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

[John Gruenenfelder]

Hello again TFUG,

If you don't mind a quick off-topic question...  I have need of some
opinions on cellphone/Android behavior and I figure there should be
plenty of people here with some experience hacking on their own
phones.

The problem, in short, is abysmal performance.  The question is what
to do about it?

I currently have a Motorola Droid 3 phone which I have had, I believe,
for about a year, maybe more.  It replaced my first Android device, a
Motorola Droid 1.  I tend to like the Droid line because they
represent one of the very few models with a physical keyboard.  I like
the KB a lot as it makes typing far easier and faster but it does
severely limit phone choice.

Anyway, my Droid 3's performance is truly awful.  The Droid 1 had, I
think, 256 MB of RAM and a single core CPU (800-1000 MHz?).  The Droid
3, by contrast has twice the RAM (512 MB total, though a fair bit less
available to users), a dual-core 1 GHz CPU, and *tons* of built-in
storage space in addition to the 16 GB microSD card I added in the
battery compartment.

When attempting to actually use the device, though, there can be very
long pauses between tapping something and the device actually doing
anything.  For example, sometimes I can try to dial a number and then
simply wait for a good 20 seconds or so before the phone decides to
really do it.  There is no indication that it is waiting, but if I
were to perform other actions, such as thinking it hadn't registered
and dialing again, these actions are all queued so when it finally
responds it can perform numerous actions at once.  I now recognize
this behavior so I no longer attempt to dial more than once because I
know that once it responds it *will* actually place more than one
call.

This is just an example.  Most actions aren't this bad, but most
actions are quite slow.  I rarely browse the web either with the
built-on Browser or with Firefox since they will be painfully slow,
and, worse still, use a lot of memory which is a virtual guarantee
that the device will reboot itself after a relatively short period of
web use.  I never play any games because they exhibit the same
behavior.

To get better performance, I have removed many apps from the phone
(even though nearly all are passive and do not run in the background)
in hopes this would help.  It did not.  The phone *is* rooted, but I
did this mostly so I could make use of Titanium Backup.  If I start a
task manager/viewer I can see what is running and will see various
apps come and go in the background.  Major culprits of running
semi-frequently in the background are the Amazon app store and
Google+.  They don't seem to linger, though.  They run for a few
seconds, do who knows what, then quit only to do it again a short time
later.

Unfortunately, Motorola has seen fit to lock the bootloader.  :(  I am
running the "Maverick" ROM which is just a modified build/version of
the stock Droid 3 ROM.  Android version is 2.3.4.  I have tried
various system speed-ups and tuning abilities of apps I have, such as
those included with System Tuner Pro (which has a very nice
task/process viewer BTW) and ROM Toolbox (pretty, but doesn't seem
nearly as useful).  None of these so-called tune-ups, which can
include, among other things, fiddling with SD cache/block sizes and
messing with sysctl settings, seems to have made much change one way
or the other.  I could easily be doing it wrong, though.

I am asking here on TFUG because the vast majority of Android
hacking/development occurs, it seems, on highly aggravating message
boards.  The initial post describes something interesting or useful,
but if you want the *whole* picture you are often left with few
options other than reading the excessively long threads.  I hate this.
 Whatever happened to *structured* useful and updated documents on the
Net (i.e. web pages)?  I hope somebody here might have some insight so
I need not spend 18 hours reading through pointless threads for useful
snippets of information.  Ugh.

So.... is there anything I can do short of saving for a new device
with far more RAM?  I know some enterprising hacker has been working
on getting Android 4.x working on the Droid 3 and there are numerous
people already using it.  Should I go through the trouble?  Would it
actually help anything?  Do you think the slowness is due to installed
apps bogging down the phone an RAM or to the ancient version of
Android?  Even though there is *some* Linux buried deep down on
Android devices, I am quite out of my element and don't really know
what is or isn't a good idea or likely to work.  Of course, digging
through the useless threads reveals little since the vast majority of
users have even less knowledge than I and seem to work by observation,
conjecture, and argument rather than any useful data.

I have a nice HTC tablet and, as far as I can tell, the major
difference between it any the Droid 3 is that the tablet has 1 GB of
RAM and runs Android 3.x.  The difference is like night and day.  The
tablet can run circles around my phone.  At this point it has become
so bad that useful performance-wise, the Droid 3 behaves quite like my
Droid 1 did before I replaced it.  That's pathetic...

Oh, rebooting it *does* help, but the cleanup/speed doesn't seem to
last all that long before it's back to "normal".  Also, rebooting
takes a fair amount of time to accomplish so I try to avoid it, if
possible.

Thanks!


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
Try Weasel Reader for Palm OS  --  http://weaselreader.org
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood
of my enemies!"
        --Sam of Sam & Max