New Android User - Setup Questions
 

So I finally took the plunge and bid a fond farewell to my iPhone 4 after receiving delivery of my Docomo Galaxy S4 in beautiful Arctic Blue. I must say that I am amazed by the phone and it's just so vastly superior to the iPhone in so many ways. I was originally concerned about the larger size, but it's just a little larger than the IP5 and much thinner.

However, I'm experiencing some teething pains on setup and hope the community can help me.

1) Email - I manually setup all of my accounts, and everything is either Exchange or IMAP except for two Yahoo accounts. The problem is syncing the status flag on messages - the phone is not setting the message flag to 'read', so the message is showing up as new when I connect via my laptop, and sometimes the message shows up as new on the phone even though I set the status to 'read' on the laptop. This is happening for every account, so it can't be the email provider - it must be something on the phone. Messages set to 'read' on both the laptop/webmail and the phone will pop back up as 'new' the next time I open the phone's mail app and sync again to get new messages.

I am receiving Gmail messages automatically, even though I set the sync interval to "manual" for this, and all accounts. I don't want the battery impacted by the phone doing pull/push in the background, especially given that I specifically set it for manual.

Is the answer here a different mail app?

2) Photos - Using Kies, I was able to move all my SMS and photos over from the IP4, however the transfer dumped all of the photos into one album called 'Camera' and I lost the albums and which photo went into which album. With over 600 photos in this one folder, it could be an endless task to sort and refile, especially doing it on the phone. What is the best way to handle this? Create the folders on the phone, then browse the device on a Windows machine and cut/paste blocks of photos from the main DCIM folder to the album sub-folders? Or is there another way?

3) Calendar Sync - my calendar updated accurately from Exchange (I'm using SPlanner) and brought over all of my meetings, but my appointments were not carried over. I use appointments in MS Outlook to block time, indicates OOO periods, vacation, etc - but these are not showing up in SPlanner. Any ideas?

4) SMS/Text - Kies was able to export and import my substantial collection of SMS from the IP4, however the Galaxy seems to choke almost every time I open the messaging app and often freezes or crashes, requiring a reboot. Is the solution here to use another SMS app? If so, any suggestions?

Most of the rest of the phone settings appear fairly easy to figure out and I checked a couple online guides for optimizing the device. Battery strength is probably similar to the IP4, meaning not so great - but I will tweak some settings and hopefully get it to last longer. I have almost all of the Power Saving mode features on.

So far I will say that I am very happy with my new device.

What's a Docomo Galaxy?

1) To troubleshoot the mail issues, I would start by reducing to just one account and making sure you have everything working. For gmail, I prefer using the gmail app rather than the main mail app (which is samsung-ified" on the S4). For your yahoo accounts you may need to use the yahoo mail app as yahoo doesn't have IMAP which is what keeps your read status in sync. Exchange should work with the mail app with bi-directional sync though.

2) Photos can be placed in folders either on the device itself or just by connecting to your pc and doing it manually via windows explorer. The gallery app has some settings to auto-sort too so might be worth looking at that.

3) Not sure why your appointments wouldn't sync - although I'm not familiar with SPlanner

4) This might just be a case of too much data to import - is there any way to do this in chunks?

Ugh, this is disappointing - it took me ages to get all of these accounts setup :( I think it's the native Gmail email app that is grabbing messages by 'push' without my intervention, but I don't see a way to change that setting or disable the Gmail app altogether. I guess I will delete them and try the manual setup method to see if that fixes the problem.

if I create folders in Windows Explorer and shift photos around there, will those folders appear as 'albums' on the phone automatically?

It seems to just affect appointments and not meetings - I deleted the appointment on my Outlook and re-created the event as a meeting and it showed up on my phone automatically.

Unfortunately Kies did not give me this option - the new phone setup app is an all-or-nothing process.

Ah, yes by adding your google account when you set up the device the gmail app will sync gmail by default. You can change this by either going to settings-accounts-google-click the google account and uncheck mail. Or you can do it in the gmail app under settings for that account.

Yes, each folder will show up in the gallery as a separate "album" automatically :)

I also recommend setting up Google+ auto-backup so the phone will backup new (and even your old if you want) photos to G+ and then it can auto-create albums from now on too.

Excellent! Made those changes and the photos are working and I think the Gmail issue will be gone too.

I removed the Yahoo accounts and re-added them using manual setup and they are syncing OK now too.