New "Smart" Phone: Samsung Galaxy 7j Perx

[Cudedog]

I recently acquired a new "smart" (dumb!) phone, the Samsung Galaxy 7J Perx. Supposedly, it is the "latest and greatest".

Well... not so much.

Thus far, I am pretty unhappy with it, and am contemplating returning it. It has lots of little "glitches" that are driving me crazy, all of which I won't go into here.

On my old smartphone, it had a feature whereby (this is hard to explain, so please bear with me) I could "expand-pinch" the text on a website (Womenrv, for example) to make the text larger, and when the text was a nicely readable size it would then flow off the sides of the page, so, in order to read the text, one would need to "push" the screen back and forth in order to read all of the text.

To correct this, one just needed to tap the screen twice, the text would then "reflow" (at the larger size) so that everything could be read on the screen without the need of going back and forth. Perfect for someone, like me, with less than wonderful eyesight.

On this new phone that I have, I can "expand-pinch" the text so that it is larger (um...most of the time) but when I tap the screen twice to "reflow" the text, the text, instead or reflowing, just returns to the original, tiny, unreadable, size.

Has anyone encountered this? If yes, do you know of a work-around?

Thanks.

Anne

[BirdbyBird]

I don't know that brand but....I bet you could Google the model and find a Q&A area that might answer your question. If you have asked it someone else probably has also.

[Cudedog]

I don't know that brand but....I bet you could Google the model and find a Q&A area that might answer your question. If you have asked it someone else probably has also.

I have Googled this issue for, literally, hours, and have been unable to come up with an exact solution.

The closest I have to finding out what is what (text reflow worked perfectly on my old HTC smart phone) is a mention that Google Chrome (which comes pre-installed as the primary browser on my phone) does not currently have this capability, although it appears that it had it previously. Text re-flow was apparently eliminated during a Chrome "upgrade".

We all know about "upgrades", I think.

Generally, my definition of a software upgrade: "Get less and pay more".

Anyway, an interim solution has been to intstall the newest version of the Opera browser on the phone. This browser is great in that it re-flows the text even better than the re-flow I had on the HTC - it does it automatically, without the double-tap requirement.

The downside is that when I use the Opera browser to access my favorite website (that is, aside from Womenrv!) which is Google News... it changes the way the Google News page is displayed. Instead of having a list of news topics one can see all at once, in three columns, and the ability to scroll up-or-down to click on my choice, it presents the topics one-at-a-time with large photos that requires scrolling left-to-right in order to (eventually) see all of the topics. A pain.

I'll look for a work-around on that problem, as I find the time.

My first choice would just to use Chrome, as installed. But it doesn't do text re-flow - at least I have not been able to find a way to make it do that. And I have spent hours Googling for a solution.

Thanks, Birdie.

Anne

[JudyJB]

Apparently, software developers use groups of users to give them feedback whenever they develop new software.

I would like to find one of those "advisory" groups and ask them what they were thinking!!!! I agree that every software "upgrade" has come without some of my favorite capabilities. That is why I specially ordered my laptop last year with Windows 7.

They came out with this wonderful Windows 8, which 90% of users hated. (I literally yelled at one MicroSoft person who suggested I take a tutorial to learn how to shut my computer off that all I wanted was an OFF button, and I had never heard of a product that you had to take a tutorial to learn how to shut it off.) The reason for the big changes? So, that they could sell one product that would work for phones, tablets, and computers! Like you said--save money. Even Windows 10 is not what I like. The problem is that some of us only choose to use one of those products, and because the software was designed to work on all of them, it worked well on none of them.

I am hanging on to my old IPhone 5 until it literally dies.

[asirimarco]

the new phones have become way smarter than me. I saw several "How To Use Your Whatever phone" books in Barnes and Nobel - they were all over one inch thick. Crazy.