Cell phone provider change

[WRXtranceformed]

Really enjoying this phone so far. The Sprint rep installed ATK (advanced task killer) to help prolong battery life, because he told me that Android pulls up applications that run in the background even when you're not using them. However, after a bunch of my own research, the newest version of Android is designed to allow these programs to work without affecting battery life. I don't know anything about software development, but there are a bunch of articles out there from Google and private developers that have said ATKs are actually detrimental to your phone. So I deleted it, went through every app on my phone and set the 3G/4G access restrictions to be minimized as much as possible, set startup permissions to be minimized, lowered the screen brightness, turned off the active wallpaper (that looks badass but eats the battery) and I'm hoping this will help battery life. The good news is that the battery life wasn't really much worse than my old worn out Blackberry, but hopefully this will help.

I had the first "dress jeans" test with the phone, and it was actually MORE comfortable in my pocket than my BB Curve was because it has a thinner profile. It will be interesting to see how much of an effect the hard case makes, but the phone was comfortable in the front and back pocket.

As far as the wireless hotspot, I ran across this article and may try it out:

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Cliff notes are that someone found a way to root the phone without causing problems with your phone and you can wirelessly tether for free instead of paying $30 per month thanks to Sprint's unlimited data plan.

I also found a pretty good GPS rangefinder for $1.99 that I might try out