As I've noticed that most (if not all) Android phones I've ever tried have been suffering from the "non-fluid" issue. The homescreen and apps experience might be fast but they're not fluid like ones found on iOS or Windows Phone and I'm guessing that it's because previous Android phones doesn't have the 2D gpu acceleration. ICS has added the feature and I'd like to ask those owner out there if the experience is now as fluid as iOS or WP7? watching video review doesnt help because videos are formatted into 30fps. Even GS2 doesn't appear to be fluid (aka I dont think it's running at 60fps)
The home screen and app launcher are very fluid if you have a static wallpaper. With a live wallpaper there is considerable slow down. Some wallpapers are less CPU intensive than others though.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
Android's fluidity is actually due to more than just Hardware acceleration. Most Gingerbread phones come out of the box very quick (Nexus S) and really glide without any apps installed. Hardware [was] acceleration is a big problem, as you were throwing efficiency out the window in order to run on everything. Now with it HW Acceleration, the slickness of the OS has multiplied exponentially giving you an experience on par with iOS (Joshua Topolsky, The Verge)
Now, here comes the real problem, apps. Android apps have the most freedom in the developer sense, and are also the most lax on what is allowed in the market. While iOS dev kit requires a stringent agreement and agreement to an app review process before getting your license, Google's Android Market is nothing like that. If you can pony up $25 (a requirement only recently), you can publish whatever the hell you have made, no matter how ugly, useless, or inefficient it is. Google's toolbox for Devs is great, even greater in terms of options in app making, but enforces no standards or required templates. This is why iOS apps all have the same look and feel while Android's app range from great to complete ****. This makes a lot of sense though as Android started late in the game, so they needed to bring up the app numbers, no matter how many were ugly soundboards or battery hog games.
With ICS, Google is taking a step in the right direction by offering the HOLO hook for developers, which will allow apps to be "prettied up" for ICS instantly. Also, more efficient protocols have been added to keep battery life and smoothness up, such as a revised Garbage Collector (actually, I think they removed it entirely) and allowed apps to share information with each other. The Garbage Collection is what make your phone lag, as it is recycling the unused code on the apps you're running in the background. The new location hook allows apps to now constantly turn on your GPS to pull your location, as they can simply request it from other apps if they don't need the most up-to-date info or if you just recently used your location on another app. The OS should be as fast as any other on the stock level, and as soon as the Apps become ICS friendly and more efficient, Android will truly have people falling in love with it
Chrono_Tata said:
With a live wallpaper there is considerable slow down. Some wallpapers are less CPU intensive than others though.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is particularly annoying. My last Android (Nexus One) was pretty smooth on almost all live wallpapers - certainly on the stock ones. The Galaxy Nexus lags like hell (slow juttery screen swiping) on all of them except one of them. Very, very disappointing and hope it gets fixed somehow.
Live Wallpaper
Thank you everyone, I'm now ordering one for myself and hopefully there won't be a let down on the UI experience!
rikbrown said:
This is particularly annoying. My last Android (Nexus One) was pretty smooth on almost all live wallpapers - certainly on the stock ones. The Galaxy Nexus lags like hell (slow juttery screen swiping) on all of them except one of them. Very, very disappointing and hope it gets fixed somehow.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Strange, I owned Nexus One too and live wallpaper (stock one) isn't running at acceptable frame rate at all....it's laggy and sluggish (i changed from iPhone 3G and that might explain why)
May be you can try changing live wallpaper on Galaxy Nexus cuz the one u'r using might not be that optimized?
PS. One more question, how u guys find the battery life?
dnlsmy said:
Also, more efficient protocols have been added to keep battery life and smoothness up, such as a revised Garbage Collector (actually, I think they removed it entirely) and allowed apps to share information with each other.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, they most certainly did not remove the garbage collector but they implemented a more modern algoritm for it and it now makes sure to run on a different CPU core as to not take CPU cycles from the app. A garbage collector is part of the Java platform and could never just be removed since that would result in constant memory leaks that would result in a crash as soon as you filled up all the memory.
When will the stuttering laggy UI experience be addressed?
I'm tired of all the mis-information. There's a pattern: Google is about to release a new handset, they don't show the handset scrolling in any of their ads, or if they do, it's super-imposed. A handful of 'mainstream' bloggers praise the handset calling it quick and responsive and lag free. You buy into it, buy the handset, and the basic UI is anything but CONSISTENTLY fluid and responsive.
I stupidly bought the Galaxy Nexus, really wish I hadn't. Here's just one example of the issue: I have an SMS thread with a mere 27 SMS messages between a friend and myself. When I scroll the up or down the thread, it's embarrassingly choppy (stuttery - don't know what word to use for it). It's extremely unpleasant, and completely ruins the end-user experience.
What annoys me is that Romain Guy closed Android Issue 6914, claiming that it was implemented in ICS. Now ICS is here, and the Android phone is still plagued with the stutters and non-fluidness Android is renowned for. Thankfully someone else has opened a new issue (Android Issue 20278), and hopefully this time Google will FULLY address the issue.
Understandably, it annoys some people more than others. Any user who has experienced a mobile UI that is buttery smooth and fluid (free from 'jitters' and 'stutters'), and where a page or menu sticks to your finger like a magnet when you scroll, would not be able to put up with what Samsung and Google have produced. It's what the kids today would call an 'epic fail'.
---------- Post added at 10:17 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:11 PM ----------
I'm tired of all the mis-information. There's a pattern: Google around about to release a new handset, they don't show the handset scrolling in any of their ads, or if they do, it's super-imposed. A handful of 'mainstream' bloggers praise the handset calling it quick and responsive and lag free. You buy into it, buy the handset, and the basic UI is anything but CONSISTENTLY fluid and responsive.
I stupidly bought the Galaxy Nexus, really wish I hadn't. Here's just one example of the issue: I have an SMS thread with a mere 27 SMS messages between a friend and myself. When I scroll the up or down the thread, it's embarrassingly choppy (stuttery - don't know what word to use for it). It's extremely unpleasant, and completely ruins the end-user experience.
Understandably, it annoys some people more than others. Any user who has experienced a mobile UI that is buttery smooth and fluid (free from 'jitters' and 'stutters'), and where a page or menu sticks to your finger like a magnet when you scroll, would not be able to put up with what Samsung and Google have produced. It's what the kids today would call an 'epic fail'.
scott.deagan said:
I'm tired of all the mis-information. There's a pattern: Google is about to release a new handset, they don't show the handset scrolling in any of their ads, or if they do, it's super-imposed. A handful of 'mainstream' bloggers praise the handset calling it quick and responsive and lag free. You buy into it, buy the handset, and the basic UI is anything but CONSISTENTLY fluid and responsive.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I find this to be untrue, the experience for me has been really good so far. Not perfect but its close. They have come a long way, it'll only get better.
And if you think any of the ads including apple are using true device operation in their advertising you are fooling yourself.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
Can one of you guys post some video footage of said lag? I just ordered a Galaxy Nexus and can still cancel it. Thanks!
Yea there is an iPhone YouTube video performing the exact same steps they show in the commercials and it takes a LOT longer in real life.
Oh well.
G2x - 2.3.7 CM7
Transformer - 3.2 Revolver OC/UV
serialtoon said:
Can one of you guys post some video footage of said lag? I just ordered a Galaxy Nexus and can still cancel it. Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not something worth canceling your order for, it's barely noticeable.
Nexcellent said:
Not something worth canceling your order for, it's barely noticeable.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Its the main reason i left Android. Hoping that one day they will use GPU rendering to assist with UI fluidity. If that is present, its enough for me to cancel an order. Ive been a long time Android enthusiast, but the UI sloppiness is what has kept me from keeping an Android phone for too long.
As a fellow UI lag hater I can tell you it's still there in some places. The problem is, although the base of ICS supports and uses GPU acceleration, 3rd party apps dont yet, and even if you "force" it in the developer settings, it isn't compatible with some apps, and will sometimes cause crashes.
That said, it is ages ahead of Gingerbread, but still not as smooth and fluid as iOS and WP7; not even the GPU accelerated parts.
ICS is a big improvement over gingerbread in terms of fluidity.. but it's not on the same level as iOS and WP 7 yet.
UI lag is one of the things I always hated about Android.. and I feel better about ICS than previous versions.. but they still need to improve it if they want to be on the same level as Apple and Microsoft.
FWIW, I bought the phone having read in several reviews that the phone still suffered (albeit much less) from the usual android-lag. It now compares favorably to iOS and the windows mobile platform, just doesn't match or pass them in fluidity and smoothness.
In my experience, many aspects of the UI are "buttery-smooth" and whatever else reviewers usually say. However, there are still a good amount of moments where lag and hangups are present. The difference is, I'm ok with that. I've accepted the phone for it's plusses, despite it's minuses.
To be clear though, it does lag and hang from time to time. Rebooting once a day helps and I believe forcing GPU rendering under developer settings generally helps.
Sent from my GNex
Dont forget that Andoid does much more in the background and foreground compare to iOS or WP7.
Think multitasking, customization, widgets, etc.
It is understandable Android cannot be as smooth as those iOS and WP7.
And for me, it is more than good enough. I wont ditch Android because it might lag a little bit, because the advantages are much more valuable.
---------- Post added at 11:58 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:48 AM ----------
Here, this just in ... a thorough explanation from Google Developer about Android graphics:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105051985738280261832/posts/2FXDCz8x93s
I copied the text here:
How about some Android graphics true facts?
I get tired of seeing so much misinformation posted and repeated all over the place about how graphics rendering works on Android. Here is some truth:
• Android has always used some hardware accelerated drawing. Since before 1.0 all window compositing to the display has been done with hardware.
• This means that many of the animations you see have always been hardware accelerated: menus being shown, sliding the notification shade, transitions between activities, pop-ups and dialogs showing and hiding, etc.
• Android did historically use software to render the contents of each window. For example in a UI like http://www.simplemobilereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/2-home-menu.png there are four windows: the status bar, the wallpaper, the launcher on top of the wallpaper, and the menu. If one of the windows updates its contents, such as highlighting a menu item, then (prior to 3.0) software is used to draw the new contents of that window; however none of the other windows are redrawn at all, and the re-composition of the windows is done in hardware. Likewise, any movement of the windows such as the menu going up and down is all hardware rendering.
• Looking at drawing inside of a window, you don’t necessarily need to do this in hardware to achieve full 60fps rendering. This depends very much on the number of pixels in your display and the speed of your CPU. For example, Nexus S has no trouble doing 60fps rendering of all the normal stuff you see in the Android UI like scrolling lists on its 800x480 screen. The original Droid however struggled with a similar screen resolution.
• "Full" hardware accelerated drawing within a window was added in Android 3.0. The implementation in Android 4.0 is not any more full than in 3.0. Starting with 3.0, if you set the flag in your app saying that hardware accelerated drawing is allowed, then all drawing to the application’s windows will be done with the GPU. The main change in this regard in Android 4.0 is that now apps that are explicitly targeting 4.0 or higher will have acceleration enabled by default rather than having to put android:handwareAccelerated="true" in their manifest. (And the reason this isn’t just turned on for all existing applications is that some types of drawing operations can’t be supported well in hardware and it also impacts the behavior when an application asks to have a part of its UI updated. Forcing hardware accelerated drawing upon existing apps will break a significant number of them, from subtly to significantly.)
• Hardware accelerated drawing is not all full of win. For example on the PVR drivers of devices like the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, simply starting to use OpenGL in a process eats about 8MB of RAM. Given that our process overhead is about 2MB, this is pretty huge. That RAM takes away from other things, such as the number of background processes that can be kept running, potentially slowing down things like app switching.
• Because of the overhead of OpenGL, one may very well not want to use it for drawing. For example some of the work we are doing to make Android 4.0 run well on the Nexus S has involved turning off hardware accelerated drawing in parts of the UI so we don’t lose 8MB of RAM in the system process, another 8MB in the phone process, another 8MB in the system UI process, etc. Trust me, you won’t notice -- there is just no benefit on that device in using OpenGL to draw something like the status bar, even with fancy animations going on in there.
• Hardware accelerated drawing is not a magical silver bullet to butter-smooth UI. There are many different efforts that have been going on towards this, such as improved scheduling of foreground vs. background threads in 1.6, rewriting the input system in 2.3, strict mode, concurrent garbage collection, loaders, etc. If you want to achieve 60fps, you have 20 milliseconds to handle each frame. This is not a lot of time. Just touching the flash storage system in the thread that is running the UI can in some cases introduce a delay that puts you out of that timing window, especially if you are writing to storage.
• A recent example of the kinds of interesting things that impact UI smoothness: we noticed that ICS on Nexus S was actually less smooth when scrolling through lists than it was on Gingerbread. It turned out that the reason for this was due to subtle changes in timing, so that sometimes in ICS as the app was retrieving touch events and drawing the screen, it would go to get the next event slightly before it was ready, causing it to visibly miss a frame while tracking the finger even though it was drawing the screen at a solid 60fps.
• When people have historically compared web browser scrolling between Android and iOS, most of the differences they are seeing are not due to hardware accelerated drawing. Originally Android went a different route for its web page rendering and made different compromises: the web page is turned in to a display list, which is continually rendered to the screen, instead of using tiles. This has the benefit that scrolling and zooming never have artifacts of tiles that haven’t yet been drawn. Its downside is that as the graphics on the web page get more complicated to draw the frame rate goes down. As of Android 3.0, the browser now uses tiles, so it can maintain a consistent frame rate as you scroll or zoom, with the negative of having artifacts when newly needed tiles can’t be rendered quickly enough. The tiles themselves are rendered in software, which I believe is the case for iOS as well. (And this tile-based approach could be used prior to 3.0 without hardware accelerated drawing; as mentioned previously, the Nexus S CPU can easily draw the tiles to the window at 60fps.)
• Hardware accleration does not magically make drawing performance problems disappear. There is still a limit to how much the GPU can do. A recent interesting example of this is tablets built with Tegra 2 -- that GPU can touch every pixel of a 1024x800 screen about 2.5 times at 60fps. Now consider the Android 3.0 tablet home screen where you are switching to the all apps list: you need to draw the background (1x all pixels), then the layer of shortcuts and widgets (let’s be nice and say this is .5x all pixels), then the black background of all apps (1x all pixels), and the icons and labels of all apps (.5x all pixels). We’ve already blown our per-pixel budget, and we haven’t even composited the separate windows to the final display yet. To get 60fps animation, Android 3.0 and later use a number of tricks. A big one is that it tries to put all windows into overlays instead of having to copy them to the framebuffer with the GPU. In the case here even with that we are still over-budget, but we have another trick: because the wallpaper on Android is in a separate window, we can make this window larger than the screen to hold the entire bitmap. Now, as you scroll, the movement of the background doesn’t require any drawing, just moving its window... and because this window is in an overlay, it doesn’t even need to be composited to the screen with the GPU.
• As device screen resolution goes up, achieving a 60fps UI is closely related to GPU speed and especially the GPU’s memory bus bandwidth. In fact, if you want to get an idea of the performance of a piece of hardware, always pay close attention to the memory bus bandwidth. There are plenty of times where the CPU (especially with those wonderful NEON instructions) can go a lot faster than the memory bus.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you saying iOS has no stutter lag..
My iPad stutters all the time. Its no where close to smooth!
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
There was some suggestion in this thread that any acceleration is currently software based only, and that the hardware acceleration has yet to be enabled.
I don't know how accurate that is, and there doesn't seem to be a definite answer in that thread.
Perhaps in the 4.1 update?
Evostance said:
you saying iOS has no stutter lag..
My iPad stutters all the time. Its no where close to smooth!
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium
Related
I love my Desire and I cannot envisage swapping it for any other phone (except maybe a similar model with a keyboard!). It's obviously one of, if not THE best phone around at the moment.
The only thing I'm slightly envious of is the smooth scrolling of the iPhone. When I scroll through my "All programs" screen it's ever so slightly choppy. Same if I scroll through a long text message conversation. Hardly noticeable unless you put it next to an iPhone.
My question is this: since the Desire has so much horsepower, is it possible to optimise the interface so it's perfectly smooth like iPhone? I don't know anything about development, and suspect this is something that could only be changed by the Android designers, but is there any way a talented dev could do this in a ROM? Anyone care to explain to me yes/no, and why?
Thanks!
I tried out home++ beta yesterday, unfortunately it's not optimised for the desire yet (lots of icons missing) but the app list is silky smooth. I think its poor implementation on gooogle/htc's part rather than the phone being at fault.
Also I'm using handcent for text messaging, its smooth aswell, didnt notice any problems with stock messages app though.
I noticed the choppy scrolling on older Android phones, but I have not had that issue with the Desire yet. It's as smooth scrolling as possible. Even when I put my Desire next to an iPhone 3gs it is fast and smooth. The Desire is even a bit more responsive then the iPhone, which is very noticeable when typing.
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Sent from my HTC Desire
I would say my Desire is definitely fast, but not so smooth. When lists scroll or things open and close on the iPhone it is a definite, measured type of action - it happens at consistent speed from the beginning to the end of the action/animation. No jerking or choppyness at ALL. Whereas on my Desire, despite it's 1gig processor, it doesn't achieve that same effect in all places.
I don't know how else to describe it. It's one of the only places Desire falls down compared to iPhone (oh, apart from the lousy video playback, poor camera recording framerate, cheap touchscreen and poor screen performance in sunlight!).
setspeed said:
I would say my Desire is definitely fast, but not so smooth. When lists scroll or things open and close on the iPhone it is a definite, measured type of action - it happens at consistent speed from the beginning to the end of the action/animation. No jerking or choppyness at ALL. Whereas on my Desire, despite it's 1gig processor, it doesn't achieve that same effect in all places.
I don't know how else to describe it. It's one of the only places Desire falls down compared to iPhone (oh, apart from the lousy video playback, poor camera recording framerate, cheap touchscreen and poor screen performance in sunlight!).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I noticed that too.
Menu scrolling isn't what i'd call choppy but it's just not AS smooth as the iPhone. This is especially apparent near the end of any menu for some reason.
An example of perfect scrolling speed on the Desire would be the settings menu. That is perfect, no choppiness, no lag, just perfect. Things like the app drawer and sometimes even the homescreens appear to drop a few frames from time to time.
I agree with you, is not smooth like iphone, even being faster than it. Maybe google needs to improve the ui of android to optimize it.
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Sent via the XDA Tapatalk App
I think it's rather HTC's fault, cause in the stock Android apps everything is perfectly smooth here. Only the HTC apps sometimes stutter while scrolling.
I'm on an htc hero and notice the same thing. This is something htc needs to release a fix for
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Sent via the XDA Tapatalk App
Check the clock when you scroll back to it - if an earlier time you see it for a microsecond when you scroll
yeah its definitely not anywhere as smooth as the iphone, scrolling through most lists is incredibly choppy, even my years old 1st generation ipod touch is silky smooth (even when scrolling through a list of albums with album artwork on each one)
but as someone has said, it seems to be only htc stuff thats like this (the messages app, the app drawer) other areas such as the settings scroll smoothly.
Not anywhere as smooth? Come on, don't exaggerate. It's almost the same as the iPhone, actually.
If you've ever used a Windows Mobile phone, you know what "not anywhere as smooth" means!
But still, of course, any improvement is welcomed...
shaundalglish said:
If you've ever used a Windows Mobile phone, you know what "not anywhere as smooth" means!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
LMAO!!!!
+1
yeah, but using live wallpapers will definitely slowdown the scrolling in the homescreen. It's not much, but noticable. Without using live wallpapers, the scrolling is as smooth as it should be.
iphone scrolls page to page, of course this is smoother. Iphone can't handle scrolling over the entire page/apps.
And an Iphone is a dump of icons, doesnt sound like a smartphone to me
Remember the iPhone screen resolution is only 480x320 as well, significantly less than the Desire. Much less screen estate to move around.
Yep, +1
I mainly see this when scrolling to the bottom of the All Program menu.
There are others with this too:
URL blocked by XDA - Search for "lag program menu htc desire" another post in XDA by other users
I emailed HTC about the small amount of lag but they said to return my phone for an exchange! Slightly unnecessary.
Hopefully more people post their lag issues here, HTC see it and do something about it for their 2.2 release.
I've tried various things to try and resolve - made sure no other programs are running, no live wallpapers, no wallpaper at all
Its not a massive problem, but there is no noticeable lag in the stock 2.1 Android Apps drawer - so we know it shouldnt be an issue.
It does stutter a bit done it on all android phones i had from htc, if you use Helixlauncher 2 though that has a much nicer scroll menu and its as smooth as butter, i would love if they could add this style into the Sense system as it looks far better.
iPhone sucks man, if you like it why don't you buy one and you'll have your A LA iPhone smooth scrolling... Jeez, i don't understand soome people.... You have a Desire and still wanting an iPhone... SUCKS!
Using MCR (Modaco Custom Rom) here, without SenseUI. Then decided to install ADWLauncher, and to be honest the scrolling on the main screen/app drawer is super smooth now. So I'd say that this probably is HTC's 'bad' programming on the SenseUI.
phunkycow said:
Using MCR (Modaco Custom Rom) here, without SenseUI. Then decided to install ADWLauncher, and to be honest the scrolling on the main screen/app drawer is super smooth now. So I'd say that this probably is HTC's 'bad' programming on the SenseUI.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
that looks cool, I think SensUI is starting to get useless since google implemented many Sense-features into standard android too. The only thing that keeps me having SenseUI is the HTC-clock. I don't like the standard Android-clock widgets. Other than that, I think Sense is starting to get more and more useless. Last year, with android 1.5, Sense was pretty usable.
Hey,
I'm considering WP7 and one thing that really concerns me is the apparently painfully slow load times associated with running third party apps.
I've seen reviewers commenting on the huge difference between first and third party software on WP7, but I haven't been able to experience it in the stores because most phones there aren't connected to marketplace.
Anyway, YouTube videos of the Facebook app show incredibly jagged scrolling and a looong load time. This directly contrasts the amazingly smooth and quick UI.
Have you guys experienced this disconnect between first and third party? Are load times really that bad? As I'm switching from an Android device most things load instantaneously, so it'd be a shame to switch to something slow.
Opinions would be greatly valued.
Thanks heaps
yeah, I put alot of it down to devs trying to rush things out the door to get into the market place
That and the type of memory storage used. I personally would recommend one of the samsung or lg phones as their use of NAND storage really helps load times on apps. In the end though, it doesn't make a huge difference, and really like others have said, if devs take the time, it shouldn't take an app too long to load.
Believe me when I say it's not down to the phones/os, but rather hurried coding on the dev's side of things. In general though, everything is crazily fast, minus the few poorly coded apps that I tend to avoid anyway
Alex
Yeah it really comes down to apps on an individual basis. My RSS Reader and Weather Channel apps load fast, but facebook takes about 10-15 seconds to completely load everything. Shazam is pretty fast too but the "painfully long" load times are going to be graphic intensive 3D games. Those can take a minute to get from tapping the icon to actually playing.
Not Slow
jennan88 said:
Hey,
I'm considering WP7 and one thing that really concerns me is the apparently painfully slow load times associated with running third party apps.
I've seen reviewers commenting on the huge difference between first and third party software on WP7, but I haven't been able to experience it in the stores because most phones there aren't connected to marketplace.
Anyway, YouTube videos of the Facebook app show incredibly jagged scrolling and a looong load time. This directly contrasts the amazingly smooth and quick UI.
Have you guys experienced this disconnect between first and third party? Are load times really that bad? As I'm switching from an Android device most things load instantaneously, so it'd be a shame to switch to something slow.
Opinions would be greatly valued.
Thanks heaps
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Had my Focus since Nov 8. All of my apps have installed very quickly via Zune and Marketplace.
They all load very quickly, as well - MUCH faster than any app on my TP2. Almost all of them have been updated by the devs, though, since thier releases.
I haven't had the same sort of experience to be honest. In terms of loading times everything seems to be fine as far as the apps I've tried. I've heard this stuff as well but it just hasn't been true in my experience.
Yes, I am working on a very intensive 2D game with advanced AIs and animations that will eventually go multi-player after socket support and my startup time is about 2-3 seconds, even with a boatload of sprites and a BIG uncompressed wave file. In addition, it runs absolutely smoothly, as I programmed it in XNA, and I was glad to see that the phone ran my code FAR better than the PC emulator (to the point of perfection).
The storage speed is not THAT bad on MicroSDs. It is bad, compared to other things, but horrible initializations and bad code will simply result in long startup times. I haven't even cleaned my code up yet and I am doing it with a partner, so it needs a lot of cleaning up.
Regardless, devs also need to realize that they cannot continue to re-allocate continuously like they do on PCs, as the bytecode interpreter does a clean-up of all the memory on the phone whenever new space is needed. It is sad that developers can't get these things through their thick skulls.
Honestly, I don't know why these programs have such long startup times. I can imagine with a MicroSD and a 3D game with lots of data to load, like Assassin's Creed, there could be a long load, but for some reason simple apps like Facebook and such aren't living up to even mediocre load and run speeds.
water911 said:
Yes, I am working on a very intensive 2D game with advanced AIs and animations that will eventually go multi-player after socket support and my startup time is about 2-3 seconds, even with a boatload of sprites and a BIG uncompressed wave file. In addition, it runs absolutely smoothly, as I programmed it in XNA, and I was glad to see that the phone ran my code FAR better than the PC emulator (to the point of perfection).
The storage speed is not THAT bad on MicroSDs. It is bad, compared to other things, but horrible initializations and bad code will simply result in long startup times. I haven't even cleaned my code up yet and I am doing it with a partner, so it needs a lot of cleaning up.
Regardless, devs also need to realize that they cannot continue to re-allocate continuously like they do on PCs, as the bytecode interpreter does a clean-up of all the memory on the phone whenever new space is needed. It is sad that developers can't get these things through their thick skulls.
Honestly, I don't know why these programs have such long startup times. I can imagine with a MicroSD and a 3D game with lots of data to load, like Assassin's Creed, there could be a long load, but for some reason simple apps like Facebook and such aren't living up to even mediocre load and run speeds.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, my application also loads completely in about 2 seconds, and in general, most of the apps I have used have been pretty quick. Facebook is probably the biggest exception.
Agree with everyone else, it's due to the devs not knowing what they are doing - which in turn is down to the platform still being new (lots of devs still do not have a device and use only the emulator for testing). I've seen vast improvekents as apps have been updated though, so wouldnt worry about it.
In regards to what some people have been saying about Nand vs MicroSD, is there actually that big of a difference?
I'm tossing up between Trophy, HD7 or Omnia 7, so I'd like to know if I'm shooting myself in the foot by buying HTC because I prefer LCD to AMOLED
jennan88 said:
Hey,
I'm considering WP7 and one thing that really concerns me is the apparently painfully slow load times associated with running third party apps.
I've seen reviewers commenting on the huge difference between first and third party software on WP7, but I haven't been able to experience it in the stores because most phones there aren't connected to marketplace.
Anyway, YouTube videos of the Facebook app show incredibly jagged scrolling and a looong load time. This directly contrasts the amazingly smooth and quick UI.
Have you guys experienced this disconnect between first and third party? Are load times really that bad? As I'm switching from an Android device most things load instantaneously, so it'd be a shame to switch to something slow.
Opinions would be greatly valued.
Thanks heaps
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
from my experience, they aren't slow to load (except for games), but they are very slow to resume. If you try to navigate back to one using the back button, or if your screen locks while a third party app is open, it takes quite a while for the app to "resume" to where you left off
This a main concern of mine. Apps that would run smoothly on Android like Facebook, IMDB, Last.fm, etc. run slow as molasses on WP7. Hopefully MS starts putting these devs in order or else I'm walking.
zukа said:
In regards to what some people have been saying about Nand vs MicroSD, is there actually that big of a difference?
I'm tossing up between Trophy, HD7 or Omnia 7, so I'd like to know if I'm shooting myself in the foot by buying HTC because I prefer LCD to AMOLED
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Out of curiosity, why do you prefer LCD over AMOLED?
People talk about how high contrast AMOLED is, and that's true - it is. But I find it's oversaturated to a point where nothing looks natural - a photo that displays perfectly well on LCD will look like a horribly photoshopped nightmare on AMOLED.
The main problem for me, though, is color banding.
http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2010/11/17/the-problem-with-super-amoled-screens-nasty-color-banding/
I can't stand it
I am sure that it is third party most of the time, Weave (the RSS reader that I use) actually loads up rather quickly and it just went through an update a couple days ago. The update also made the resume time pretty quickly.
Moral of the short story, it depends on the developer most of the time. The quick apps are usually the ones that have been updated recently while the slow ones, haven't. Not the OS problem.
Although, games sometimes load up rather slow based on my experience. Hoping the update improves load times for games by a large margin.
manny84 said:
This a main concern of mine. Apps that would run smoothly on Android like Facebook, IMDB, Last.fm, etc. run slow as molasses on WP7. Hopefully MS starts putting these devs in order or else I'm walking.
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Out of those three apps, the only one running slow is Facebook - which is completely due to the way it's written.
In general, apps are fairly fast both to load and resume now (recently released or updated ones that is). Also, the "January" update comes with memory optimization which further shortens load times (although mostly for games).
Just my $0.02, but coming from a Touch Pro 2 ALL the load times seem fast, even Facebook and games. I also have an iPod Touch 4G and my WP7 load times are on par with that.
Forgive me if this has been posted elsewhere but I couldnt find it.
Q1. Has anyone experienced clicking the Home button from another app or from the app drawer and seeing just the wallpaper for a few moments until the home screen widgets, folder and shortcuts are redrawn?
Q2. Also, Has anyone noticed lag when scrolling between home screens if a Live Wallpaper is used? I notice some live wallpapers make scrolling worse than some others.
If this has been posted, let me know?
Yes to Q1.
Also had lock up in gallery with a spinning circle and nothing happening.
Yes to Q2. All of the live wallpapers except one cause lag. Quite disappointing.
Yes I've noticed this which is quite disappointing considering everything is meant to be GPU accelerated and butter smooth in an iPhone-esque manner, general navigation doesn't seem any different to my HD2. Hopefully software updates can overcome these issues.
It's good to know I don't have a faulty handset but its a shame that its not as smooth as the early reviews lead me to believe (although it is very smooth once in the app drawer and other places).
Does anyone know any impressive Live Wallpapers that have little or no detrimental effect on Home Screen lag? I find Koi Free quite impressive without causing much noticeable lag (but its a bit old hat now, so I'd like something different).
Yeah I find it very hard to work out how The Verge could've given it such a high score, software in particular, and called it "blazing fast".
It's good, but it doesn't feel very fast to me.
I'm very disappointed by the live wallpaper lag, i thought ICS completely diminished any lag in the OS
all the live wallpapers make the scrolling look historic except for the one: PHASE BEAM
that one is as smooth as a picture wallpaper
anyone else? hopefully its easily fixable in a future general maintenece OTA or some custom roms
if you guys are using third party wallpapers then they probably were never updated to enable the hardware exceleration.
if your using the built in, then thats totally unacceptable IMO and is very upsetting since i was looking forward to having a device that will actually be able to run LWPs.
neok44 said:
if you guys are using third party wallpapers then they probably were never updated to enable the hardware exceleration.
if your using the built in, then thats totally unacceptable IMO and is very upsetting since i was looking forward to having a device that will actually be able to run LWPs.
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I have tryed the ones that came with with phone and sadly it is not smooth also.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
It feels like my Sensation with a 3rd party launcher. =(
Still love the phone but this wasn't supposed to happen.
i read in the endaget review that not all live wallpapers are HW accelerated - as of right now only "Phase Beam" (the default) one is.
Which is why you should notice theres no lag on the Phase Beam Live wallpaper (at least not for me), whereas stuff like "Nexus" live wallpaper will seem to lag
This is the paragraph i read:
"Not all the live wallpapers are fully optimized (for example, Phase Beam is, but Water isn't). Developers have to add a single line of code to their apps to take advantage of 2D hardware acceleration -- you're able to enable this as the default for all apps by checking "Force GPU rendering" in the Developer Options."
So apparently its just one line of code that devs need to add in for their apps - granted, these are GOOGLE wallpapers so im not sure why they just didnt add it in themselves.
But this also adds to the Developer options of "Force 2D rendering" - although im not sure if this will help the unoptimized live wallpaper lag
just my 2cents
1. Yes
2. Yes
I also sometimes get lag when launching the app drawer.
Scrolling widgets also seems so stutter slightly as well.
Glad to know its not just my handset, but dissapointed as well. My GS2 was buttery smooth everywhere
Well, this is disappointing. It's a pretty basic part of the user experience, one that you'd think Google would spend a lot of time on. My GS1 running 2.3.4 suffers from refilling the launcher when I return to the home screen. I was hoping the SGN with ICS would end that experience. You guys running a lot of apps? Maybe there's something in common between those affected that isn't experienced by everyone. Will be watching this thread.
Noticed it straight after first boot, amount of apps has nothing to do with it, at least for me.
Anyone tried different launchers. Different launchers play a big role in Android user experience and smoothness. I don't think any custom launcher has hardware acceleration enabled yet, but it would be worth a shot.
It is also unacceptable that the default stock Live Wallpapers from Google weren't updated to utilize the hardware acceleration. HWA is the main feature of ICS that everyone was waiting for. EVERYTHING on the Galaxy Nexus should be setup for HWA. No excuses.
On a side note, all of my phones lagged a little when using LWPs. Even my fast G2x. The SGS2 had hardware acceleration enabled... so it could just be the launcher.
adw launcher FTW.
enable 2d doesnt fix it
has this been opened as an issue in the google aosp page
Hmm. This reminds me of the first time I took my Nexus S out of the box..
Just wait for some custom roms and such, google are apparantly horrible at optimizing performance.
I have a feeling that using GPU acceleration to certain wallpapers would cause the phone to become unstable or something, like how forcing GPU acceleration has been reported to cause instability. Google probably disabled it while they quietly work on the issue.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
perhaps
but the one live wallpaper works WONDERFULLY
I have a live wallpaper on, but it still shouldnt be that laggy. My sensation could handle a lot that was thrown at it without being all that laggy. Even with live wallpaper off it's a little laggy. Keyboard in landscape mode? Laggy. Swipe from one home screen to another? Laggy.
Any fix for this!? I just can't wait until CM9 now to fix all this stuff!
I don't know man. I came from a Sensation (running CyanogenMod 7) and the Nexus blows it out of the water in terms of speed and smoothness...and the Sensation was pretty ****in' fast running stock Android.
Well I still think my Nexus is better. I love it to death! But the sudden lag kind of kills it. I don't know what the deal is either.
I read some of the live wallpapers are laggy but not all of them
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
Hi monkey hung
I too noticed some laggyness to begin with the Live Wallpaper turned on. Sounds like your last phone was an iPhone 4?
I've been playing around with settings and have a few concepts on what might be going on:
1. First of all, under: Settings > Developer Options, there is a setting called "force GPU rendering". I haven't tried this with the Live Wallpaper on yet, but perhaps this might help the 2D UI laggyness? Let me know what you find.
2. Disable your Live Wallpaper, I did, it saved battery life and things are much snappier.
3. Close your unused apps. I know ICS is meant to deal with old apps much better now, however, I find my Galaxy Nexus to be snappier when I close down the 30 odd applications I have left in a suspended state. It doesn't take long to swipe them off from the home screen using the right "Application" touch button down the right hand corner of the screen.
4. I've noticed that dragging my finger along the screen does not give the same smooth/matte feeling of the iPhone 4. As a matter of fact, it almost jitters/vibrates across the contour glass. If I touch with a less contact force, I tend to find the performance of touch screen to be smooth, rather when I apply more force it tends to jump across the surface of the screen creating a jagged touch slide. I've also noticed the higher sensitivity of the accelerometer. If you have a very steady hand you can see the extra performance, if you hand is un-steady, it almost looks worse than the previous phone, but in reality, it was simply my inability to hold the device in one spot that gave the poor performance, really this a reflection on how responsive the phone is to my dodgy movements.
Thanks but I had HTC Sensation with CM7. I think you must have mistaken when I made topic about my girl friend having an iPhone 4 haha
berglh said:
1. First of all, under: Settings > Developer Options, there is a setting called "force GPU rendering". I haven't tried this with the Live Wallpaper on yet, but perhaps this might help the 2D UI laggyness? Let me know what you find.
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please don't go around suggesting people to do this. They are developer options for a reason.
Force GPU Rendering is only likely to introduce bugs as some apps don't handle it well. Wait for the developers themselves to enable GPU rendering. In addition, GPU rendering adds extra memory overhead to the app (8MB vs 2MB).
By suggesting this, you only end up with people who post back at the forum complaining that App X or App Y no longer works.
berglh said:
Close your unused apps. I know ICS is meant to deal with old apps much better now, however, I find my Galaxy Nexus to be snappier when I close down the 30 odd applications I have left in a suspended state. It doesn't take long to swipe them off from the home screen using the right "Application" touch button down the right hand corner of the screen.
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This doesn't "close" anything. It just removed the application from your app switching list. FYI.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
I agree!
Im running an Unlocked version on tmobile. Its very laggy. It takes 2 seconds for screen to rotate to landscape and back, and overall its just slow. Even the data keeps fading from hspa to 3g Im beginning to fall in love with its for its beauty but performance wise my galaxy s2 was way faster and smoother. Is an update going to address this? Any input would be appreciated.
davidbart said:
Im running an Unlocked version on tmobile. Its very laggy. It takes 2 seconds for screen to rotate to landscape and back, and overall its just slow. Even the data keeps fading from hspa to 3g Im beginning to fall in love with its for its beauty but performance wise my galaxy s2 was way faster and smoother. Is an update going to address this? Any input would be appreciated.
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The rotation delay is intentional.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium
I'm experiencing the same thing you are but the delay is intentional. If my screen was rotating all the time I would get really annoyed!
Also, the switching between 3G and 4G is intentional. 3G uses less battery... it kicks over to 4G when you're actually using the data connection.
My galaxy nexus is almost perfectly responsive. It lags on occasion, but I find it to be much smoother and more responsive overall than just about any other android device I've used. (including the galaxy S II)
davidbart said:
Im running an Unlocked version on tmobile. Its very laggy. It takes 2 seconds for screen to rotate to landscape and back, and overall its just slow. Even the data keeps fading from hspa to 3g Im beginning to fall in love with its for its beauty but performance wise my galaxy s2 was way faster and smoother. Is an update going to address this? Any input would be appreciated.
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Click to collapse
If your phone is laggy, then it's probably something on it you're running that isn't optimized for ICS. My phone runs just fine and easily outclasses any other phone I've used (and I've used pretty much every high end gsm phone that has come out here in the states). FYI your data isn't "fading from hspa to 3g", the phone idles on UMTS and when it's transmitting data it goes to hspa. This is very normal. Do a search on it if you want to know more.
kwazi said:
please don't go around suggesting people to do this. They are developer options for a reason.
Force GPU Rendering is only likely to introduce bugs as some apps don't handle it well. Wait for the developers themselves to enable GPU rendering. In addition, GPU rendering adds extra memory overhead to the app (8MB vs 2MB).
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Wow, we are really going to miss that 6 MB with the 1 GB available to the GN. My last phone was an Xperia X10 with only 384 MB of RAM, yes it was chuggy, but comparatively this amount of allocation is small and the feature seems to work well thsu far. I hardly think they are going to miss it, but your point on the Development Settings is valid to a certain degree.
kwazi said:
By suggesting this, you only end up with people who post back at the forum complaining that App X or App Y no longer works.
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I would rebut this by saying that most of my paid apps either don't work at all or don't work correctly due to the fact I'm running Ice Cream Sandwich prior to turning this option on on my own phone. There are many other reasons that apps are going to fail, particularly on Android. In retrospect, a disclaimer to this effect might have been appropriate considering the ramifications of the advice, and I direct this at hung monkey:
If you are not smart enough to draw the correlation between enabling the 2D acceleration and most of your apps suddenly not working, then you should probably not turn it on.
I have turned it on, it fixed the laggyness of the default Live Wallpaper, I haven't tested how much it saps the battery yet. Turning it on has only resulted in an improvement to my phone thus far.
davidbart said:
Im running an Unlocked version on tmobile. Its very laggy. It takes 2 seconds for screen to rotate to landscape and back, and overall its just slow. Even the data keeps fading from hspa to 3g Im beginning to fall in love with its for its beauty but performance wise my galaxy s2 was way faster and smoother. Is an update going to address this? Any input would be appreciated.
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From what I read about your "laggy" screen rotate. That is intended so it doesn't accidentally change orientations.
matt2053 said:
This doesn't "close" anything. It just removed the application from your app switching list. FYI.
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Don't be so sure that it doesn't. For example, if I load a relatively heavy game in to memory, such as Pocket Legends or NFS Shift, and I multitask, the app is suspended. I can use the app selection menu to resume that app, and quite quickly I might ad, much faster than the time it takes for the game to load in memory.
If I then kill it with the Task Switcher, it then has to load from the start, like the suspended session was terminated when I removed it from this list. Even Google themselves said that if you like to manage your apps, then this is how you can end them, but ICS will do a good job of managing it for you anyway, the controls are there if you want them.
This behavior does not match your allegation, would you please care to shed some light?
Cheers!
I concur with the Op - the phone by comparison with my Samsung Galaxy S2, it does seem a bit laggy when scrolling between screens - I have everything setup exactly the same way as on the SGS2.
I'm not technical but I can only hope that these reasons of laggyness come down to the apps,etc. haven't been optimised for ICS yet?
When scrolling up and down the twitter, facebook or google reader apps, it just isnt as smooth as the Galaxy S2 or even the Galaxy S1.
Otherwise, very beautiful UI.
Live wallpapers need to die a horrible death. Worst Android feature ever.
To the OP, use a normal wallpaper instead and you'll see an improvement in the overall speed of the UI.
case0 said:
Live wallpapers need to die a horrible death. Worst Android feature ever.
To the OP, use a normal wallpaper instead and you'll see an improvement in the overall speed of the UI.
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I agree! This phone lags really bad with all the live wallpapers except for the Phase Beam one. TURN THEM OFF and its by far the smoothest phone.....lol
I use wp clock and havent noticed any lag versus having it off....
I was reading on reddit a while ago some info on Android scroll/responsiveness lag, and that it was partly an Android issue with the way it was coded, but that developers could implement a bunch of things to get around it, but I'm unable to find that thread again. They mentioned that it was inherent to the way Android was built (regardless of it being Java), but I couldn't tell if it's just inefficiencies or prioritization issues (UI vs background processes).
Is this really still an issue? I read about Project Butter but it seems to be a bunch of workarounds rather than real fixes; I want to start developing but not have to jump through a hundred hoops just to get smooth scrolling. It seems fixes could be implemented with Android to A) make things more efficient such as have most-efficient default handling for UI/scrolling, and B) prioritize user interaction over background processes.
I've owned an original Droid (ran crappy), a Droid RAZR (ran much better but still had scroll stutter and eventually ran so slow even with minimal apps on it I upgraded), and now a Moto X (2013, or X1 I call it), and since playing with a Nexus 4 (almost same exact processor), I've noticed how smooth the Nexus 4 runs (almost like an iPhone) and how jittery scrolling is on the Moto X. I'm on Verizon, and I don't know if the stuttering is because of Motorola and/or Verizon, or the hardware, or Google.
Can someone explain or point me to a page that shows how to best optimize list views or the UI to best prevent stuttering and lagginess? I really think Google should have nipped this in the bud years ago; there's no reason UI should be fighting with background processes and lazy-loading and loading/transition efficiencies shouldn't be baked in to begin with.