Team-BHP - Android Thread: Phones / Apps / Mods

Quote:

Originally Posted by civic-sense (Post 3636469)

Thanks for the tip, but I had tried that long ago. Did not help. The issue is not that simple. Problem is that android is resource hungry. The fact that lollipop introduced a lot of useless animations has made things worse. Wonder who told google that what lacks in android are animations. Lollipop requires top notch hardware. That is why nexus 4 also has problems with lollipop.

BTW I have a puzzle which I hope somebody can solve. I have a galaxy S3 running 4.3 jellybean which is very slow and laggy despite having almost all Samsung bloatware disabled. A few days ago, my FIL got a galaxy grand prime which has a quad core snapdragon 410 and a gig of ram. Still his phone is noticeably faster and much more fluid than my S3, which has supposedly better hardware (exynos quad). I remember that when I bought it with ICS, it was blazing fast. Just one major OS upgrade and the phone becomes dead slow. Was it a deliberate ploy from Samsung to release a laggy update so that people feel it is obsolete and upgrade to S4 or S5? Else how can anybody explain the snappy grand prime?

Quote:

Originally Posted by AbhiJ (Post 3636822)

Samsung made touchwiz slightly better with time. Plus, the grand prime must be new.

My advice... Get CM on your S3. Makes the phone usable again.

Agree with Abhi.

Get SlimROM. Fastest my phone has ever been. Touchwiz 4.1/4.3 are lag fests.

Buy ProCapture or Snap Camera. Does the job for back camera better than Samsung's stock.

I use CM camera only for selfies (which is rare but seems okay).

Quote:

Originally Posted by civic-sense (Post 3636469)

<snip>.....
BTW I have a puzzle which I hope somebody can solve. I have a galaxy S3 running 4.3 jellybean which is very slow and laggy despite having almost all Samsung bloatware disabled. A few days ago, my FIL got a galaxy grand prime which has a quad core snapdragon 410 and a gig of ram. Still his phone is noticeably faster and much more fluid than my S3, which has supposedly better hardware (exynos quad). I remember that when I bought it with ICS, it was blazing fast. Just one major OS upgrade and the phone becomes dead slow. Was it a deliberate ploy from Samsung to release a laggy update so that people feel it is obsolete and upgrade to S4 or S5? Else how can anybody explain the snappy grand prime?

I've been using an S3 since its launch in Dubai. I've tried many roms and finally found Omnirom as one of the best one and settled on that.
If the phone is idle, ominrom gets it very fast in to deep sleep mode and I've seen sometimes just 0% or 1% drop overnight, while I sleep.(~ 8 hours)

That was the first time I found such battery savings and initially I thought, "hey,I might've overlooked" the battery percentage while going to bed. But after observing it closely I found out omnirom is one of the best one for S3. But sadly, it doens't have good maintainers for S3 branch and hence not much activity nowadays on that rom development for S3.

In my sammy based rom days, I was using Omega and was very satisfied with that too.But over a period of 6-8 months, all sammy based roms gets slower and slower to a point where your caller picture itself will take 5-10 second to load ,once you receiver a call.
:Frustrati

Quote:

Originally Posted by Speed.Demon (Post 3637608)

One reason why the grand offers decent performance is because it comes with a sort of Touchwiz 'Lite".

I guess you are right, one look at the app drawer and I find very less apps. But then, I have disabled most of the samsung stuff in teh S3. Still....

That's why I feel that Samsung has intentionally the latest update slow so that we all feel the need to upgrade. I think I'd try reverting to an older version.

Quote:

Originally Posted by phamilyman (Post 3637666)

I had been on Omnirom for some time. But the camera is horrible. Third party camera apps didn't help as they do not do Samsung's post processing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mykal shoemaker (Post 3637674)

Omnirom was good. I especially liked it that I could update every morning via OTA. A reset of Samsung ROM helps speeding it a bit, but once you install a few apps, its slows down again.

I got One Plus One last month and I was pretty happy with the performance. I immediately installed CM11 on my S3 and it took my S3 to the next performance level. I fail to understand if there is so much which on performance which can be unlocked on the same hardware with a difference software then why Major companies choose to make their software full of bloatware.

Though installing on S3 was a breeze with the CM installer, I need to find out easy way to install on my S4 and also on my Samsung Tab Pro 8.4 ( SM-T320). I eagerly want to install it on my Tab as S4 still is quite snappy but the TAB sometimes makes me feel that it's true potential is not utilised. Anyone knows an easy way to install CM on TAB please assist.

I bought a new battery for my Defy+ last week (source Amazon.in; looks authentic but who can really tell!). At 3-yrs-old, the old one was expiring in ten to twelve hours. This one is lasting the whole day, but only one day. This is 99% standby too: I barely use the phone much. I don't remember how long the original new battery ran for. The phone is running Cyanagenmod.

It's not a big deal: I'm never far from home/car charger for many hours anyway. Just curious as to what should be expected.

Quote:

Originally Posted by phamilyman (Post 3637877)

I know what you mean. that was always the case on my HTC Chacha. But on the S3, Snap Camera IS clearly better than my OEM app.

If we'd had this discussion 2 weeks back, I could've shot photos as proof.

Which app didnt work for you?

I had tried focal and a few others - don't remember names.

Anyway am going to experiment custom ROMs on the S3 once my wife gets used to my Lumia 925. I donated her that after I moved to the OnePlus.

So, I got the lollipop update for my Moto G 1st gen over the weekend. The excitement of installing the new version died in about 2-3 hours when I realized that there are not many changes, and worse still some of the battery saver apps do not work on this new version.
Lollipop does not allow for mobile data to be turned off through 3rd party apps, you have to do it manually going into the settings, data, and then switch it off. It has a short key to enable/disable WiFi but not for mobile data. I mean, why would they not allow this?

How do I go back to the previous version of android? With the mobile data continuously on in 3G mode, my battery does not last more than 6-7 hours.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vid6639 (Post 3638011)

Press the carrier icon in the status bar. When you press that it opens a small window showing mobile data usage and a toggle switch to turn mobile data off.

In the earlier version, my battery app would switch off the data connection and only switch it on once every 15mins or so if the phone is not being used. That saved the battery big time and it used to last me a day. Is there any app which will allow me to do that in lollipop?

Quote:

Originally Posted by saurabhkum (Post 3637824)

There is a step by step in Cyanongenmod's wiki. I hope you already checked that out.
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Instal...r_mondrianwifi

There is no one click installer type solution.

Regarding the first part, why companies not using better ROM for factory install. It is a long debatable point. :). Companies do bundling and branding according to their market stratey. They try to make a balance between performance, and required applications (branding,tracking tools -aka bloatwares) for their business data collection and better update management through OTA ,KIES etc.

After market community developed projects take the skeleton android open source code and start from there.A community powered project works better due to multiple brains (not getting dictated from corporates to make an application in THIS way or THAT way only). So these brains have different ideas and independent approach for each problem and its solution.

When it gets into the form of a collective ROM, through sourceforge,jira,github or any common tracking mechanism, the final product called cyanogen,omni,slimkat,pacman.......etc gets into a beautiful rom utilizing the maximum performance capabilities of the underlying hardware.

But sometimes we get stuck with properietory drivers like camera drivers (the famous camera issues on cyanogen mod for many sammy devices ) and all when there is not much openness from parent companies.