Essential Official Android Thread
The Nexus 7 lag dilemma, and why there’s no real fix
Ask anyone who has been using the Nexus 7 tablet about its occasional lag problem, and you’ll be in for an earful. There’s no denying that the Nexus 7 lags, but I did some digging and realized that finding a fix for the issue is unlikely.
The Nexus 7′s best feature is its price. That said, you don’t have to look far to figure out why the $200 Nexus 7 isn’t the best tablet on the market. It’s a Tegra 3 tablet with 1GB of RAM and a variety of storage sizes. The Tegra 3 chipset was never known for stellar performance, despite Nvidia’s insistence that the Tegra Zone games would run best on their hardware. Still, many people remember the day one Nexus 7s and how, unless you were trying to play a game, there was no lag to speak of.
There have been a lot of fingers pointed at a lot of issues in an attempt to find a cause of the lag, but no definitive answers. In an attempt to locate the culprit I reached out to the Android community to find answers.
nexus 7 teardown_03When investigating Nexus 7 lag, I found that there are two main suspects right now. The first is Android itself, specifically the latest iterations of Android. Many claim that their hardware became slower with the latest version of Android, and it has never been the same since. To try and fix this, several ROM developers released tweaked versions of Android.
The other suspect that has been focused on is the use of cheap storage. The assumption here is that the hardware Asus used in the construction of the Nexus 7 was poor and, as a result, storage units are failing or simply becoming unusable after a certain point.
Fortunately, both of these things can be tested. The cool thing about the Android ecosystem is that there’s no shortage of people willing to roll up their sleeves to locate a solution. Unfortunately there’s also a lot of placebo effect in one-off results reporting, as I observed when someone convinced a swath of users to try messing with their entropy pool in order to defeat lag. It didn’t work.
I figured that properly testing the Nexus 7 would require a group of users all performing the test at the same time with their own environments. I asked users to report whether or not they were rooted, what ROM they were using, and the storage capacity of their unit. I then asked them to perform the AnTuTu Storage IO test and report their findings. Afterwards, I asked these same users to completely wipe their tablets and run the test again, without restoring their Google Accounts to the tablet first. I personally performed these same tests on the Google I/O edition Nexus 7 and a newer version I had been purchased from the Google Play Store. Both of these tablets were stock, with no root access or installed ROMs.
Nexus 7 lag
Based on the information I collected, there’s very little to suggest that the Nexus 7′s storage is the problem. When running this same storage I/O tests on a brand new Nexus 7 and a Nexus 7 from the very first batch that was handed out at Google I/O, which is used daily, the read and write speeds were identical. There’s no degradation over time, at least not in the year since the hardware was launched. These read and write speeds are also the same as the HTC One, a phone that has never had these sorts of issues, so clearly the read and write speed of this hardware is not the issue. In the cases where the write speed dipped below half, users reported they had well over 100 apps installed on the tablet at the time. One user — the one marked with “**” — ran the same test moments after reporting the initial result and saw the write speed get considerably higher, around 130 or about 2x the previous number.
One important finding was also an obvious one, at least to mobile enthusiasts. As with any other mobile OS, if you have a lots of apps installed on your machine it will slow down.
This test also demonstrates that the notion that stock Android is at fault and that third party solutions can fix the lag are largely inaccurate. It’s worth noting that the CyanogenMod and Paranoid Android ROMs did demonstrate faster write speeds even when under a significant app load, but in my own testing I found the difference to be imperceptible. In asking the people who participated in this test, who run these ROMs every day, their lag problems have not gone away as a result of using these modified versions of Android. There’s still lag on the Nexus 7 even under these modified ROMs.
In the end, it comes back to the processor being used. There are no Tegra 3 devices that are considered especially snappy when put under the same conditions as the Nexus 7. The rest of the Asus tablet line running these same processors have the same issues, and there’s no real long-term solution as a result. We got exactly what we paid for, a $200 Android tablet.
Nvidia hopes to have handled this with the new Tegra 4 line, and from what we’ve seen with Project Shield it certainly seems like they have made great strides.
Special thanks goes out to everyone who volunteered their time and their data to this report.
Samsung ships 20 million Galaxy S4s since launch, almost keeps pace with iPhone
it's clear the Galaxy S4 is definitely more successful than its predecessors, but analysts had hoped to see Samsung sell its flagship at a world-beating rate. When you compare the S4's performance to Apple's iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, it's clear why Wall Street is a little disappointed. Based on Apple's opening weekend figures and Strategy Analytics' estimates, we can estimate that the iPhone 4S took 79 days to surpass 32 million shipments, while the iPhone 5 reached almost 34 million shipments in 100 days. We'll have to see how long it takes Samsung to announce its 30 million milestone, but it looks like the company will fall short of the pace set by Apple's iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S.
it's clear the Galaxy S4 is definitely more successful than its predecessors, but analysts had hoped to see Samsung sell its flagship at a world-beating rate. When you compare the S4's performance to Apple's iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, it's clear why Wall Street is a little disappointed. Based on Apple's opening weekend figures and Strategy Analytics' estimates, we can estimate that the iPhone 4S took 79 days to surpass 32 million shipments, while the iPhone 5 reached almost 34 million shipments in 100 days. We'll have to see how long it takes Samsung to announce its 30 million milestone, but it looks like the company will fall short of the pace set by Apple's iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S.
Having my phone automatically go to silent the second I'm at my girls house
Even set it up to switch to a picture of me and her as my wallpaper while im there, and switch back once im gone.
Tasker is
I know I'm late Breh's. Still working those iPhone cob webs off of me.
S4 and Nexus 7 should be delivered in a week. Can't wait brehs.
iceberg_is_on_fire
Wearing Lions gear when it wasn't cool
Having my phone automatically go to silent the second I'm at my girls house
Even set it up to switch to a picture of me and her as my wallpaper while im there, and switch back once im gone.
Tasker is
I know I'm late Breh's. Still working those iPhone cob webs off of me.
Sounds like you are rocking tasker, one of the goat apps. I have my phone going to wifi on when I'm at the crib, turn bluetooth on when I'm in the car. I use this shyt everyday and I'm still like
at the shyt that is happening.
Sounds like you are rocking tasker, one of the goat apps. I have my phone going to wifi on when I'm at the crib, turn bluetooth on when I'm in the car. I use this shyt everyday and I'm still like
damn im missing out
iceberg_is_on_fire
Wearing Lions gear when it wasn't cool
u got the paid version?
