I stood in line almost two years ago for the G1. And earlier this year I
finally got around to rooting it and experimenting with custom ROMs. The
G1 served me well for a long time, but last month I decided it was time
for an upgrade, and picked up the “Samsung Vibrant”, T-Mobile’s version
of the Galaxy S.
I love the display on the Vibrant, but Samsung’s custom skin — TouchWiz,
or “iPhone for Android”, as I think of it — leaves a lot to be desired.
AWN.Launcher goes a long way, but the presence of an icon to watch the
included version of Avatar — an icon you can’t remove — continued to
gall me every time I opened the application list†. The real
problem, though, is the lag issue. According to the specifications,
there’s no reason this phone shouldn’t hum along without complaint. But
I was consistently seeing lags, pauses, and stutters when opening or
switching applications. Samsung’s “online
support” wasn’t exactly helpful —
“why don’t you wipe the phone
clean?” Ridiculous.
Ridiculous, yes, but that is what I did yesterday afternoon. Of
course, I wiped it in preparation for rooting, applying a “lag fix”, and
generally ripping pieces out. While there’s not a Cyanogen ROM for the
Galaxy S yet, the community has been industrious. In the end I followed
a couple of different guides on the path to fixing my phone:
- I rooted the phone using theinstructions in the Cyanogen wiki
- I followed most of the “How to make the Vibrant software not suck”
tutorial
(in a slightly different order — I rooted and installed Clockwork Mod
Recovery first). This included fixing GPS. (Guess I won’t have to
wait until
September
to use Maps effectively.)
- I applied this experimental lag
fix (more
on that below).
- I ripped out lots of the bundled
crap,
including Telenav, Avatar, Layar, and the TouchWiz widgets‡
- I installed the Desk Clock, Calendar, and Music applications from
the Nexus
One.
As someone pointed out, the included Desk Clock doesn’t even have a
clock. And the bundled Calendar is just a little to, uh, vibrant
for my taste.
So far everything seems to be working fine. The lag fix, in particular,
makes the phone seem to live up to its promise. According to the xda
forums,
it would appear that the issue has to do with the filesystem Samsung is
using for the internal storage, RFS. In particular the fact that it
doesn’t do write buffering. The fix creates an EXT-2 formatted loopback
device and moves much of the important bits onto it. With all the
caveats about benchmarks,
Quadrant
showed nearly a 3 times improvement in performance, and it feels like
it, too.
Thanks to @GalaxySsupport for
suggesting I wipe the phone: it was indeed the first step to massive
improvements. And while I may no longer have a warranty, I now have a
phone that works great.
† The funny thing about that icon is that it’s apparently just a
symlink to the included microSD card; replace the card with a larger one
(like I did), and the icon just pops up a “file not found” message when
you click it.
‡ Samsung should be particularly embarrassed by the TouchWiz Dual
Clock widget. Yes, you can show two clocks. And yes, even though you
tell it what time zone to display (and it knows the date), you have to
manually adjust for Daylight Saving Time. Do I have to wind it daily, too?
| date: | 2010-08-22 14:45:51 |
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| wordpress_id: | 1747 |
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| layout: | post |
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| slug: | improving-a-samsung-galaxy-s |
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| comments: | |
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| category: | geek |
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| tags: | android, cyanogen, galaxy s, samsung, vibrant |
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