I heard reports that the download booster in the Galaxy S5 has been disabled.
Can anyone confirm that news?
Confirmed. The feature was removed, but it wasn't just Verizon that did this. Sprint and AT&T did it too. T-Mobile was the only major carrier that left it intact. That's not all though. Verizon also blocked the ability to use the fingerprint scanner to authenticate payments through PayPal. Nice, huh? http://www.hngn.com/articles/28711/20140412/verizon-disables-payment-authentication-via-fingerprint-...
Thanks for the reply Axel. I wonder if that effects the Google play edition phones or not. Verizon doesn't support many of those anyway.
From what I read the booster used not only wifi, but also LTE at the same time to get the boost.
If you used it, then it would eat up your data usage very quickly. In Europe they get everything cheaper and will most likely have the feature.
That is they way I read it as well. I do think though that that VZW has a reason not to support which they are not telling us! Like a feature they wanted to come out with to charge us a monthly fee. Just a guess. VZW can't let phone manufacturers give everything away. Poor VZW might not be able to get all the money out of its customer they would like.
downloading faster doesn't use more data.
They are always doing something to get money out of you.
In addition, I read an article shortly after the s5 was released, which stated that having the download booster on, only used half of its power and about half of the WIFI that is provided to the phone. In other words, booster and WiFi were giving 50% of their capacity.
I had a feeling it wouldn't give a 100% .
The way I see it is you would only be downloading 50% of the data on 4G/lte and not going over your allotment of data you purchase so they can charge you overages on your data. But on the other hand if you were home or work you would normally use the Wifi anyway but with Booster of that data you download you would be using 4G/lte. A small amount which you normally would not use without Booster and using a little more data which you have to pay VZW to use. VZW would be making money off Booster but it would come free with the OS/phone. I guess they just don't want to support it on their end unless you pay them to support it?
Big carriers remove Samsung’s ‘Download Booster’ from the Galaxy S5 | Ars Technica
T-Mobile has not disabled it.
Good Luck
You need to wait 8 months before you can get the update which will install Verizon speed booster, but it's going to cost you an extra 7.99 a month, even though your Wifi connection is through another ISP. You can't disable the app, it takes up system resources, and constantly bothers you with notifications. Sound familiar?
I was at best buy today looking at their displays and they had different carriers up of course and all of them had download booster on their phones.
Big carriers remove Samsung’s ‘Download Booster’ from the Galaxy S5 | Ars Technica
No carrier other than T-Mobile has the booster enabled.
Read the link above.
You could not see other carriers having it other than T-Mobile.
Good Luck
I believe Verizion removed it because it requires 4G/LTE to use, and there are still to many customers that can only receive 3G.
Umm... yes, the Verizon S5 at Best Buy DID have Download Booster on it... but that doesnt mean it is available.
I recently read (about a week back) on an Android site that there is a way to get around it by installing a 3rd party launcher, Nova. See the article and instructions here: Work-around: Enabling Download Booster on the Verizon and AT&T Samsung Galaxy S5 : PERSONAL TECH : T...
Yes, but I also read they don't have it working completely and it only works on files larger than 50 mb when and if they do get it working I read this over at XDA who has people working on this hot and heavy. VZW will enable this when they figure out a way they can come up with a feature they can charge you monthly $7.99 You folks are trying to get something free that VZW wants to charge you to do here it looks like. VZW don't like that.
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