[Optimus L3, L5, L7 General] -CALIBAN666-:
LG's L-series

They made a big splash earlier this year at Mobile World Congress, and a few carriers in Canada jumped at the chance to sell them, but then they seem to have fallen off the map. I'll admit, even I have to look and see what we're talking about when we have potential news about the L3, L5, or L7. Let's have a refresh.

Imagine LG's Prada phone, but remade for folks who don't buy Prada. The L-series phones are all stylish (and really resemble LG's iconic Prada phones -- check out our look at them in Barcelona) and have an emphasis on good looks. The entry-level L3 competes with phones like HTC's One V and Samsung's entry-level Galaxy phones. It's running Gingerbread on a 3.2-inch display, but it looks nice doing it. Compared to something like the Motorola Defy Mini, you get good looks along with your dirt-cheap pricing. The L5 takes things up a notch to Ice Cream Sandwich and a 4-inch screen, placing it in the middle of the road where most people look first when buying a new smartphone. They'll see the L5, and notice the build materials and design. Finally, the L7 looks to compete with the big dogs of the Android world, with all the bells and whistles you would expect from a high-end smartphone, in a damn fine looking external shell. All three are eye-grabbing, and getting people to notice is the first hurdle. We're really not sure why we don't hear more and see more about them, but we're guessing a saturated market has something to do with it.

Maybe we'll see the L-series phones make their way into the spotlight, maybe we won't. But at least now we all know what we're talking about when we see them mentioned.

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Multitasking

Multitasking is a word you'll hear a lot around here and at other places on the Internet that talk about smartphones or other tech. It doesn't mean what it used to, back when dinosaurs with long beards first dreamed up computers, but it still makes a very big difference for some folks and can be the deciding factor when picking a smartphone operating system. Let's have a look and see what the fuss is all about, and how it relates to Android.

A long time ago, in a laboratory far, far away, some Jedi masters decided that computers should do more than one thing at a time. They really already were doing plenty of things behind the scenes, but to the user it was a case of entering a command, and waiting for it to finish. Using threads and schedulers, and probably a little magic and a lot of luck, engineers were able to work up an operating system that could run more than one user command at a time, and multitasking was born. When you switch to a new VT (virtual terminal) on a Unix box with no GUI, you're multitasking. When you have more than one window open on your Windows or Mac or other computer that does have a GUI, you're multitasking. You're doing more than one thing at a time, and the computer is running more than one user task at a time. You can now read Android Central while your completely legal torrents are downloading in the background.

On a smartphone, multitasking is a bit different. We don't have the luxury of a 20-inch monitor, so showing more than one "thing" running at a time isn't a big deal. Samsung is testing the waters and trying it with the Galaxy S III with the Pop-Up Play feature, but for the most part whatever we're doing takes the whole screen to do it. We also don't have tons of RAM and video memory available and have to watch the power usage. This means smartphone multitasking has to be a bit, well, smarter.

Smartphones have been multitasking for a long time. All the mobile operating systems do it a bit differently -- some suspending all other apps in the background, some saving the state and closing the app itself, and others just letting everything run. The way Android does it is to let threads and processes run depending on their priority. If you're using Google Play Music, the processes that make the sound come out of the speaker have a high enough priority to stay running when you switch away from the app. Not all of it is running in the background, but enough of it is to keep the tunes playing. Other apps can be killed if they aren't being used, and some apps get "frozen" (for lack of a better word) and restore themselves when brought back to the foreground. What's important, and prioritized, is decided when the application is written and compiled so the end user doesn't have to worry about it. It's not perfect, but it follows the very strong multitasking model from Linux and tweaks it for Android. It's all open-source, so manufacturers and ROM builders can (and have) tweaked things to allocate memory the way they want it allocated. Sometimes the tweaks are great, sometimes not so much.

In the end, remember the next time you open an app and start up where you left off that you're seeing multitasking at work.

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Haptic feedback

It's one of those little things that can make a big difference, and something we never really think about. Simply put, haptic feedback (commonly referred to as haptics) is the use of touch feedback to the end user. You know how your Android phone vibrates a tiny bit when you tap one of the navigation buttons? That's haptics at work.

Since the screen on your Android phone or tablet is pretty much just a smooth sheet of glass of some sort or another, it's difficult to register any sort of tactile feedback to our fingers. When we type on a computer keyboard, we know when our fingers have pressed a key down. Our mouse (and some trackpads) do the same thing with a healthy click when we press the button. On a smartphone, we just have to trust we've done something, and wait for it to happen. Haptics helps here. The short and light vibration when typing out a message with an on-screen keyboard can make a big difference for many of us, and I can see myself being pretty frustrated if an on-screen button didn't let me know I had pressed it.

Haptics go beyond navigation and the keyboard though. They can be a very important part of mobile gaming. Gunning your way through an enemy horde is much more satisfying when you feel every shot from your rifle, and nothing lets you know you've hit the wall in your favorite racing game like a harsh vibration from your phone or tablet.

Probably the best thing about haptic feedback on Android devices is the way it can be customized. The OS itself is open, meaning OEM and developers can adjust things to get them just the way they like, including leaving the settings wide open to the user like we see in CyanogenMod ROMs. More importantly, application developers have access to the hardware controller to customize haptic feedback for their products. It goes one step further with the addition of things like the Immersion haptic SDK to the mix, where developers have an almost unlimited way to make their applications register with your fingers as well as your eyes and ears. Sometimes, the little things mean a lot.

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F is for Factory Reset

A factory reset is the ultimate cleansing of your Android device. It's usually either a last resort to fix a problem, done before you sell it, or because you like to flash ROMs. When you perform a factory reset you're essentially wiping out everything you've ever done to the phone and restoring it back to the basic manufacturer software. As we've mentioned before, it doesn't uninstall any software updates you've received from the folks who made your phone, but it does wipe out any core application updates you've grabbed from the Google Play store. The technical details are as follows:

/system is untouched, because it's normally read-only

/data is erased

/cache is erased

/sdcard is untouched

When your phone or tablet reboots, it's like it was when you opened the box as far as apps and user data goes, except for your data on the SD card partition (either a real, physical microSD card or a partition named sdcard).

Doing a factory reset is easy -- open the settings, do a little digging (different manufacturers put it in different places, but start with privacy or storage), select it and confirm. Your device will reboot into the recovery partition, erase everything, they reboot into the setup again. One thing to note though -- if you've rooted and ROM'd in any way, you should never do a factory reset from settings. Often times it works just fine, but some devices and some ROMs are so different once hacked that you'll end up with a bricked phone. We hate bricked phones around these parts. Follow the instructions from the folks who developed the software you're running instead, and use the reset method they recommend.

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End of life

End of life is a term none of us ever want to hear. We envision it means the death of our phone, and we should just throw it away and get a newer model. After all, it's at the end of its life, right? Not really. End of life means something different to carriers and manufacturers than it does to enthusiasts like us. The easy way to look at it is that when the folks in suits get together and decide that a phone isn't going to make enough money so it's worthwhile to keep producing it, it has reached the end of its life. That may mean a refreshed, newer model (like the Droid RAZR MAXX), or a shift to a newer model with new, and arguably better, features like the EVO 3D. We have to remember that the folks who make these phones do it so they can make money, and like any good business they want to maximize their profits.

But what does end of life mean in the real world? First off, it means that once the current stock sitting on the shelves is sold there won't be any more new ones to replace them with. There may be refurbished units floating around, but no more new phones of that model are being made. It doesn't mean that the phone is done getting updates, but don't expect too many new features to come along -- things are in maintenance mode and bug fixes and security patches are the only things that will be addressed. It also doesn't mean your warranty is affected in any way. Even if you were to buy a brand new phone that has already reached the end of life status, you'll still get the full manufacturers warranty.

Most importantly, it doesn't mean that the phone is going to stop doing anything it already does today. The HTC EVO 4G is a great example. It was a huge hit for HTC and Sprint, and actually stayed in production longer than any of us would have thought. Some places are still selling them new (although they're getting harder to find), and those EVO 4G's sold new today are every bit as good, and have the same warranty from HTC, as the ones sold in 2010. Sprint still offers customer service, and it's still one heck of a phone.

Don't be put off by the words end of life. While we wouldn't recommend you search out a new phone that's already been discontinued, they still perform as they should and you'll find lots of folks who still love them.

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DLNA

DLNA, or the Digital Living Network Alliance is an organization set up by Sony in 2003 that determines a universal set of rules and guidelines so devices can share digital media. The devices covered include computers, cameras, televisions, network storage devices, and of course cell phones. The guidelines are built from existing standards, but manufacturers have to pay to use them and have their device join the DLNA.

With DLNA devices, you can share video, music and pictures from a Digital Media Server (DMS) to your Android phone or tablet. A DMS could be your computer, a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, a television or Blu-ray player, or even another Android device. Anything that has a DLNA server, or can have one installed will act as a DMS. Fun factoid: when a DLNA server is installed on a cell phone, tablet, or portable music player it's called a M-DMS -- the M stands for Mobile.

Once a DLNA server is in place, our Android phones usually have two functions -- to act as a Digital Media Player (M-DMP) or a Digital Media Controller (M-DMC). The player is easy enough to figure out, it finds content on a DLNA server and plays it back. A DMC will find content on a DLNA server, and push it to another connected player. For example, my television has a DLNA player, and my laptop has a server. With the right software, I could use my Android phone to find the content on my laptop and play it on my television. DLNA can really be fun if you have all the right equipment.

But chances are Android (and eventually other mobile devices) will be moving away from DLNA. With Ice Cream Sandwich, Wifi Direct is part of the operating system and has the potential to do everything DLNA can do, and more. We already have seen it replace DLNA streaming in the HTC One series with the Media Link HD receiver, which streams content from a Sense 4 device to a monitor with HDMI input. It uses native Wifi Direct, and by all accounts works really nicely. Or Samsung, who is using NFC to kick off a Wifi Direct session for fast data transfer on the Galaxy S III. We'll have to wait and see what manufacturers do with Wifi Direct, because having it built into the OS is a big plus -- even for a company like Samsung who makes millions of DLNA devices each year.

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Bloatware

When you think of Android phones, you think of bloatware. We wish it weren't so, and not every phone comes with, but the majority of Android phones out there come from carriers and are chock full of bloatware. We've complained about it, and found ways to remove it, but what exactly is it?

Most folks consider any applications that your carrier (or the folks who built your phone) pre-installed to the system as bloatware. Usually, these applications are a front end to some service or content that you'll have to pay for, and usually it's something you would never download and use on your own. All the carriers, and all the manufacturers, are guilty of including it, and we tend to hate it all equally. When you open the app drawer on your new phone, and see City ID staring back at you, just waiting for you to click it, you can't help but hate it.

But why is it there? It's one down side of Android's open nature. Google gives Android away to anyone and everyone, but realistically only a very few companies can afford to make cell phones. And they don't make them with you and me in mind as their customer. HTC, or Samsung, or LG (you get the picture) makes Android phones for the carriers. They work out deals to decide hardware and software they want to include, and part of those deals are these "value-added applications" we lovingly call bloatware. Verizon and HTC love you, but they still want you to click the app and send in the money. Because Google isn't involved and doesn't make any rules about it, they can include any app they like in your new phone. Nobody likes it, but it is the side effect of being open.

Thankfully, Ice Cream Sandwich brings along the ability to disable (most of) these apps without rooting or tinkering with the system files on your Android device, and that provides the best solution we can think of. Certainly there are some people who found a use for City ID or VZ Navigator, and they should have the opportunity to use those apps if they like. And we can disable and hide them, and forget they exist.