Finally caved and installed an ICS ROM on AT&T's Skyrocket

[EvilYoda]

So I've been patiently waiting and waiting (why, I don't know) for AT&T to release the official ICS update for the Skyrocket (Samsung Galaxy 2 S LTE)...finally got fed up with it and installed the newest SkyICS ROM from XDA.

Everything went great, no problems, can even use hotspot after the APN change...but things seems a bit sluggish? Anybody else experience something like this? For instance, the keyboard is definitely laggy...I switched back to Swype which I've been meaning to do anyway and it seems to be okay. But just jumping into an app seems to take a good .5-1 seconds longer than before.

Finally having ICS is great and I'm still playing around with launchers and customizing, but knowing that the phone was faster before annoys me. Any suggestions are welcome.

(I also haven't ran it long enough to know how battery life is compared to before...it better be a positive result!)

 

[pm]

It's seems to me that everything is a bit sluggish whenever I flash a ROM... for a day or so. I think it's related to the Dalvik cache being cleared as part of the ROM flash process.

Give it a day or two and then see if things still feel sluggish.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Try different schedulers. I find that makes a big difference as my phone seems to hate smartass and most developers like it.

 

[AstroManLuca]

That is weird, I actually find my phone to be faster immediately after wiping and installing a new ROM.

I'm assuming you did a full wipe of /data, but did you batch restore anything via Titanium Backup? I've had issues with that; it seems to work better if you reinstall apps from the Play Store instead of restoring them from a backup, and you should only restore data on an app-by-app basis for apps that have data you specifically want to keep (mostly games, also anything with profiles or extensive customization).

 

[QueBert]

you probably should charge to 100% than wipe the battery cache and run it to 0% without charging. Then finish by charging to 100% without taking it off the charger. I do this every rom I install, and the battery improvement ranges from slight to very noticeable.

 

[ponyo]

you probably should charge to 100% than wipe the battery cache and run it to 0% without charging. Then finish by charging to 100% without taking it off the charger. I do this every rom I install, and the battery improvement ranges from slight to very noticeable.

Do not do this. All you're doing is harming your battery. Battery will calibrate on its own after about a week.

 

[wirednuts]

you shouldnt really hurt the battery by running it to 0%. they have built in cutoffs that disconnect the current draw if the voltage gets too low, both in the phone and in the battery itself. you would have to have both of those sensors fail to go below the safe operating voltage, and thats very rare to happen.

now, if you drain your battery to 0% and leave it sit like that for a week or months, then the battery can self discharge itself below the safe range and ruin itself like that... so if you to drain a li-ion all the way make sure you charge it back up asap.

 

[wirednuts]

as far as speeds after custom rom install, find a better rom. there *should* be one out there that runs faster then ota roms (there usually is anyway). a couple examples would be the touch pro 2. the oem rom is ok at best, while most custom roms are only slightly better to a lot slower. but if you find super rom 15 and put that on there, BAM you get a surprisingly fast phone.

another example is the droid 1. ota roms, its OK but kinda slow. even with the original CM7 rom, latest build, its still pretty slow. but find something like steeldroid rom and BAM again, its slicker then snot (even though steeldroid is heavily based on cm7, they just optimized it for that specific phone much much better, and it makes a huge difference)

 

[2timer]

Try different schedulers. I find that makes a big difference as my phone seems to hate smartass and most developers like it.

Good suggestion poofyhairguy

 

[soccerballtux]

you shouldnt really hurt the battery by running it to 0%. they have built in cutoffs that disconnect the current draw if the voltage gets too low, both in the phone and in the battery itself. you would have to have both of those sensors fail to go below the safe operating voltage, and thats very rare to happen.

now, if you drain your battery to 0% and leave it sit like that for a week or months, then the battery can self discharge itself below the safe range and ruin itself like that... so if you to drain a li-ion all the way make sure you charge it back up asap.

doesn't hurt battery

 

[NikolaeVarius]

you probably should charge to 100% than wipe the battery cache and run it to 0% without charging. Then finish by charging to 100% without taking it off the charger. I do this every rom I install, and the battery improvement ranges from slight to very noticeable.

Why do you continue to spread lies and disinformation about battery calibration?

1) Wiping battery stats does exactly ZIP to help battery life
2) There is a reason that a battery does not normally charge to 100% full capacity.

Normal usage will allow the battery to calibrate itself.

 

[EvilYoda]

Yeah, it was a full wipe, I did everything correctly...it was running slow even before I restored a few apps from Titanium. Sadly, I forgot to make a note of what websites I had running in Opera as I'm not using Chrome (love it) and lost the 4 tabs I had open. Oh well!

 

[QueBert]

Why do you continue to spread lies and disinformation about battery calibration?

1) Wiping battery stats does exactly ZIP to help battery life
2) There is a reason that a battery does not normally charge to 100% full capacity.

Normal usage will allow the battery to calibrate itself.

This is what I was told directly by an engineer who works for HTC. I have seen with my own eyes how it does improve battery life. It has improved battery life for the 4 Android phones I've owned. And since it was passed on to me by a guy who literally builds Android devices I'm going to listen to him over you sorry. Also you'll find thousands of threads on XDA where people recommend going into CWM and wiping the battery stat every time you flash a rom. Why do you think there's an option built into CWM to wipe the battery stat? It's not there for looks. But I'm sure you'll tell me you know more than the programmers of CWM right?

As for #2, you are correct, the HTC dude also said on my EVO to wait until the charge light turns green, unplug and replug the usb cable. Once it goes from red to green unplug again, then repeat this 10 times. I did it once a week and can attest it worked wonders for my EVO 4g battery life. My Note doesn't have a charging LED so I haven't done it with this phone.

But more importantly that the better battery life, I noticed how it greatly increased the accuracy of how my phones reported the battery life. This is something no amount of time will calibrate. pre battery status wipe my phone's reporting of remaining battery life would always be widely inaccurate. Like it would be 99% and 5 minutes later say 90%.

 

[Spoooon]

This is what I was told directly by an engineer who works for HTC. I have seen with my own eyes how it does improve battery life. It has improved battery life for the 4 ... that the better battery life, I noticed how it greatly increased the accuracy of how my phones reported the battery life. This is something no amount of time will calibrate. pre battery status wipe my phone's reporting of remaining battery life would always be widely inaccurate. Like it would be 99% and 5 minutes later say 90%.

Didn't that Google engineer blog about how battery stats has nothing to do with battery calibration?

 

[QueBert]

Didn't that Google engineer blog about how battery stats has nothing to do with battery calibration?

It's purpose is to help better accurately display battery life, and to my understanding the reason it ends up increases battery life is due to the fact when your phone's not accurately displaying battery life it will go dead when it thinks it's at 0% even if it's not. I know pre wiping on my EVO, Droid 1 or Note the accurate reporting of my battery life lead to a increase of usage time. On my EVO it would go from 50 to 25 in a matter of minutes sometimes. And my phone would auto shut down even when I knew I should still have about 15% battery left. After a battery stat wipe it would go down much more gradually, and I'd get more time out of my phone. I flashed about 50 different roms on my EVO and tried every hack I came across to get more juice out of it. I stand behind always doing a battery stat wipe after any new rom when I hit 100% then draining to 0% without touching the phone and charging back to 100% without taking it off the charger.

 

[ponyo]

Didn't that Google engineer blog about how battery stats has nothing to do with battery calibration?

Yes.

 

[wirednuts]

doesn't hurt battery

if you let a battery drain to 0%, it is at the cutoff limit that the phone is set to. this is slightly above the cutoff limit the battery protection circuit is programmed for (the circuit inside the battery itself). if you then leave that battery uncharged for too long (a week, two weeks, maybe longer) it WILL self drain itself below the battery pack cutoff. if that happens, the protection circuit will shut down and most of them are designed never to wake back up after that. effectively, the battery is killed.

 

[EvilYoda]

Decided to try out a nightly build of CM9 - OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG so much better.

That is all.

 

[Proxyep]

Decided to try out a nightly build of CM9 - OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG so much better.

That is all.

really? My battery life seemed to go down even after I wiped the battery stats

 

[EvilYoda]

Battery seems like it's still a little unstable but overall the speed and features baked into the ROM are perfect for me. I understand that it's a work in progress and I'll customize with Apex/Nova Launcher, but for now I'm pretty stinking happy.

 

[PowerYoga]

I noticed performance varies greatly from different roms, and even within the same rom there might be major improvements from release to release.

So if the one you're using doesn't work well, try something else.

 

[EvilYoda]

Yeah...my friend and I were talking about AOKP and MIUI...it's not perfect but I don't know if I feel like changing things up so quickly. The main problem is that I'm on the road 3+ weeks out of the next month so I really need my phone fully working. Otherwise I'd have no problem fooling around with new ROMs if I were just at home.