lol anyone still praising the OG Droid can only praise it for the openness. It's completely unusable as a daily driver. It's just FAR too slow. Even when I have it overclocked to 1.13 ghz. The 256 MB RAM is unusable with Gingerbread no matter how many optimizations you put through. CM6 is ok, but you really need to reboot everyday to free up some RAM otherwise the device gets sluggish.
Yes, I still use my Droid everyday. I sometimes read Pulse on it while I wait for my computer to boot up. It's docked to my computer 24/7 on USB to remain charged.
You're doing it wrong.
You have to run OS Monitor and uninstall all the apps that want to wake themselves up in the background or disable them from doing so (twitter etc.) if you insist on having them. For example gmail, I actually found having the light blink out of nowhere was annoying cause it made me check my phone, now I only check when I want to see if I have email.
Among the offenders are the stock Email app, the stock Gallery app, both of those wake themselves up and store themselves in memory even though neither are being used. Delete or freeze both apks. Delete or freeze the CM7 statistics reporting, it doesn't go away if you say "no, don't report my stats", it still wakes itself up for whatever reason. Also delete the equalizer that comes with CM7 or use another ROM. Oh and use a ROM with hosts based adblocking to speed up browsing immensely. So between all these things, boom, right there, you've freed up ~45-50MB worth of junk that wants to run in the background.
Then you get the superchargerv6 script and run that with hard to kill launcher and multitasking settings and you're golden. I love my phone, plenty speed, the slowness you feel comes from thrashing the flash while you load one app another gets written to disk because so many things insist on running in the background.
This is why Apple doesn't allow ANY services to run in the background except for music, push notifications, and very restricted location tracking...keeps their OS butter smooth.
If you do all these things the right way you'll have a great phone that's plenty fast. It just took me frickin 6 months to figure all this out and get it right...that's why Android is poorly designed, you shouldn't have to have hardcore knowledge of the way Android runs to be able to make your phone run nice...the thing that makes it suck is all these apps wake up in the background once you turn off the screen and push stuff like the browser out to flash, so you come back in a minute to continue reading what you were reading and the browser has already been flushed and you have to wait for android to swap out whatever twitter app woke itself up, and then swap in the browser app again...or you want to send a text message and all those other apps insist on doing things in the background so you can't even keep your browser webpage loaded while you send a new text message.
once you get this stuff taken care of you don't feel compelled to overclock to 1.2ghz (like I did for a while, and wondered why it wasn't doing much for me) and your battery life skyrockets (80% when I get home) both because you aren't doing the overclock anymore and it's not doing anything while it sleeps.
If Android and hardware supported virtual address mapping you could get back about 100MB of RAM lost to replication of the 10MB or so Java Virtual Machine footprint that comes with every single app you run. Haven't seen any ROMs that do this though, that would require a lot of serious hacking to get to work right, but it would make a 256MB Droid like a 512MB one by freeing up tons of ram...
