I got a cheap no-brand Chinese smartphone. We shall gloss over the wisdom of this purchase, but suffice it to say it turns out it isn't the MTK6582 quadcore with a gig of RAM that was promised. A quick peek in the options revealed a Spreadtrum SC8825 dualcore and 512 megs of RAM running 4.0.3 ICS. This was confirmed by other sources. Long story short I got another phone that's now my main one, but the Chinese one was so cheap that I took the loss as a life lesson and didn't even bother sending it back to Hong Kong, figuring a backup crappy phone is better than no backup at all.
I therefore decided to decrapify the cheapie as much as possible. I found a mention in dx's forum of a newer, better ROM for it with less crap, so I downloaded it and flashed it. Proving that I apparently can't make a good decision about this thing at all, what I now have is a phone whose settings show a "MT6582" CPU that reports itself as having four cores, plus a ludicrous 1.5GB of RAM and running Android 4.2.2. Weird thing is, the apps do in fact see this - for instance, Antutu does report four cores and all that RAM, and other benchmark apps do as well - though two of the cores are mysteriously always inactive. I know that the CPU and RAM are wrong, and I suspect the Android version is faked as well. I suspect this is what's causing some apps to misbehave; they expect specs that aren't there, and freak out and crash as a result.
Thing is, because it was showing the correct specs before the ROM flash, I know for a fact that whatever fakery is going on is exclusively at a software level. I don't know if Android does any checking on the hardware or if it just displays what the ROM's reporting, but either the checks are being bypassed or the ROM is simply reporting the wrong data.
Edit: tried cat /proc/cpuinfo in adb and got this, which shows the fakery to extend there as well.
Which brings the question: having rooted the phone and being able to access it via adb, where in the system partition do I go looking for the fakery so as to get rid of it and have, at least, a phone that reports itself as what it actually is?
Bumpy bump.
Related
First of all Im new to the forum so hello lol
I have a question about qualcomm...I know that the scorpion processor in the next generation 45 nm chip but what I dont understand is why is it clocked at 800mhz?
The made it such a big deal crossing the 1ghz mark and I would assume that they would never look back. I might not have my facts straight but dosent the 45 nm run clock-cycles just like a 65 nm but more efficiently in respect of battery consumption.
It looks as if they wanted to get in on the low-end Android market share. As for the G2 which I love, my friend ran quadrant pro infront of me and it shows the cpu was scored what looked like 20% lower than the nexus one at 2.2 (my guess from looking at it) but of coarse the gpu trashed the nexus one.
I saw a interview on engadget about a week ago about googles executive that said soon there will be a clear distinction or line between low end Android and high end Android devices. I wonder if HTC is in contact with google about future updates in order to release devices adequate enough to run them or are they just blindly releasing high build quality devices lol
Sorry about the long post but I had come up with a few questions that I didn't want to ask anywhere else.
Thanks.
Wait until our geniuses figure out root then you can happily run it a 1 Ghz+. If you look at the spec scheets for the MSM7230 then you will see it's rated for speeds 800-1000. Higher speeds=lower battery life, so the reasons for having it clocked lower are very practical. My G2 can average 1600-1650 on quadrant, so I don't think it's that bad.
azzeh3 said:
First of all Im new to the forum so hello lol
I have a question about qualcomm...I know that the scorpion processor in the next generation 45 nm chip but what I dont understand is why is it clocked at 800mhz?
The made it such a big deal crossing the 1ghz mark and I would assume that they would never look back. I might not have my facts straight but dosent the 45 nm run clock-cycles just like a 65 nm but more efficiently in respect of battery consumption.
It looks as if they wanted to get in on the low-end Android market share. As for the G2 which I love, my friend ran quadrant pro infront of me and it shows the cpu was scored what looked like 20% lower than the nexus one at 2.2 (my guess from looking at it) but of coarse the gpu trashed the nexus one.
I saw a interview on engadget about a week ago about googles executive that said soon there will be a clear distinction or line between low end Android and high end Android devices. I wonder if HTC is in contact with google about future updates in order to release devices adequate enough to run them or are they just blindly releasing high build quality devices lol
Sorry about the long post but I had come up with a few questions that I didn't want to ask anywhere else.
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
MHz is a misleading statistic to judge performance by. A 1GHz processor is not guaranteed to be faster than an 800MHz one. What is always true, though, is that a given processor running at 1GHz will take more energy than the same processor running at 800MHz. Because these new processors are so fast, even at 800MHz, they are competitive or even faster than any other phone on the market today. However by clocking them a bit slower, they also have quite serviceable battery life.
In daily use, it is unlikely that you would notice much difference between 800MHz and 1GHz with this cpu. They are both plenty fast, and most of the time the CPU will be waiting for you, not the other way around. However if it were clocked at 1GHz, you would immediately see a shorter battery life, so to my mind the sacrifice is well worth it.
As far as any fears that this might be a "low end phone", make no mistake, this is the premiere Android phone on the market right now. The Droid 2 may have a higher profile, but it is slower, has a slower network, and uses a non-standard GUI (not to mention a whole lot more expensive when you factor in the price of the service). No phone will have every possible feature that people want, but as far as raw capabilities go, there is no better phone on the market today as far as I can see.
Those seem to be very valid points and thanks for the input..
One other thing when exactly do you need 1ghz of processing speed?? I mean back in the day the macbook air used a 1.5 ghz processor..
Also where dose the ram come into play?
azzeh3 said:
Those seem to be very valid points and thanks for the input..
One other thing when exactly do you need 1ghz of processing speed?? I mean back in the day the macbook air used a 1.5 ghz processor..
Also where dose the ram come into play?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
RAM is a far bigger determiner of performance on a day-to-day basis than processor speed, at least to a point. You could have a 10GHz computer, but if you only had 64k of RAM it would crawl along miserably slow.
In either case, there is a point of diminishing returns, though as applications become more demanding that point gets higher and higher. I remember selling Mac's back in the early-mid 90's and telling eople, don't worry, 16Megs of RAM (a huge amount back then when the standard was 4MB) would handle anything they could throw at it. Little did I know that just 15 years later I would have 500x that much in my desktop and 32x as much in my cell phone!
I am by no means a Andoid systems expert, but from what I have read there is not much benefit of having more than 512MB of RAM with the current versions of the Android OS. I would have preferred that they included 1GB of RAM just for a future growth path, but I can understand why they didn't. Each of these features costs money, so you have to draw the line someplace, you can't included every feature people may ask for in every phone.
Your right lol How will the big companies make any money if they give you everything you wanted....
I've never kept a phone for more than 8 months because of updated stats but lately there is a boom in technology so its going to be more like 4 months now hahaha
Currently running: CM 10.1, build 0319 stock kernel and cpu settings.
TL;DR - The Hercules and its 1GB RAM suddenly seem like it can't multi-task like it once could. However maybe its app developers just heinously demanding more resources so their apps can look amazingly fluid because they forcefully killed everything else in the back?
What's the deal?
I remember a time in yesteryear yonder, whence I would have 5-7 apps running in the back without breaking nary a sweat. SO WHAT THE HELL happened Android? That was back on Touchwiz and Gingerbread!
Today I can't have utorrent and chrome open simultaneously. TWO apps. For instance if I've utorrent downloading, ill switch to Chrome (recent apps switch; not open) and maybe answer a Whatsapp immediately after; utorrent will undoubtedly be killed and must be reactivated.
Now I understand that chrome and utorrent are naturally RAM heavy applications, but it helps further my point. Why are apps being killed so quickly today? Was it Touchwiz that was great at ram management? Was it gingerbread? Or have apps been slowly updating over the last two years and demanding more allocation of RAM from the get go so that everything else gets forcefully killed? I remember when the Hercules was announced and all the reviewers claimed 1GB was such a stupid amount of overkill RAM and we'll never see it taxed. Now that 2GB has become the standard with the introduction of the GS3, I theorize app devs are being more liberal in demanding resources from devices without giving too much consideration for older models. So apps are killed more frequently to make room to the foreground.
So why do you care?
-The stock stopwatch app will die if you run a few more apps afterwards. This is just derp. Really, try this yourself. Can you imagine your morning alarm was silently force killed because you were reading a website before bedtime?
-Some audio apps can be killed as well. ie Doggcatcher. Audio actually stops if certain conditions of apps are opened after Doggcatcher. Derp.
-Device slows to a complete crawl during the course of a day. I don't believe I've ever owned a device (clamshell Sammy, Blackberry or Android) that didn't exhibit facepalm-worthy memory leak issues. If Android was designed to have its RAM filled, why do slowdowns exist?
-Incoming phone calls suffer lag when re-acquiring attention. This seems bizarre because in About > System you can see the Hercules indicates it has 768MB RAM, indicating a quarter is reserved for system apps. Which means it shouldn't really have this problem.
-Application settings requesting 'Persistent Notifications' to ensure app foreground attention. Apps like Tasker, utorrent, Battery Guru request this to remain alive. Is this the solution now? And is this 100% immune if system requires the resources?
-Apps take longer to open. I can't quite pinpoint this. Just a feeling.
Alright man relax, the Galaxy S4 and HTC One come packing with 2GB
Upgrading to a new flagship doesn't seem to be the solution to stifle this issue. App developers are excellent at what they do and naturally want their product to look its best with the resources available to it. With 3D games exhibiting the capabilities of a Snapdragon 600 and Tegra 4, where's the incentive to tell either to slow down? This same logic can be directly applied to the smartphone spec war and the recurring battery life bottleneck story.
Excellent read here from Gizmodo:
http://gizmodo.com/5992917/battery-life-is-the-only-spec-that-matters
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So what's your point?
I'm not sure I have one. I'm just observing whats happening. We are finally actually seeing applications that are pushing our hardware to its limits. While 1GB of onboard RAM used to be a drool inducing spec, 2GB is not really a huge leap considering the jump the Snapdragon S3 made to the S4, S4 Pro and now the 600 in magnitudes of processing power. 2GB would certainly be astronomical, if it took a trip back in time and only had to run 2011 apps. I guess my point is: I'm throwing a tantrum that the Hercules is showing its age, even if it's not its fault.
Forgive my rambling and lack of proof-reading. At work.
mettleh3d said:
Currently running: CM 10.1, build 0319 stock kernel and cpu settings.
TL;DR - The Hercules and its 1GB RAM suddenly seem like it can't multi-task like it once could. However maybe its app developers just heinously demanding more resources so their apps can look amazingly fluid because they forcefully killed everything else in the back?
What's the deal?
I remember a time in yesteryear yonder, whence I would have 5-7 apps running in the back without breaking nary a sweat. SO WHAT THE HELL happened Android? That was back on Touchwiz and Gingerbread!
Today I can't have utorrent and chrome open simultaneously. TWO apps. For instance if I've utorrent downloading, ill switch to Chrome (recent apps switch; not open) and maybe answer a Whatsapp immediately after; utorrent will undoubtedly be killed and must be reactivated.
Now I understand that chrome and utorrent are naturally RAM heavy applications, but it helps further my point. Why are apps being killed so quickly today? Was it Touchwiz that was great at ram management? Was it gingerbread? Or have apps been slowly updating over the last two years and demanding more allocation of RAM from the get go so that everything else gets forcefully killed? I remember when the Hercules was announced and all the reviewers claimed 1GB was such a stupid amount of overkill RAM and we'll never see it taxed. Now that 2GB has become the standard with the introduction of the GS3, I theorize app devs are being more liberal in demanding resources from devices without giving too much consideration for older models. So apps are killed more frequently to make room to the foreground.
So why do you care?
-The stock stopwatch app will die if you run a few more apps afterwards. This is just derp. Really, try this yourself. Can you imagine your morning alarm was silently force killed because you were reading a website before bedtime?
-Some audio apps can be killed as well. ie Doggcatcher. Audio actually stops if certain conditions of apps are opened after Doggcatcher. Derp.
-Device slows to a complete crawl during the course of a day. I don't believe I've ever owned a device (clamshell Sammy, Blackberry or Android) that didn't exhibit facepalm-worthy memory leak issues. If Android was designed to have its RAM filled, why do slowdowns exist?
-Incoming phone calls suffer lag when re-acquiring attention. This seems bizarre because in About > System you can see the Hercules indicates it has 768MB RAM, indicating a quarter is reserved for system apps. Which means it shouldn't really have this problem.
-Application settings requesting 'Persistent Notifications' to ensure app foreground attention. Apps like Tasker, utorrent, Battery Guru request this to remain alive. Is this the solution now? And is this 100% immune if system requires the resources?
-Apps take longer to open. I can't quite pinpoint this. Just a feeling.
Alright man relax, the Galaxy S4 and HTC One come packing with 2GB
Upgrading to a new flagship doesn't seem to be the solution to stifle this issue. App developers are excellent at what they do and naturally want their product to look its best with the resources available to it. With 3D games exhibiting the capabilities of a Snapdragon 600 and Tegra 4, where's the incentive to tell either to slow down? This same logic can be directly applied to the smartphone spec war and the recurring battery life bottleneck story.
Excellent read here from Gizmodo:
So what's your point?
I'm not sure I have one. I'm just observing whats happening. We are finally actually seeing applications that are pushing our hardware to its limits. While 1GB of onboard RAM used to be a drool inducing spec, 2GB is not really a huge leap considering the jump the Snapdragon S3 made to the S4, S4 Pro and now the 600 in magnitudes of processing power. 2GB would certainly be astronomical, if it took a trip back in time and only had to run 2011 apps. I guess my point is: I'm throwing a tantrum that the Hercules is showing its age, even if it's not its fault.
Forgive my rambling and lack of proof-reading. At work.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lol...I totally agree. My apps seem to close a lot quicker, yet my RAM never dips below 280 MB free. Don't really get it myself...
I guess some OUYA users tried it for games that demanded more memory, but I'm not a OUYA user.
You can probably chalk this up to boredom, but I'm intrigued by the RAM Expander app by ROEHSOFT.
So I'm wondering if anyone's tried it with AFTV? And since I haven't read about it in these forums at all I'm guessing it's either incompatible or useless, since aftv comes with 2 gb and the app says "up to 2.5 gb"
Basically I'm just curious. I've heard it could put unnecessary strain on your device. Of course if it is safe I don't see the harm in using it. I'm just not certain it'll make a noticeable difference...and it is a bit costly but they offer a trial (I think.)
Like I said. It's a slow night. I'm just looking for some info or an opinion if you have it. Thanks.
If your Fire TV is slow something is wrong. Maybe some high quality streams or videos may jitter, but the function should never be slow. I Have yet to get down lower than 680mb of ram. 2gb of ram and four cores is more than enough for any device and should never be slow.
porkenhimer said:
If your Fire TV is slow something is wrong. Maybe some high quality streams or videos may jitter, but the function should never be slow. I Have yet to get down lower than 680mb of ram. 2gb of ram and four cores is more than enough for any device and should never be slow.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's not slow. In fact it's very fast. But a wise man said the more ram the better (2 things there--1. I'm paraphrasing horribly
2. I'm NOT the wise man
I do read here that people oc with hard to measure results. So while it was just an--I'm bored and curious type question, I feel like other people have considered possibilities of speeding things up. I've seen some streaming boxes from China with 4 gb yet the processor, I think, was on par or a bit less powerful than aftv.
I have no need to increase ram. Only scenario I think it MIGHT help (and this is through novice eyes) is if you're using the swap data option for games or perhaps storing thumbnails on usb. Maybe you'd get quicker reads??? But I could be way off there.
You did confirm what I thought--it's not necessary, but I'm thinking more along the lines is there any benefit?
Either way. I doubt I'll test it and definitely don't want to encourage any curious novices like myself to try. It's just if someone has tried it I'd be interested in hearing about it.
I was watching a video review of the LG G3 by The Nerd Herd, and the guy said, and even showed that the LG's skin constantly used over 2 gigs of RAM all the time. Here's the link with timecode, so you can see the part where he talks about it: YouTube.
I want to buy the phone, but 2GB version is my only option and I'm a little bit worried after seeing this. Is this version noticeably slower than the 3GB version? How bad is it?
I also wanna mention that I will install a custom software for sure, probably the CloudyG3, or Cyanogenmod, or something close to stock Android, so I won't stick with LG's firmware.
It really isn't bad at all, I have had this phone since Kitkat and at maximum the RAM will go as up as 80% percent. It never passes it and it usually is at 56% percent with a GB free for use of the 1.8 it shows. I love this phone and actually the only problem I have is the fact that it overheats and it scares the hell of me but it never throttles or anything
In this moment, and for current android versions, 2GB is more than enough. I've read an article about tests with both G3 versions, and 3GB version was 5% or so faster, unnoticeable in real life usage. Before I bought my phone, I had same dilemma, so I've investigated a lot and asked oppinions from some professionals, and I am convinced that 3GB is not needed in this moment ;
I can't tell you exactly how much RAM I'm using, but it's really not going to be that much. If I've got a lot of stuff open and I'm constantly doing things, sure I'll get the odd slow down, but it runs smoother than a baby's bottom, and that's coming from someone who is incredibly picky with their system (My old S3 had over 200 custom flashes... oops).
Some of you know me here as i was one of the first owners of the phone, and tried to mitigate and investigate to hopefully solve some of its issues to no avail....
Android 13 has made some things better like animations, app launch time and slight improve to battery life as well as supporting Bluetooth LE.
However, I've been running this phone alongside with the mighty ROG6, and i have to say, that the ROG6 really opened my eyes to how phone SHOULD operate.
I'm not going to ramble about that here, but to sum it up, here are my main issues that are solved with a proper phone optimization(ROG6 in my case):
1) Memory Management-AD 13 improved it a bit, but it's still far cry from being good, specially with 12gb of ram, it always aims to refresh most of the apps, and you can't really rely on that for the long run.
on the other side, mine ROG6 never reloads any apps unless it requires a refresh on the main page by the API (Instgram, Facebook etc...), even with heavy games.
2) Battery life-Pretty sure we all got disappointed at some point, but it really poor specially the standby time with any SIM card, as without sim card it seems like the standby time is actually great.
SD8GEN1 is the main culprit as the SOC is pure trash, unfortunately small 4700mah battery is not enough for the might of the phone.
3) Performance across the board-slow animation, poor LTPO implantation, laggy interface, heavy throttling under some conditions.
All of those for a high-end phone are unacceptable and unfortunately, Android 13 update is the magic sauce we all hoped for.
I'll end up with some optimistic though, the next iteration of the X series might be much better with better optimization across the board, if the new SOC won't repeat the disastrous process of the SD8GEN1.
No device is perfect. Good luck with your new purchase!