[Tfug] OT: Phones..... Argh!

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Nick Lopez <nick at glowingmonkey.org> wrote:
>
>   There are Cyanogenmod 10.1 (Android 4.2) nightlies being built for the
> droid 3. Android 4.2 is all about the Buttery smoothness so it's worth a
> shot. Also, getting rid of the motorola junk can only be for the best.
> http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_solana
>
>    - nick

Nick,

Just to thank you again for the heads up. I finally did something
about it last night and installed the current 4.2 nightly.  It has
been a very nice change.  A few minor issues, like the hard button and
keyboard backlights timing out far too quickly (but they turn back on
if you touch anything).  Overall, I can't really say if it is/feels
faster, but whatever issues it has now are almost certainly due to
memory pressure.  Still worth all the updates, though.

Checking with my task/process manager app, I also noticed that both
cores appear to be online all the time now.  Previously, with the
stock kernel, the default frequency scaling module was "mot_hotplug"
which behaved just like "ondemand" but kept the second core offline
unless the CPU was really working hard.  Now that is gone and it is
just using "ondemand".  So far, it doesn't seem to have had a big
effect on battery life.

The default CM home app, called Trebuchet, is rather nice, but I was
very surprised that you cannot organize your apps into folders... que
the hell?  This is a "problem" that was solved a very long time ago.
I'm probably going to try a different low-memory home app (with folder
support, of course) to see if I can free up a little RAM.

The first thing I did last night was to update my very old version of
Safestrap for Droid 3.  After rebooting, though, it didn't recognize
that I had been running a non-stock ROM and booted into the stock ROM
which, for some reason, was very unhappy and had nearly everything
force closing left and right.  I still have nandroid backups of the
stock ROM and the Maverick ROM I had been using, so I can always find
a way to restore one of those if absolutely necessary.  For now,
though, I can't really see a big reason to switch back from Android
4.2.  Next up, at some point, is to update my tablet from Android 3.x
to 4.2.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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