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SGSII owners: is a custom rom necessary?

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Quadrant is garbage for benchmarking phones. Well, they're all pretty useless, but Quadrant more so than most - it doesn't even test both cores.

The stock rom is working perfectly for me. I've tried ICScreweD and Task 650s ICS'd Out! and both have more issues than I want to deal with. I end up restoring my backup of stock after trying to bludgeon the rom into doing what i want.

I haven't tried UnNamed yet, but I think it'll be the closest thing to completely stock, except all the shit he's removed that I use (Media Hub, SNS support, the default tethering app, etc).
 
I think TouchWiz 4 is actually pretty well done, I wouldn't mind using it if I wasn't so used to CM7 already.
 
gorcorps said:
I've heard 'round these parts before that AT&T has cracked down on such things before. Have you not had any problems (as in, automatic tethering charges) using the various rooted apps?
Click to expand...

I find tethering now more of a convenience than anything, I was on a date a few weeks ago, and she wanted to use her AT&T phone and had no service, so I tethered her iPhone to my ThunderBolt so she could get on the net...

Nice to have in a pinch.
 
Pliablemoose said:
I find tethering now more of a convenience than anything, I was on a date a few weeks ago, and she wanted to use her AT&T phone and had no service, so I tethered her iPhone to my ThunderBolt so she could get on the net...

Nice to have in a pinch.
Click to expand...

And did that get you any? That certainly would rev my engine :wub:
 
I use UnNamed. It's basically an enhanced stock rom - it's still TouchWiz, but a lot of the bloat is removed, the boot menu is changed, there are more toggle widgets, etc.

For those who are familiar, it's like what Fresh Rom did for the Evo and a few other phones - offers a near-stock experience with the common sense enhancements that make it a better phone.
 
Went with UnNamed and is running well. Little hiccup getting the rom installed, but only because I thought "install zip from SD card" meant the external card... not the internal memory. I kept wondering where the hell my files kept disappearing to. 😳

I ditched the launcher almost immediately because it doesn't do much of what I liked with other launchers, so I put ADW back on. The whole experience is quite awesome. I like having all the toggles in the notification pane, something that I couldn't get on the Atrix but other phones seemed to have.
 
poofyhairguy said:
A few more quick tips:

-Before we start do a Nandroid backup incase you hate my suggestions

1. Here is an ICS themed dialer. I love it:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1327780&highlight=ics

There is a flashable zip.

2. Use the ICS font theme:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1318904&highlight=ics

It looks SO nice on the SGS2. In fact, it almost makes the screen seem higher res because the fonts are so crisp.
Click to expand...

Thanks. The dialer is really neat, though I didn't notice the font change. Of course I'm not a great judge of those types of things. I've been on a "crappy pentile" screen for months and didn't notice the problems people have with it.
 
There's a thead at XDA with a link to an online SGS2 kitchen in it where you can cook your own ROM. It's really nice. You can strip out most of the bloat and have a different launcher.
I'll post up a link when I finish work if no-one else finds it before then.
 
I highly suggest you flash some new code to it. The siyah kernel was just ported to the att phone and I did notice better battery life and performance. Little tweaks, like being able to further dim the screen, and undervolt, go a long way, I get at least two days out of the phone now. The roms give other features, more transparency in the UI, usually a modded version of touchwiz which lets you do other things like put five icons in the dock, and resize widgets. Better layouts and less bloatware to help battery life more.
 
firewolfsm said:
I highly suggest you flash some new code to it. The siyah kernel was just ported to the att phone and I did notice better battery life and performance. Little tweaks, like being able to further dim the screen, and undervolt, go a long way, I get at least two days out of the phone now. The roms give other features, more transparency in the UI, usually a modded version of touchwiz which lets you do other things like put five icons in the dock, and resize widgets. Better layouts and less bloatware to help battery life more.
Click to expand...

The Siyah kernel seems a little fishy. I'm not willing to flash it just yet. The author doesn't maintain a repo, so he just drops his code whenever he feels like it. It's not entirely known if he's using some risky tweaks, like disabling per-file sync, to increase benchmark scores.

I'd stick with Entropy's DD kernel for now.
 
sjwaste said:
It's not entirely known if he's using some risky tweaks, like disabling per-file sync, to increase benchmark scores.
Click to expand...

Who cares about benchmark scores? I use his kernel because its feature packed, not because it wins some quadrant/antutu benchmarks.
 
If I "upgrade" from my stock TouchWiz ROM to the UnNamed ROM, will my settings and installed apps remain intact (since UnNamed is just modified TouchWiz), or will I need to resinstall/reconfigure everything?
 
shabby said:
Who cares about benchmark scores? I use his kernel because its feature packed, not because it wins some quadrant/antutu benchmarks.
Click to expand...

That was kind of his point. He said it's possible his kernal may make some unnecessary tweaks simply to inflate benchmark scores, meaning the stability might be compromised just for the sake of higher numbers that you just said aren't important.
 
Adam8281 said:
If I "upgrade" from my stock TouchWiz ROM to the UnNamed ROM, will my settings and installed apps remain intact (since UnNamed is just modified TouchWiz), or will I need to resinstall/reconfigure everything?
Click to expand...

The instructions say to wipe before flashing, but I don't know if the ROM installer script wipes /data before it installs the rom. I know it wipes /system. You might be able to just flash it on top and keep everything intact, but that almost always causes problems, and if you have any kind of problem, troubleshooting is going to start with this step: "Wipe and re-flash".
 
I've been just fine with Touchwiz for the 3 months, after debating and trying to figure out all of this customization bull.

I would worry about getting all of the other pre-installed apps...if I felt they were actually taking up space. They are taking up space--but nothing significant in my mind. I've already downloaded enough apps on my own that I will never use, so it would be silly to care about these other apps that I will never use.

I will wait until ICS and likely then try cyanogen mod to see what all the fuss is about.

The only improvement that I could get out of any type of rom, as I see it, would be improving battery life.
 
gorcorps said:
That was kind of his point. He said it's possible his kernal may make some unnecessary tweaks simply to inflate benchmark scores, meaning the stability might be compromised just for the sake of higher numbers that you just said aren't important.
Click to expand...

The author keeps no secret of the tweaks that he enables, they're all in the /sbin/siyah/tweaks.sh file and you can edit it if you like or delete altogether. He even mentions that he does this in the thread and in the tweaks.sh file. Not flashing the kernel because he does this seems foolish, its a great kernel.
 
shabby said:
The author keeps no secret of the tweaks that he enables, they're all in the /sbin/siyah/tweaks.sh file and you can edit it if you like or delete altogether. He even mentions that he does this in the thread and in the tweaks.sh file. Not flashing the kernel because he does this seems foolish, its a great kernel.
Click to expand...

It's the only kernel that I have had stability problems with, although I haven't tried the later builds.
 
So is there a quick way of getting rid of specific notifications? On my Atrix there was a (-) button that I could use to get rid of individual ones, but here there's nothing. I tried swiping them away too which didn't take. It's rare I want to clear some, but not all notifications but it does happen so it'd be nice.
 
gorcorps said:
So is there a quick way of getting rid of specific notifications? On my Atrix there was a (-) button that I could use to get rid of individual ones, but here there's nothing. I tried swiping them away too which didn't take. It's rare I want to clear some, but not all notifications but it does happen so it'd be nice.
Click to expand...

Nope, and that's a bummer. Clearing individual notifications is a baked-in feature of ICS, but not Gingerbread. I'm not very knowledgeable about custom ROM's though, so it could be there are ROMs which would let you clear individual notifications.
 
Occ said:
And of course there is a 12/13 update with some fairly cool things in it. 😛
Click to expand...

Yeah I saw that yesterday. People have reported success flashing to 2.0 without wiping everything out, so I think I'll be okay. Fingers crossed 😛
 
Found something else cool that the Atrix was missing, when I press home+power it takes a screen shot... similar to how the iphone works. Not sure if this is stock or unNamed behavior, but it was sorely missed on the Atrix (and a lot of early Android phones surprisingly).
 
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