizon with VoLTE, using my existing droid 4 sim on a pay-as-you-go plan.
I just punched the sim down from the micro sizes in my droid 4 down to a the nano size that the pro1 needs, ran the *#*#4636#*#* trick, and it worked.
That said - if you are looking for a provider to use with the phone, so far I would not recommend verizon. Due to the fact that it is _only_ on LTE, the performance of the phone in marginal coverage areas is... poor... since it cannot drop back down to 3g or lesser networks. Fingers crossed that fxtec gets off their butts and gets the phones officially listed on verizon so the cdma bands start working because my house has marginal coverage and being LTE only is miserable.
Disclaimer - my droid 4 sim has spent some time in a galaxy S5 which has been using VoLTE, so the sim was known to be VoLTE provisioned before the swap. The sim itself is about a year old, and was used with VoLTE in the S5 basically immediately after I got the sim. But it was not a 'fresh' sim by any reasonable definition. If anyone is curious, the APN was automatically detected correctly as "VZWINTERNET", but only after setting the VoLTE sliders in the testing menu. Before activating VoLTE I briefly got service, but shortly after the phone went into 911 only mode as if the sim were not active. After enabling VoLTE and rebooting the APN was correctly detected and my missed SMS messages were delivered immediately after the 4G logo appeared on the status bar.
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I was able to activate mine on Verizon with VoLTE, using my existing droid 4 sim on a pay-as-you-go plan.
I just punched the sim down from the micro sizes in my droid 4 down to a the nano size that the pro1 needs, ran the *#*#4636#*#* trick, and it worked.
That said - if you are looking for a provider to use with the phone, so far I would not recommend verizon. Due to the fact that it is _only_ on LTE, the performance of the phone in marginal coverage areas is... poor... since it cannot drop back down to 3g or lesser networks. Fingers crossed that fxtec gets off their butts and gets the phones officially listed on verizon so the cdma bands start working because my house has marginal coverage and being LTE only is miserable.
Disclaimer - my droid 4 sim has spent some time in a galaxy S5 which has been using VoLTE, so the sim was known to be VoLTE provisioned before the swap. The sim itself is about a year old, and was used with VoLTE in the S5 basically immediately after I got the sim. But it was not a 'fresh' sim by any reasonable definition. If anyone is curious, the APN was automatically detected correctly as "VZWINTERNET", but only after setting the VoLTE sliders in the testing menu. Before activating VoLTE I briefly got service, but shortly after the phone went into 911 only mode as if the sim were not active. After enabling VoLTE and rebooting the APN was correctly detected and my missed SMS messages were delivered immediately after the 4G logo appeared on the status bar.
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For what its worth, I was the lucky person to win this phone. Locane has shipped the phone and with any luck it will arrive on Friday 😍
I am currently on a droid 4 under a verizon pay-as-you-go plan, and will be attempting to migrate my sim to the phone using a galaxy s5 as a mule. If there is interest in the community I can film the process
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Magnetic cables
in General Discussion
Posted
As we are all to aware, the pro1 does not support wireless charging. What do you guys use for charging?
I am working on a laser cut stand inspired by my tylt Qi charger with the intention of adding a magnetic breakaway charger in the base of it.
I am investigating the readily available usb-c magnetic breakaway adapters. Currently I am using one from ebay which supports quick charge but not data transfer. Interestingly, the device that actually arrived was branded "Baseus" and looks similar to the original kickstarter by the same name, but uses a different layout of the contacts. The pictures in the listing shows a 5 pin arrangement, but the device that arrived has a 6 pin arrangement. I ordered the one labeled "for other ucsb-c device" and it fast charges both from the stock charger and a RAVPower 61w usb-c charger.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/401933899627
So far it seems to work fine, but is an expensive solution since it means that all of my charging spots need a $15 adapter in addition to a usb-c capable charger.