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Is there a level of delusion and wishful thinking?

So I recently made the plunge and rooted my Nexus S. It was well worth the trouble. But maybe not for the reason most people might think.
Obviously, my aim was to try out different ROMs and get more power/battery life/functionality out of my phone. I agree on the functionality, but I have great doubts about the other two.
For the last week I've been testing Cynogenmod against Inf1nity against NSCollab and the results have been poor on most accounts.
Improved battery life:
Absolutely no way. My battery life has never been worse. No matter what I try, the battery drain is pretty bad. Not helped by the fact that in all three ROMs there are serious bugs which means auto-syncing even though it's switched off and constant notifications, even though they are all switched off. And that's just on the surface. System processes are going berserk on all three ROMs for no good reason at all.
Improved speed:
If there is, it's a bloody small one. In my opinion, it's quite the opposite. Maybe there's a performance improvement in certain areas, like gaming or audio. But in general the phone was prone to sluggish behaviour, no matter what settings were selected. Only Infinity felt snappy. In all cases you have to remove whatever non-stock launcher was on there and switch off many things.
The only thing you get from all of them is more functionality. But to be honest, I'm back on the stock 2.3.4, rooted and flashed the kernel and my phone is the snappiest it's ever been and so is the battery life. And there was no ROM in sight to get it there.
I'm new to this, so if I have been testing the wrong ROMs then please do point me in the right direction. If not, I'm just going to stick to my rooted phone and customize the parts I want when I have a need for it.

For some reason there is often a disparity between the experience that one individual has with a ROM, and that which another person may have. Even on the same make/model device and the same ROM, peoples 'luck' may be completely different. Perhaps it's the interaction of ROM + Apps installed, configuration, usage, variations at the silicon level...sheer luck...? Who knows?
My device hates Stock ROMs but excells with CM7, whereas others with the same device often have the opposite experience. That's why we're lucky to have a diverse dev culture and usually many options available to us. You just have to find one that fits.

Well, I'm not giving up, that's for sure The Nexus S compatible ROMs seem to be quite new, so I'm hoping future versions will show improvement.
In the meanwhile I have to applaud the community spirit and the work some people put in this. Just a pity it's not translating into results on my phone quite yet. I hope to see a real lean and fast ROM run on my phone soon.

Hitting the sweet spot in ROMs

I've tried most ROMs that are out for the MT4g, and I can say there is a massive variety. I really love the ability to fly between ROMs like this, but there is one glaring fact that I can't get by: they each have very evident weaknesses.
Yesterday, I flashed MIUI for the second time. The first time didn't last long - I quickly reverted to whatever I was using before, probably CM7 or VU. This time, however, I immediately became enamored by its quickness. Responsiveness I had only found on iDevices previously was very evident - and after installing launcherpro, I had the smoothest and most enjoyable surface-level device you could ask for. Polish was very evident in many parts (The two-pixel tall battery meter that would be above the notification bar was quickly a hit with me.) However, I quickly learned that it was not entirely translated from Chinese - the search button from the homescreen would produce only Chinese results. The registration for MIUI's built-in services was built around Chinese websites. On top of these evident, but manageable, issues, I noticed that music would randomly skip, sometimes multiple songs at a time. This issue kept reappearing in third-party music apps. Also, netflix was plain awful. A notification would lag the video and make the audio be out of sync. And that was only when the video actually worked. I ended up switching ROMs this morning when I accidentally turned screen brightness down to the lowest setting which made the screen permanently black, which for some reason has no method to fix. I was not willing to set everything up again.
Of course, before this I had to have a reason to switch from another ROM, right? CM7 has been my go-to for an acceptable Android experience. It works, but has a good number of rough edges, and isn't the smoothest experience ever. It does, however have many aspects that are universally compatible with almost every other Android device on the market running the same ROM, like the theme manager. Updates come almost every day if you are willing to flash a ROM every once in a while. Under the right circumstances, it is pretty speedy. My dealbreaker with it is poor radio performance. I don't know how MIUI would fit in with radio performance, as I was only on it for a day. Sense ROMs seem to have exemplary radio performance. CM7 randomly drops Wifi and is on edge where sense roms would have one or two bars of HSPA+. In addition, it takes longer for CM7 to actually connect to data services when you want to connect to a webpage or something.
My second most common ROM is Virtuous Unity. I think it has some cool eye candy, and has awesome data performance. Unfortunately this is as far as it goes for me. Sense is bulky. Really bulky. Looking at the built-in process manager shows a constant use of 4/5 of the RAM. This is not OK. I could quickly notice that the graphics performance for everything other than the launcher and certain built-in apps quickly decreased. The same apps would run smoothly on a ROM like CM7.
I guess my point is that it has been a while in the development for this device. Why hasn't anyone made a ROM that can pull the best aspects of these together?:
-The visuals and ludicrous responsiveness of MIUI
-The low resource consumption and crazy customization like CM7, as well as generally good compatibility with media apps
-The outstanding radio performance of Virtuous unity and other Sense ROMs
Maybe I'm completely in the dark here on why this might not be possible. Let me know if there's some ROM that I haven't tried yet that comprises these features and you may have found me my new daily driver.

I don't really know what to say to help ya out.
Running MIUI was fine for me, I never saw any Chinese and I ran MIUI for 2 months straight back in the summer. And the notifications never lagged apps, it bugged me when i was on Navigation, but I would turn that pop up off.
Sense ROM's were fine for me as well, I never experienced the bad graphics that you're talking about. I always played games and everything was fine. Sense always takes up more RAM but that's never an issue, even with Sense 3.0 ROM's you're still left with 100mb's or so. Even with 4/5 of your RAM taken that's not a problem as unused RAM is wasted RAM anyways.
And as for CM7, it's always my favorite and "go-to" ROM. It's always smooth and buttery for me 24/7 and has never slowed up on me. Wifi never drops on me and I get the same radio reception that I get on Sense ROM's.
Maybe you have certain apps installed or something that's causing you to have these weird problems with CM7 and Sense. As for MIUI, I never saw Chinese lettering so now sure how I can respond on that one.

I'm on Miui and I love it. You can overclock it and even undervolt a little too if you want but even overclocking the battery life is still really good.
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA App

on miui right now and pretty content with myself
never saw chinese either personally, and never really felt like i needed to go to the miui site for any support, this place has been great for any issues i've had
as for the screen blacking thing, this is a known issue and is fixed by sliding the "trackball" to the right to bring the brightness back up or knowing where the brightness button on the settings page is.
and i personally feel GPS locks on faster in miui then it does when i was on tdj's 3.5 port. i unno, it took awhile for gps to lock on that but in miui it locks on so quickly lol

if you are really having that hard of a time getting full functionality out of the ROMs you are installing you are doing it wrong.

darinmc said:
if you are really having that hard of a time getting full functionality out of the ROMs you are installing you are doing it wrong.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Everything the OP is talking about is opposite of my experience.
My radio works fine. GPS is zippy on the new leak.
I watch netflix at work ... Ive been through 6 documentaries and 28 episodes of Man Men.
MY experience with all the mentioned ROMs have been great.
If you dont do the recommended steps or do additional research Im gonna have to "+1" the comment above.
Sense: loved the flow of functions, hated the animations & batt life
CM7: Loved the reliability and speed, hated the blandness
MIUI: Love the themes, speed and batt life. Hate the contact manager
(I make my UI look sleeker and more sophisticated than an iphone)
People that dont like it because it looks like an iphone or acts like one is because you let act like one or look like one. You gotta understand all the eatures to appreciate it

MIUI.us has been my everyday ROM for over 2 months now. The only concurrent issue with it is with MIUI Music, where it would entirely lock up the phone even when I followed the advice and disabled certain options in the app that "helped" solve the problem.
Other than that, I haven't seen anything else wrong with it up to this day. I use my phone a whole lot, meaning I watch a lot of youtube videos on it, and even HD TV Shows (Go Kamen Rider Fourze!! ) without any problems whatsoever.
Check out the Doubleshot port if you want to swich to something different every now and then. It's pretty good as well, works great!
Give MIUI.us a second chance, just make sure you wipe everything beforehand. Check everything out and you'll be happy enough once you use it for a while longer, you'll see.
Right now I've got the latest BeatMOD BlissSense ROM with Beats Audio and it's an okay ROM, with the same downside as most Sense ROMs, it is a bit slow here and there.
[EDIT] Oh yeah, about the radio reliability, I've got the best radio results with CM7 and AOSP ROMs. Have you tried flashing the Panache Radio ROM to see if it helps?
Well, that's my two cents

For the Chinese search results hit the search button then menu then change the default search engine.
The only other Chinese I saw was in the themes app, but I find it much easier to get themes from English forum sites.

[Q] Couple noob questions

I'm not necessarily a noob to android. I've flashed a few phones, dabbled with rooting and custom roms, but nothing too serious.
My first question about these Tegra 2 processors is fairly simple. I want to know if overclocking them makes them more media capable? I have a Droid Charge and had a Galaxy S before it, and both phones were perfectly capable of playing a 720p mkv with nary a stutter. It boggles my mind that I have to convert every video file before I drop it onto the Xoom. It's not a huge hassle but it's rather interesting a single core hummingbird can handle it with ease and a dual core clocked at the same speed has so much trouble.
Second question is this. Is there any development going on for the Xoom Family Edition? I haven't noticed much other than news posted regarding this version on this forum, so I'm not sure. It's obviously not the hit they were hoping it would be, there's a whole 3-4 cases made to fit it, and virtually no accessories for it like there is for the Xoom (docks and whatnot). If overclocking helps without nuking battery life, I'd be interested. I wouldn't know where to start developing, I'm definitely not a skilled programmer, but I would be happy to help any way I could (minus a potential brick, I can't afford a new tab)!

Bump. Any opinions?

Regarding the overclocking the tegra 2 , yes it will be more powerful therefore increasing media playback performance. Although battery usually drops faster you can install set CPU to set profiles for when the screen is off etc...
As for the Xoom I myself am not very knowledgeable about that device so I cannot effectivily answer your question.
Hope this helps!
Sent from my PG86100 using XDA App

Remember that the Xoom screen is so much bigger, so takes a lot more juice to playback at same resolution, but overclocked cpu does make a difference for sure. Also, if on ICS, go into developers settings menu and turn off animation or set to .5. Makes a big difference.
The Xoom FE (like the Xoom2 and the Xyboard) don't have unlockable bootloaders and noone yet has found the exploit to gain root access. Hence no development...so far. If you find the way, you will be popular among the owners of those devices.

If you overclock the Xoom it will of course consume the battery faster, as with anything that requires voltage tweaking. The main thing to remember is research the governors that will adjust what clock you're running at and when you're running it. Interactive usually gives the best performance speedwise while Ondemand gives you a mix of performance and battery life.
Your media playback issue could possibly be due to several factors. Processor, RAM, SD read rate, and the media player are the main culprits that come to mind.
If it is the processor then overclocking will most likely help. There is a minor off chance that the Tegra2 does not contain certain instruction sets included on the other devices processor that allow it to decode the Matroskiva, mkv, format as readily.
If it is the RAM, your best bet is to get a task killer and use it to kill everything before you try to play the video. You can also go into settings and go to individual apps to force kill them which tends to work better than most task killers.
If it is the SD card rate, research fairly deeply into the subject because I personally have heard many mixed reviews in regards to the Xoom and higher "class" or access rate SD cards. Eventually I plan on getting a collection of them to run some testing myself for a unified chart, but until then your best bet would be to ask experienced Xoom users, and browse these forums.
If it is the app then try looking around to see what other players are out there. Some people use different decoding codecs than others, and some tend to work better on mobile devices with limited instruction sets.
Mind you, if i remember correctly, the other two devices also display at a lower resolution, which would take less power, and the app used to play the file might not support the larger resolutions as well.
And if you have not already toyed around with your Xoom and hacking it, just as a warning, like all other devices it can be easy to brick. Make sure you have read at least 2 different tutorials on how to do it beforehand as some are much more clearly stated than others.
Hope this helps you some

I hadn't thought about the memory card being the issue. I'm not sure how fast the internal memory card is, but my external is only a class 2, so that could have an effect on load times and everything. I know the RAM isn't really a problem, I don't do much on my tablet, and I've tried killing apps and fresh boots and nothing seems to work. It only seems to use about 450mb out of 1024mb for apps, and out of that only 124 was in use last time I checked.
I have tried many other media players though, including Dice Player which seems to be unanimously the best, and nothing I've tried is able to play an mkv on the Xoom. I typically try downloaded tv shows before movies, which include 500mb Big Bang Theory mkv files and 1gb Top Gear mkv files at 720p. Neither play at all in the stock player and play very badly in Dice or other players.
I can't wait until ICS on the Xoom FE, I'm betting it fixes a lot of my issues. Such as the browser constantly force closing and my wifi slowing down the longer the tablet is on.

[Q] What defines if a Rom can work on any device ?

I have an idea that there are certain criteria to a Rom working on any device in that :
Hardware speed - eg, maybe a 4.3 Rom cannot function smoothly on a 600mhz single core with 256MB of ram
Hardware existence - eg, maybe no gyroscope means no tilt/rotate function
Device type - Phones V Tablets V "Phablets"
It is somewhat fair to say if you have as much computer knowledge as me that any Rom will work on any device as far as booting up and getting to 'desktop' is concerned but regardless of performance and hardware ability, is this true ?
Does it make a difference if you have a phone or a tablet or the terrible yet funky termed 'phablet' ?
Granted, this really isn't about apps as am I right in thinking it is dependant on hardware and the Rom as to what apps can run. I am mindful of things like screen resolution and probably other relevant things that may dictate what can happen. Do any of these relevant hindsights mean there should be core features for resolution and other such issues ?
That's all I can think of for now as I have a bit of a headache. :good:

[Q] CyanogenMod 11 vs LineageOS 14.1

Hello,
I would like to ask you, the experienced modders and users of xda, what CFW would you recommend me to install in case I'm looking for a long lasting battery and a smooth experience (rather a minimalistic system than a sleek, but laggy one)? I basically only use my PhQ for reading and writing SMS messages and e-mails, for web browsing, for chatting and internet (video)telephony. Occasionally I watch a YT video or use the GPS navigator.
Given the fact, that the phone has only 1 GB RAM and a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, would you recommend me flashing it with the up-to-date LineageOS 14.1, or shall I stay with the older, but (supposedly more) stable build of CM 11? Or is there a different (slim) CFW, that would provide me high stability, fast response and good battery life?
Thanks.

I'd use newer than CM11 for sure. Lollipop (CM12) uses ART which makes stuff faster, and improved battery usage, so that's the minimum I'd consider.
I dunno exactly which version off the top of my head, but somewhere later than CM11 ZRAM was added, which keeps stuff from swapping to disk as often, so faster. F2FS support was also added, so if you reformat data/cache as f2fs before you install, that'll speed up disk access too.
I personally see no reason not to use the latest since it has all that, and is officially supported, so if you find something wrong there's people to talk to...

Well, maybe it was just my wrong assumption, but I thought I might want to keep using CM11, because I had read and heard, that Android 5.0 and above had higher HW requirements compared to Android 4.4.4, possibly making the phone with such specifications slower. On the other hand, I've read, that the RAM management and power management are both better with newer versions of Android, therefore I decided to post this question here and ask you xda guys (and girls) for your opinions.

You might be right, I'm no expert, and it's been quite a while since I ran kitkat. But lollipop (on our device) seemed faster to me, and battery definitely better. ZRAM also helps our low memory situation run modern apps, my understanding is it basically compresses what's in memory. Kinda like stacker did for hard drives back in the day if you remember the early 90s. So yeah, it slows down memory access all the time. However, the OS has to swap apps you're not actively using to disk when it needs memory for your current app, and in worst case scenario even will swap background apps out of memory that you expect to remain active. So by using zram, you get effectively more ram even tho its slower to access it, but overall makes things faster. And people who've done actual tests can confirm f2fs speeds things up on any device. I only just started using nougat myself so dunno how it affects performance, probably not any better than CM12/CM13 with zram implemented and f2fs format...
I belive KitKat even supports zram, but as far as I know wasn't implemented in CM11 for our device.
Also, dunno if it was in L or M, but you can now utilize external_sd cards easier. Don't have to keep setting paths for camera/etc to use external_sd, it blends it with your internal storage somehow, haven't paid attention to how it works, but haven't had a need to mess with paths ever since, and since we have only 8GB internal, that's also another nice feature; one completely easily fill that up without any photos or even going crazy with apps. Apparently our device will even work with 128G SDcards, although I only have the same 32G I've used forever. So for me on this device, it's CM12 or newer.

Alright, thanks for your advice. I will appreciate any other input and experience, though.

I'm interested what others might say too actually, I wanna know if other people agree or disagree with me! But being this is an older device, not very active community anymore. Only reason I'm on here every day lately is cuz I just updated myself, which had me checking into things, and am now looking for help getting the keyboard working right (in another thread).

I was running CM11 cm-11-20150626-SNAPSHOT-XNG3CAO1L8-moto_msm8960_jbbl.zip
finally decided to try CM12.1 cm-12.1-20151007-SNAPSHOT-YOG4PAO339-xt897.zip
Its smooth so far, but I'd love to try the lastnightyly/snapshot you have from March 2016 @enigma9o7