Is it time for a new DROID?

[TheDroidURLookinFor]

Yes...It is time.

[floydfollower13]

Gave up my D1 when Bionic was released. Gave it to my mom and it still runs like the first day it was released. It is still one of my favorite phones! If you fix it or by a newer phone, I think you will be pleased. But I miss my very first smartphone and easily the greatest!

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using DroidForums

[vey]

Unlike you guys, I ain't loaded and this phone is new to me, so it's pretty funny listening to talk about the new phones being so much better than the old ones. I tried GB and all I got was headaches with the phone not ringing and the camera not working. The GB incremental changes were way less important than advertised.

My neighbor's newish GB phone is much slower than mine and it has nothing to do with the amount of RAM or CPU -- it has everything to do with his choice of apps. I have noticed that certain apps make my screens refresh very slowly, while others, even if they are piggy, don't.

Coming to this phone after two OS upgrades, after rooting is easy as one click, after all sorts of custom ROMs, after tons of software is available and after this thing has been hacked to death means there is not much sense of adventure left. I think you guys are really looking for a new adventure 'cause you are bored with this phone.

Ice Cream promises all sorts of new obstacles to phone bliss. Maybe you should wait until there are more phones for that being made. In the mean time, make a list of your apps, take the phone back to "stock" which is 2.2.3 in case you have lost track by now by running all those custom ROMs, root it -- 2.2.3 needs superoneclick 1.7 to work. Then start adding apps in one at a time and observing what happens after each app is added. added: I forgot to mention not to use a backup -- start from scratch -- because the backup will have all your mistakes in it.

You could be surprised.

[JeffDenver]

Unlike you guys, I ain't loaded and this phone is new to me, so it's pretty funny listening to talk about the new phones being so much better than the old ones. I tried GB and all I got was headaches with the phone not ringing and the camera not working. The GB incremental changes were way less important than advertised.

My neighbor's newish GB phone is much slower than mine and it has nothing to do with the amount of RAM or CPU -- it has everything to do with his choice of apps. I have noticed that certain apps make my screens refresh very slowly, while others, even if they are piggy, don't.

What phone does he have? In my experience, the two biggest factors in speed are CPU and RAM.

(And you dont need to be loaded to afford a new $200 phone every 20 months IMO)

Coming to this phone after two OS upgrades, after rooting is easy as one click, after all sorts of custom ROMs, after tons of software is available and after this thing has been hacked to death means there is not much sense of adventure left. I think you guys are really looking for a new adventure 'cause you are bored with this phone.

I was looking for a lagless phone. The Droid 1 was awesome, but it had HORRIBLE load times by modern standards. You could not tweak it enough to get rid of them...all you could do was mitigate it.

I rooted my Droid 1 to be able to optimize it for that very reason. With the Rezound, there is no longer a need to root. Out of the box it does more (or at least does it faster) than my Droid 1 ever did, even fully tweaked and overclocked. This had nothing to do with "adventure" for me. My phone is a tool. When I bought a new one I upgraded to a better tool.

Ice Cream promises all sorts of new obstacles to phone bliss.

GB is very polished on my phone. I dont ever have to upgrade unless I want to. But I cant think of anything that GB does that ICS will not do as well or better. Do you have any examples of those obsticals?

[vey]

What phone does he have? In my experience, the two biggest factors in speed are CPU and RAM.
(And you dont need to be loaded to afford a new $200 phone every 20 months IMO)

My neighbor doesn't seem to think $200 is too much, and he doesn't think ~$75 a month is too much, either. But I sure do. My monthly bill was about $5 a month before I got this phone. Now I am up to $12 a month.

I think he is on his third Sprint Android phone. I'm not sure which phone he has now, but I know it is less than 6 months old and the speakers are blown. He doesn't root or tweak his phones so replacing a phone is a little painful for him. Seems like unless a phone is rooted, it is hard to back it up fully. Will that change in ICS?

I had a play with his phone and his newish untweaked phone was about as fast as my tweaked OG. As I said, because I am in the doing more with less, I tweak like crazy and I have seen my phone start lagging after I installed certain apps. I don't overclock and after my bad experience with GB, I'm leaving custom roms alone.

Android for me is a bit of a disappointment. My old (built circa 2006) WM5 based phone had a 520 MHz CPU and only 64MB of RAM (plus 128MB internal memory). Yet there were things it did better than Android with ooodles of RAM (comparatively) can do. Voice control for 100% handsfree dialing worked fine without a data connection for one thing.

Another is A/V. The makers of The Core Media Player (previously TCPMP) tried, but so far are unable to port the app to Android the way they did for the iphone, palm and symbian based phones. There is a very long list of video codecs that app can play. The Core Pocket Media Player - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia It's really amazing. Close watchers of the CoreAV company say the company hired android developers, but gave up after six months. I see nothing that even comes close to the Core Media Player for Android.

Bluetooth support in Android is miserable.

I see these "features" or lack of them as obstacles to be overcome. Will ICS solve them?

[JeffDenver]

Android for me is a bit of a disappointment. My old (built circa 2006) WM5 based phone had a 520 MHz CPU and only 64MB of RAM (plus 128MB internal memory). Yet there were things it did better than Android with ooodles of RAM (comparatively) can do. Voice control for 100% handsfree dialing worked fine without a data connection for one thing.

The fact that you had to use the qualifier "comparatively" says all that needs to be said. Modern Android phones allow you to do a great deal more, even if they are not as optimized as they could be. There is a really good reason people are flocking to Android over WM5 phones.

I see these "features" or lack of them as obstacles to be overcome.

The problem is, in order to get the few features you say are better on WM5, you'd have to sacrifice many MORE features that Android has but WM5 doesn't. One step forward, ten steps back. WM5 is a lot farther away from smartphone bliss than Android is (or has been).

[vey]

The fact that you had to use the qualifier "comparatively" says all that needs to be said.

All it says is that RAM cost a lot more back when Smart Phones were in their infancy and so did screens and CPUs. I "flocked" to Android because six year old phones tend to be near death.

For me, going from a BREW based phone to a WM5 phone was a wonderful step up and even though there was plenty of life left in my old phone, I was glad I moved up. I'm still trying to figure out how much better off I am. Maybe it's because I'm not a gamer I just don't appreciate it enough.

[JeffDenver]

All it says is that RAM cost a lot more back when Smart Phones were in their infancy and so did screens and CPUs.

So what, you could say that about anything. The fact that it might have been a good phone for it's time does not mean it is better than modern phones.

I "flocked" to Android because six year old phones tend to be near death.

The reason you are not flocking to newer versions of those dead phones is because no one wanted them. Thats why they stayed dead. Android offered something better.

For me, going from a BREW based phone to a WM5 phone was a wonderful step up and even though there was plenty of life left in my old phone, I was glad I moved up. I'm still trying to figure out how much better off I am. Maybe it's because I'm not a gamer I just don't appreciate it enough.

I dont game at all either. But the browsing experience alone is light years ahead of anything from that time...including WM5. It is faster (4G), prettier, and more intuitive. Turn by turn navigation on google maps is something none of those phones did as well, if they could do it at all. Dont even get me started on GPS or eBooks. There are many many things modern phones do now that those phones did worse (or usually not at all). It is not even a contest.

By those old standards, smartphone bliss is already here.

[vey]

"But the browsing experience alone is light years ahead of anything from that time...including WM5."
.
Light years? Nah. Not if you ran Opera Mini on WM5, which I find myself doing more and more often on my 2.2 based phone. The built in browser is good, but pages load far too slowly for my taste even when I am on Wi-Fi. It does have Flash and it does handle java scripting, but there are only a few sites I use where I actually must have a sophisticated browser to find out what I need. Pretty doesn't impress me.

Having a You Tube app is not a major plus for me.

All the rest of your advantages are due to price drops on hardware, improvements in carrier networks or both.

I prefer to use an app that holds my GPS mapping software on the SD card. Google Maps is nice, but it doesn't beat Tom Tom Navigator for features or functionality and you can't get much snappier map recall than what comes off the SD card.

Sadly, Tom Tom doesn't make an Android version for the US, and I tried others, but they either had odd methods of direction (taking me miles out of my way) or lacked features I wanted. I also used to use a separate GPS puck, that I bought for $20. I thought that was a real disadvantage until I started running built-in GPS and saw how fast the battery ran down when I used it. When I ride my bike, I like to log my path (to be uploaded on my PC later) but I sure don't want to be logging away only to find my phone dead and unable to make or receive calls. If the puck went dead, so what?

Oh, and when massive amounts of 4G comes down to $12 a month, let me know.