Develop Bugs

[Q] Galaxy Nexus UI Experience

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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

[Q] Poor graphics performance - normal?

Hello,
I´ve just bought a Galaxy Nexus and had great expectations about it being lag free. This was even my first impression but after 2 days of use I can see there are some actions that display a clear visual lag/frame drop.
- On the home screen, if I switch panels using my finger it goes great but if I press the center button to get back to the center panel the transition isn´t smooth (frame drop)
- The blue glow animations from pressing the buttons is not smooth, I can see clearly the transition from the strong glow to black again (stage by stage). It´s even stronger in the settings app, where I press any of the options (battery, app, display, ...) and it takes 1 second to open the new activity: during this time I can see 3 stages before the glow disappears.
- In the apps/widgets list, when I scroll left I can see the panel stops and quickly starts to run smooth again.
The phone came as a yakjuzs but I unlocked the bootloader and updated to yakju 4.0.2 (bootloader, radio and os).
I ran some benchmarks and got lower results than people posted on the internet:
- Quadrant: once 1419 and once 1881. Framerate on the graphics test were: 20/25 on the ladder, 7/8 on the planet and 10/20 on the dna
- Antutu: total score 6140, 2d graphics: 265, 3d graphics: 1184
Are those numbers and behaviors normal? I expected more from the device since it has 2d aceleration (activated for all the apps by the developers settings).
Any chance my upgrade to yakju 4.0.2 is the reason of this performance?
I hope you guys can help me
Gabriel Simões
ps: after upgrading I got stuck in an infinite loop so I did a factory reset and was finally able to use the phone.
(sorry for the double post on the general android forum)

Kill quadrant with fire please as it means nothing . A lot of your issues cleared up with 4.0.3.
Also don't run live walls unless they are meant for ics. That does not include all the stock ones. Phase beam and Galaxy are the only ones from Google that are ics ready. 3rd party I have no idea.

4.0.3 drastically improved my benchmarks and overall performance, went from around your scores up to 3100 with a 4.0.3 ROM and franco's nightly kernel and rid almost all lag in the UI
I specifically remember on the planet portion of the Quadrant Standard benchmark there was a whole chunk missing out of the larger planet while I was on stock 4.0.2...flashed 4.0.3 and it runs at 60 frames a second
I'm also not sure what effect ICS has on the benchmark's accuracy, if any
I'd suggest flashing a new ROM if you were planning on rooting anyway, if not hold out for the official OTA
Attached is my newest bench (franco's 13 with bixgie's 4.0.3 build 4, OC'd to 1350 on higher score and stock clocks lower score)

Its all fake.
Planets uses software rendering on sgx gpus.The renderer was removed from your rom. Its smoke and mirrors because no other apps use that like planets does. The quadrant scores arent translating to performance, and 4.0.3 on its own doesnt improve the scores. It does clear up some graphics and performance issues though.

Its nice to know I didn´t fVck my cellphone on it´s first day!
I´ve been thinking if I should upgrade to a non official 4.0.3 since I got the nexus to have a standard plataform to develop. Audio engine changed a lot from 2.2 to 4.0 and I have to update apps.
By the other side I´d like to lower voltage to improve even more my battery (I get to the end of the day with 50% left).
How is franco's 4.0.3 working for you? Is it too modded?
Also, any idea on when 4.0.3 official will come?
Last but not least, any improvements to screen quality (colors at least)?
tnx

adrynalyne said:
Its all fake.
Planets uses software rendering on sgx gpus.The renderer was removed from your rom. Its smoke and mirrors because no other apps use that like planets does.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Are there any more accurate benchmarks you'd recommend? (other than authentic usage of course) When I was looking Quadrant seemed to be the most popular (which I understand doesn't make it the best, but I figured it's a good starting point)
Also I've been using franco's nightly's since I got my phone and it's been excellent for me. Better battery life, performance, added features and patches are a nice touch too. Can't say it's too modded since I've yet to run into any issues with any of the changes he's made.
Link to franco's kernel: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1422956

Remember - ICS is still new. Most apps/games still aren't "optimized" for it.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App

Quadrant isn't ICS optimized and only uses one core I believe.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium

adrynalyne said:
Kill quadrant with fire please as it means nothing . A lot of your issues cleared up with 4.0.3.
Also don't run live walls unless they are meant for ics. That does not include all the stock ones. Phase beam and Galaxy are the only ones from Google that are ics ready. 3rd party I have no idea.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can you explain what you mean by "ics ready"? Do you mean that all the stock live wallpapers but 2 on the phone aren't optimized? Why would google release the phone like that?
I only ask because I was planning on using the nexus LWP

The Galaxy Nexus laggs with every Livewallpaper I've tried even with firmware 4.0.3 ...
Just don't use them

OJ in Compton said:
Can you explain what you mean by "ics ready"? Do you mean that all the stock live wallpapers but 2 on the phone aren't optimized? Why would google release the phone like that?
I only ask because I was planning on using the nexus LWP
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
nobody knows why but google goofed because only 1 LWP works on the new nexus. every other one lags horribly. they must have completely overlooked it i guess.

Why do these retarded threads keep popping up, there is already tons of info on this.
Use the search son
sent from my googletron

Using static wallpapers since day one.
Things I do like a lot right now: battery and 3g speed. For a guy that used to use a milestone + cm6, this thing flies and handles 1 day of job with spare juice.
I´d like to know what changed so much from stock 4.0.2 kernel and franco's 4.0.3

Shakes head. Goes back to superb nexus experience.
Sent from my Nexus in Texas.

@rbiter said:
Shakes head. Goes back to superb nexus experience.
Sent from my Nexus in Texas.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That different?

Colemak said:
Are there any more accurate benchmarks you'd recommend? (other than authentic usage of course) When I was looking Quadrant seemed to be the most popular (which I understand doesn't make it the best, but I figured it's a good starting point)
Also I've been using franco's nightly's since I got my phone and it's been excellent for me. Better battery life, performance, added features and patches are a nice touch too. Can't say it's too modded since I've yet to run into any issues with any of the changes he's made.
Link to franco's kernel: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1422956
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Antutu is better but as for how accurate, I know not.

ChongoDroid said:
Why do these retarded threads keep popping up, there is already tons of info on this.
Use the search son
sent from my googletron
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So retarded that people still come here with doubts ...
I will try to improve my search skills, improve your invisibility ones ...

Gabriel Simões said:
I will try to improve my search skills, improve your invisibility ones ...
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LOL....sorry that was funny

deezid said:
The Galaxy Nexus laggs with every Livewallpaper I've tried even with firmware 4.0.3 ...
Just don't use them
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
A lot of the lag in ICS is caused by the animated soft keys. This is fixed in cm9 by having the softkeys have no animation and simply just light up instead of lighting up and fading like before.

blackhand1001 said:
A lot of the lag in ICS is caused by the animated soft keys. This is fixed in cm9 by having the softkeys have no animation and simply just light up instead of lighting up and fading like before.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Those animatios are really instable in 4.0.2 std:
- If I open the notification bar and press home only once the animation looks great ... if I keep pressing it will lag on the 3rd or 4th time and on...
- The animation in settings menu is terrible and lags a lot ... it takes like 1 second to open the battery activity and while that I can see clearly 3 stages of animation fading out...

Custom Auto Brightness Levels?

Ive read that the One X tends to run a lot brighter for the equivalent setting on phones like the SII.
Is it possible to tune the brightness level that the Auto setting provides, and the external light at which it "ups" the brightness - as in my opinion, HTC's setting, although wonderful, is overkill in many situations, and screen on time needs all the help it can get.
Cheers.

slvrarrow said:
Ive read that the One X tends to run a lot brighter for the equivalent setting on phones like the SII.
Is it possible to tune the brightness level that the Auto setting provides, and the external light at which it "ups" the brightness - as in my opinion, HTC's setting, although wonderful, is overkill in many situations, and screen on time needs all the help it can get.
Cheers.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
if things aren't changed in ICS, you can decompile the /system/framework/framework-res.apk and then edit some xml's in it. Compile it again with the modified xml's and at last adb push it into the system partition. and this procedure requires a unlocked system partition.
if you don't want to unlock / don't know how to edit the stuff, the most feasible way is to put a brightness widget on homescreen and change it manually.

slvrarrow said:
Ive read that the One X tends to run a lot brighter for the equivalent setting on phones like the SII.
Is it possible to tune the brightness level that the Auto setting provides, and the external light at which it "ups" the brightness - as in my opinion, HTC's setting, although wonderful, is overkill in many situations, and screen on time needs all the help it can get.
Cheers.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
leedroid, insertcoin and a few of the other roms here have the option to lower the brightness in their tweak settings. If you search for it, j4n87 also created a flashable xml mod that lowers the brightness as well.

Cheers, I saw one on XDA for what I thought was the One S but it must be what youve just mentioned above I think.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXJhJSAq3ig&feature=related#t=11m03s
That shows what I'm on about.

slvrarrow said:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXJhJSAq3ig&feature=related#t=11m03s
That shows what I'm on about.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, we're on the same page although I don't understand italian . The mods I'm referring to all alter the baseline brightness as opposed to just the regular screen brightness based on ambient levels.
I'm running CM9 which allows you to edit baselines for screen and softkeys, but the roms and mods I referred you to do the same thing with less granular control. j4n87's mod is pretty dim but worked well for me until I switched to CM9. You could always crack open his zip and change the levels yourself before flashing.
Here is the link:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1595559

Yeh haha I don't speak Italian either just stumbled upon that on featured videos! Erm I knew CM9 had it working, can you point me in the direction of the best build? I need HDMI out but can live without Hotspot (which I believe is the only problem causer?). What's CM9 battery overall before these screen modifications?

I've tried about 6-7 of the roms here, they're all pretty much the same with varying levels of tweaks. I'm pretty sure that HDMI is working on the majority of them.
I love the hardware on this phone but not fond of Sense at all. Looking forward to more AOSP/AOKP based roms. The only available CM9 rom still has some bugs that need to be addressed (Phone, GPS, Camera - all working but with flaws) Battery life is excellent though I'm getting 4.5-5+ hours of screen on with heavy to moderate use using Faux123's kernel.

Is that the CM9 over at Modaco? Or is there an active one here?
That's great screen on time by the way.
Ideally I want one based on CM9 but with the sense Camera, that's all I can see thats worth keeping. Sense just isn't worth the performance hit IMO. It looks pretty cheap, especially with all the colourful busy icons...

Yes I'm using the build from modaco, jdroid is apparently working on a AOSP version and is beta testing. He said that they may release something this week.

How are you finding Screen on times for video playback/streaming by any chance?
Also, have you tried to see if the force dual core app helps?
Ill know myself tomorrow, the phone arrives...!

[Q] What is the mDNIe scenario? (Custom ROMs)

Hi, I am still fairly new around here (and to the custom ROM scene) and I have been lurking around for some time. So far, I haven't had the need to ask any questions as they have all been answered in other threads, but here's one that I am curious about; it's one that I have noticed in a few custom ROMs I have tried so far.
[Q]: What is the mDNIe scenario and what does it do?​
It is located under the Advanced portion of the Settings menu. I've ticked a few of them, but it doesn't seem like it does anything.

KunoMochi said:
Hi, I am still fairly new around here (and to the custom ROM scene) and I have been lurking around for some time. So far, I haven't had the need to ask any questions as they have all been answered in other threads, but here's one that I am curious about; it's one that I have noticed in a few custom ROMs I have tried so far.
[Q]: What is the mDNIe scenario and what does it do?​
It is located under the Advanced portion of the Settings menu. I've ticked a few of them, but it doesn't seem like it does anything.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
smhtc said:
mDNIe stands for mobile Digital Natural Image engine.
In stock galaxy S2 rom (at least my i9100 international), under Settings ->Display -> Screen mode, it shows a sample image and three preset profiles - Dynamic, Standard, and Movie. These adjust the brightness, sharpness, contrast on different screens/ in apps like camera.
Custom roms can always have custom settings for these display-related parameters of a phone.
I am not android developer, so I cannot tell you how to turn it on, but I think stock rom has mDNIe enabled by default.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I also wondered about this option on CM10.1, but from reading the quote (from another post) above, I conclude that they are just different settings to tune the displaly of the phone. The differences between each scenario are so small that I can't really notice them, so I just leave it on the preset UI mode.

klin1344 said:
I also wondered about this option on CM10.1, but from reading the quote (from another post) above, I conclude that they are just different settings to tune the displaly of the phone. The differences between each scenario are so small that I can't really notice them, so I just leave it on the preset UI mode.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, I dug little into it myself and read that they were some presets for color management. I was kind of curious if they were working properly on the ROM I am currently running and if it would have any impact on battery life as well, but if it's as minute a change as you say, then it's probably not worth investigating, at least not for the time being.
Thanks for the reply and the info, by the way. I guess it's more for display clarity if anyone were to have problems with the viewing screen. I'd give your post a "Thanks" if I haven't already met my thanking limit of the day already. lol I'll be sure to give you one when I get the chance to.

Can this be related to the Galaxy S4 auto-dimming problem? If I set the background mode to STANDARD instead of AUTO, it will probably not dim?

[Q] Color profiling with CyanogenMod

It's not a secret that AMOLED screens like the one installed in S4 mini have wider color range than IPS what often results in over-saturated images which were prepared for standard sRGB range.
Stock S4 mini ROM has means to change color profiles. So the question is - if this functionality also included/planned to be included in S4 mini's CM and kernel CM uses for this model? Could profiles be anyhow adjusted?

It's on my to-do list.

Really glad to hear it, Arco! Thanks!
Could you please share a bit about mechanism behind that? Is it really some driver/kernel-space functionality or it is being implemented on higher levels?

metaxaos said:
Really glad to hear it, Arco! Thanks!
Could you please share a bit about mechanism behind that? Is it really some driver/kernel-space functionality or it is being implemented on higher levels?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Haven't really looked at it yet, but I think both kernel and user space changes are needed.

arco68 said:
Haven't really looked at it yet, but I think both kernel and user space changes are needed.
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Click to collapse
Hi arco68,
I'm also interested in a solution for the over-saturation problem of the amoled of my S4 mini. Before that I'll keep my stock rom that has the profiles included.
In the meanwhile any progress on that?

S4 Mini oversatured display - solution!
Finally I found something that really works: S4minisettings.apk
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2558702&page=11
look for F4k's post
This build is for cm 11 (4.4 kitkat). The only thing is you have to manually put it to system/apps/ folder and then correct the permissions to
rw,r,r (644)
otherwise it doesn't work.
To get really natural colors instead of the oversatured ones you have to set mode to "natural" and temperature to "normal". Sometimes you have to switch the display off and on to get the settings applied.
Great thanks to F4k!

Cool!
Finally i get rid of this unnatural colours,
thanks peter and f4k! :good::good::good:

If you're interested I've developed an App called "ColorModeChanger" to adjust colors and saturation. You cn visit XDA thread at: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3154845