newbie question - where is the discussion of "which ROM for me?"

[leland]

Hi all,

New to the Droid (v1). My battery life is terrible. I'm on stock Froyo. About to root to try something else as there has to be something better out there.

I'm having a ton of trouble figuring out where to start in terms of trying ROMs and Kernels.

My priorities are: battery, tether and native exchange (touchdown kinda blows)

 

[Abe21599]

you can check out link 6 in my sig to see all of the different ROMs out there offered for teh Droid..

 

[LifeIsABeach]

You may want to start with figuring out what is killing our battery. Rooting or a new ROM may not help with that.

1. Check Settings -> Battery Usage to see what is taking up most of your battery life. The display is often a big part. Turning down the brightness or turning on auto will help a lot.

2. Stop using any Task Killer or Anti-Virus if you are using them. They do nothing more than kill your battery.

 

[Codiusprie]

Search the forums, a "what rom is best" thread literally pops up about twice a week if not more.

 

[donerico]

I haven't found a comparison of features anywhere, is such a thing available?

 

[Codiusprie]

Each rom developer has their own sub forum, just go read. There is usually a sticky thread at the top of the page for their latest release. It will have release notes features or a link to their personal site. Do some leg work hoss.

 

[leland]

Thinks for the links in the sig... I appreciate the help. I did a lot of searching and was surprised that I couldn't find any discussion of "which one".

My battery seems like it's getting killed by touchdown and at startup from all this stuff starting (amazon mp3, visual voicemail). Also random widgets that I don't run seem to run in the background.

Separately, I'm with @donerico on this, a subforum for each dev is confusing without a central place to compare. There's a reason people like me end up posting, because there's no sticky, wiki or discussion forum for comparing things. Spreading out in each forum is just confusing. Until there's one, there will be a past from someone like me each week in each forum. If there's a place to discuss that's easy to find that would be helpful.

 

[EbE404]

Thinks for the links in the sig... I appreciate the help. I did a lot of searching and was surprised that I couldn't find any discussion of "which one".

My battery seems like it's getting killed by touchdown and at startup from all this stuff starting (amazon mp3, visual voicemail). Also random widgets that I don't run seem to run in the background.

Separately, I'm with @donerico on this, a subforum for each dev is confusing without a central place to compare. There's a reason people like me end up posting, because there's no sticky, wiki or discussion forum for comparing things. Spreading out in each forum is just confusing. Until there's one, there will be a past from someone like me each week in each forum. If there's a place to discuss that's easy to find that would be helpful.

Sounds like to just signed up for an assignment

Seriously, you are talking about creating a feature matrix for the literally dozens of ROMs that are out there, each of which can be running with different themes, options, kernels and customizations.

Add to that the frequent updates of said ROMs, new ones that pop up, and you're talking about a full time job to keep on top of this all and stay up to date, and that's probably the biggest issue.

Lastly, there is a hugely subjective nature to many things as to which is "best".

To the OP questions, tether is something any rooted Droid can do (there are apps in the market), I can't speak to native exchange, but I'm not aware of this being offered, and battery life is greatly dependent on usage, kernel and system settings made in SetCPU-this is not necessarily ROM-dependant, although it can be.

I understand that reviewing each sub forum can be a little unwieldy, but as mentioned, there is a feature list in most of them. Another bonus of going through the sticky thready in the sub forums is that you can also get some valuable information about what works and what doesn't (after you skip over all of the "best thing ever" and "it's so smooth" gushing posts, anyway), and I personally find that as valuable as the actually feature set anyway. The nature of this stuff dictates that different people are going to experience slightly different things, and that insight is helpful.