I have been running some tests to address some of the concerns reported by users with this ROM and provide some assistance to our DEV team over on
this thread. Here is what I have so far:
Soft-Key Flicker
I usually keep my brightness at ~20-25% to save battery and haven't really noticed any soft-key flicker. When I turned brightness all the way down I did notice some flickering of the buttons. When set to auto-brightness or turning brightness to 100% there seemed to be no noticeable flickering. I took "flickering" to mean like light bulb tweaking on crack. If the keys weren't lighting at all, then here is the next part.
Did some testing with Incredicontrol to see if maybe the voltages were to blame. Governor was set to "powersave" so the CPU would stay put at the min (245mhz), and the i/o was left at "sio". I decreased all outputs equally down about 200 mv before the system rebooted, did not notice any flicker on the way down. I repeated the test with the governor as "performance" to lock the CPU at the max (1024), again left the i/o as "sio" and took the voltages down 150mv before crash/reboot. Sure enough the soft-keys kept flashing on and off as the voltages were ratcheted down. So a dying battery could be the cause of some of the flicker if someone has a heavy overclock and brightness turned way up.
After the system reboot(s) I did notice that my soft-keys didn't light up right away, but I went into settings a toggled "auto brightness" on, then back off, and things were back to normal.
Screen Brightness:
I tried to find an app to test the lumen output of an android screen, but no such luck on the market. There is this, but it is for using your phone to test the brightness of a light, in a room for example, not the phone's screen itself. So the best I could do was take a few pictures with a digital camera in a dark room to compare the two. Quality control is crap and I wish I had some hard numbers to compare, but I guess its up to subjective user feel.
For the dark room test, my camera settings stayed the same (it is a Panasonic Lumix 14mp by the way), lights off in the room, flash off on the camera, and pics were taken from ~1foot above the phone and ~2feet above the phone with this app used to make the phone screen a "flashlight." I also included pics of my app drawer, same background (black) and launcher (Go Launcher EX) were used in the pics. The flashlight app automatically turns screen brightness to 100% and I manually set screen brightness to 100% for the app drawer pics.
MIUI Samples:
CM7.2 Samples:
Prior to the test I personally did not notice a difference in screen brightness between MIUI 2.4.20v3 and MTDEV-CM7.2. Though, as mentioned in the "Flicker Test" post I usually keep screen brightness turned pretty low anyway. After the test I would say that the results are inconclusive due to the lack of quantifiable measurements. MIUI may be a bit brighter, but for what its worth I'd say the screen brightness on MTDEV-CM7.2 is just fine as is.
Switching Recoveries
FYI if anyone is thinking of switching to TWRP (team win recovery project) from CWR, be sure that the first thing you do after installing is boot to recovery and make a new back up. You
WILL NOT be able to access your CWR backups from TWRP and vice-versa. The same is also true if you are thinking of trying version of CWR newer than what you used to make your backups.
Volume
Increasing Volume in Cyanogenmod Settings: Menu > Settings > Cyanogenmod Settings > Sound > Increase "attenuation" levels and below that ("...if music is playing) Set each to "attenuated system setting"
Increasing Volume in PowerAmp: Open PowerAmp, menu, settings, audio, replay gain. Then under "Replay Gain" check "apply gain" or "prevent clipping" depending on if it is loud enough or too distorted. Under "Source", check track. Under the next two options select you desired increase.
For Distorted Sounds: Open App Drawer, open DSP Manager. Both "headset" and "bluetooth" have options to enable compression (at the top) and for loudness compensation if your using the DSP equalizer.
Estimated Battery Life
Interactive and iso left at default my est. bat. life was about 18 1/2 hours
SmartassV2 and cfq clocked to 61-1901mhz also gave me an estimated 18 1/2 hours
SmartassV2 and cfq clocked to 61-1901mhz and undervolted by 50mv produced an estimated 29 1/2 hours.
*Feel free to message me for further details and other results, but these were the best so far.
Undervolting
So far in my testing it has been best to take a stairstep approach and not just notch off a big chunk of power all at once. Use the smallest intervals and apply after each one to check for stability. It also appears that more active governors (interactive and smartassV2 for example) are
less tolerant to undervolting. Heavy overclocking also tended to clash with undervolting, especially with fluctuating CPU speeds. I was stable undervolting all values by 50mV which yielded about 60% more battery life in my testing.
YouTube Flicker
As stated in the OP videos (YouTube included) flicker in portrait mode. Increasing screen brightness had no effect for me. Videos worked fine in landscape however.
Thunder.prop
dsmryder posted an updated thunderprop for this rom a few pages back. Which can be found
here. I am not a gamer by any means, so I cannot attest to the full capacity of this tweak. But on the plus side I have not found any major issues after flashing ROM -> gapps -> thunderprop. Benchmarks with AnTuTu and 3G speeds with Open Signal were a bit lower and battery life was about the same. The main difference was button (soft and hard) sensitivity, which may be a good thing for gamers.
*Updated 8/18/12
To Do List: Skype issues?, B_kernel, theOC Kernel.
. Un installed it and re installed it but just crashes as you open it. And some flash videos just show up as a black screen. Other then these minor probs I like it. It's also my first time flashing a phone lol. And this rom and such seemed like the most stable out according to forum users.
