My wife’s phone recently started running out of storage space, making most app updates impossible. It was not the right time to shop custom roms, so the solution was to swap phones. Farewell to HTC One, Hello to old Desires and great expectations to the 2014 lineups.<\/p>\n
With launch events and actual availability quite a while away, next step was to get the best out of my “new” phone, an HTC Desire X. It looked like a good deal when it came out and we were looking for an Android phone with dual core and 4″ screen. Nice price too. But also flaws, first and foremost the 4GB internal memory that filled up surprisingly and disappointingly fast. Nothing that can’t be fixed by installing a custom rom with support for the excellent Link2SD app though. Unfortunately, I found no good AOSP based rom,\u00a0but then I had an opportunity to revisit MIUI in a newer incarnation. Interesting and quite a polished, different experience. That could all have been good, if only the earphone sound quality had been better: I have a forty minutes daily commute by train, so that matters. Maybe my unit was faulty, maybe it is a general issue with this device. I suspect the custom roms I tried had an issue with Beats Audio. In any case, I started carrying another phone too, just for the sake of Music.<\/p>\n
So my old Desire S was turned on once more, running CM7.2 Gingerbread well, but looking dated. Great to find out that much more recent rom versions are available too and eventually I ended up with a 4.2.2 Andromadus build. Great. Still, I know of why the device officially only runs Gingerbread. The minimalistic CM UI still doesn’t run entirely smooth, and as more apps and accounts were added, the phone would start freezing more and more often. Specs do matter, but having tasted Jelly Bean I am not going to downgrade. Instead, this slightly underpowered device is quite an interesting test platform to see him when different apps affect system performance, with any bad performer being able to tip the balance and make an acceptable experience useless. First app to go was Facebook, the next LinkedIn followed by Google Hangouts. It seems everything that touches the contacts list has trouble running on a low resource system. Not surprisingly I guess, since the contacts list is far more complex than a more list of names and phone numbers. And when several social apps are added to the system, each with its own list of contacts with contact info, photos etc, and the contacts list trying to handle duplicate contacts, it makes sense that an overstretched system gets in trouble.<\/p>\n
However, it turns out music is more important to me than social network apps, so now the Desire S is my private phone of choice (got a BlackBerry Curve for work too). Well, metal beats plastic too and the Desire S is a lovely device IMHO…<\/p>\n
So several lessons learnt here. They may not beat having an HTC One, but I am as happy an Android user as ever. And there may be more to come. There is some still one Desire left in the drawer – an original Bravo. It did not handle Jelly Bean well, but its 576MB RAM is more than the minimum required to run KitKat. The first pre-alpha builds are already out there, so perhaps I may even get there before Wifey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My wife’s phone recently started running out of storage space, making most app updates impossible. It was not the right time to shop custom roms, so the solution was to swap phones. Farewell to HTC One, Hello to old Desires and great expectations to the 2014 lineups. With launch events and actual availability quite a … Continue reading Silverlinings<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-android"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5WBL8-2i","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions\/169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}