Norton Mobile Utilities Public Beta

[DaveSyd]

A few collected thoughts;

•  Integrated UI, ie. took me a while to find the settings for data plan, because there are 2 places to go looking for settings. On on the home screen, menu drop down. Then also a separate one for your data plan on the Usage screen. These 2 should at least be linked so you can jump to the data plan setting from main settings screen?

•  Like the drill down style of the UI and the Black, Grey appearance, please don't with this too much, and the way it drills down from one to the next on looking at Network, CPU, memory usage. Would like it to integrate better, by being able to click on the apps listed in the usage (CPU, Network, Memory) screens and then get the app details. Instead of going back out to the home screen and going into apps to find out the app details, including system apps.

• There seems to be specific issues with some models on SD cards. I have a SGS2 which has 16GB, on board. After all the OS files etc. it has onboard 11.5GB mounted as \sdcard\ . On top of that I have a microSD card inserted in the phone 32GB, it is mounted as \sdcard\external_SD. When I move applications to the SD card, it actually moves it to the external SD and transfers it to a hidden folder. NMU recognises the internal storage as 'the sd card' and therefore cannot find any applications when it attempts to move them or analyse them. It's not just NMU that is confused by double sd cards.

• Battery Profile and newly added functionality. I also find the 30% notification incredibly annoying but this is covered elsewhere. The also find this screen a little trigger happy! It's hard to grab the screen and scroll without actually changing the setting of the item you grab. With one mistaken tap, I end up changing all my settings, on/off. The time estimates on the battery on calls, music, Movies, browsing and asleep wildly optimistic (I'm guessing because there is no documentation or help on this yet). The SGS2 is notorious for being under powered with the battery and the carrier apps that they all seem hell bent on loading. Mine currently says battery is 66% that it will last 115:51 asleep (presume 115hr 51 minutes). There is no way it will last that long - more like 15hr not 115. So much so that I tend to ignore this screen.

[erik_carlstrom]

The team has a plan to address the multiple SD Card issue soon.  While it impacts your SGS2 it also impacts Honeycomb Tablets as well.  The internal mount structure is very different in the 3.x version of Android.  It sounds like your Samsung is similar in this fashion.  

We're also undertaking a design review.  At some point in th enear future you should see a change in the UI for NMU.  

As to the Battery information, keep in mind that the relationship is not exact and is variable depending on what is happening on the device.  The 115 item you mention could potentially be a typo bug.  Are you able to take a screenshot?  I might mean 1 day, 15 hours, 51 minutes and not 115 hours, 51 minutes.  

[DaveSyd]

Hi again,

I tried in vain getting a screen shot posted. Perhaps jpg vs jpeg wouldn't stick, I tried more than 20 times getting past the CAPTCHA words? Any way the battery side, 115:51 was last time today it's 193:21. IT wouldn't be 1 day 93 hrs of course because 2 digits before semicolon are going higher than 24 all the time. Anyway the calculations do not seem to use previous history (ie, how many background apps, services typically run) to work out the amount of power left.

Anyway on a different note another improvement idea for you...

The "Widget Panel" which contains 4 items of data, but there are settings for only 3 of them. # of open apps is the only piece of data on that panel that is static and not configurable in any way, while the others are data usage, total calls and total SMS. To be honest # open apps is pretty irrelevant. I'd like to see the Battery % charge in that panel, or some other pick list of items. I can't think a reason anyone should worry about how many open apps there are running?