Tuesday 23 October 2018

Unihertz Atom Part 2

Some further observations on the Unihertz Atom now I've had it for a bit...
  1. It's a lot faster than the Jelly Pro, which sometimes felt like a compromise compared to a full sized Android phone. The Atom is as responsive as anything I've used (Samsung Galaxy's and a Sony Xperia Z5).
  2. The GPS is miles better than the Jelly. In fact it seems to get a position lock faster than any of the other devices I have access too - nearly instantaneous. This I find quite remarkable considering the Jelly generally took a few minutes.
  3. The battery life is excellent - even setting it up with lots of downloads and syncing it still gave me nearly 2 days of use. Overnight with Wifi and 4G on it only dropped a couple of percent. The question is: do I charge every two days to try and preserve battery life considering it's not removable?
  4. On a USB PD charger it seems to charge very quickly: 30-85% in under half an hour. It does slow down after reaching around 90% but that's enough charge for a day of operation in half an hour.
  5. Fingerprint reader seems to work very well for me. I would estimate that it works first time 90%+ of the time.
  6. The Calender widget is not as good as the Jelly one, too much screen space wasted on a small screen. That will need replacement.
  7. Even after updates the Jelly is ahead on Android patch level - consequently, I expect more updates soon. 
And now a few more config details now...
  1.  Nova launcher works quite well on the Jelly, and now Atom, since it allows you ta lot of flexibility resizing widgets. In particular, it allows you remove widget padding to maximise their size, and I use full screen widgets to make the most of limited screen real estate.
  2. I use a dark theme on the phone since I find white-on-black easier to read. 
  3. On the first home screen I have a full screen calendar using Simple Calendar Widget which is much more space efficient (and neater) than the inbuilt widget.
  4. On the second-through-fourth home screens I have full screen aquamail widgets for each of my main email accounts. These are all set to update every 15-mins and AquaMail is white-listed under Settings|Smart Assistant|Power save manager  to ensure that it is able to run in the background correctly.
  5. One the fifth screen I have a full screen BBC News widget, also whitelisted like Aquamail so it updates regularly.
  6. On the sixth screen have three widgets running taking up a third of the screen height but at full width: BBC Weather, Music and TuneIn Radio Pro.
  7. There are no app icons on any home screens but the dock at the bottom also scroll sideways to reveal new icon sets. I have set it to hold four icons (one is always the Apps button).
This way I can get to all my key info one-handed by just side scrolling the screen with my thumb. Unlocking using a PIN is actually easier than using the fingerprint reader if the phone is held one handed since the button is so low. This is something most phone makers get wrong and I blame Apple for encouraging that design stupidity. The Xperia Z5 Compact with its fingerprint sensor on the side actually worked better for one handed operation (but only for right handers).     

3 comments:

HS said...

I'm following your posts about the Atom with interest. Keep them coming please!

Have you experimented with the dual SIM function? The Jelly is dual SIM but since you have to limit one SIM to 2G only it was practically useless. I wonder if the Atom has dual active 3G/4G.

Unknown said...

How exactly do enable drak mode on the Unihertz Atom? It is not on my settings > Display > Advance option (using latest update from Unihertz, Android 9). Cheers.

Neil Jefferies said...

Dark mode is a Nova Launcher option, and various apps like Aqua Mail have it too. It's not built in until Android 10 as far as i know.