Help Since ICS responsiveness etc (Vodafone B952 std)

[wallport]

I'll give my view of responsiveness compared to previous Gingerbread. Please can others post their views and anything which causes improvements. Has anyone sent for repair and did it come back any better?

Its 3 days since I upgraded (so early days yet). Firstly, this phone has always missed taps even under Gingerbread. When I first put ICS on it became terrible but it soon became clear that this was partly because all the apps had been moved to internal storage and had to be moved back to memory card. Since this was done, my impression is that its still worse than it was under Gingerbread but I haven't yet deemed it to be bad enough to rollback. One thing I have never understood is how sometimes you even get feedback for the tap but the phone still ignores it. Do other people get this?

I have read of problems with apps crashing. I had this problem with Astro file manager but re-installing it fixed it. I have seen it with one other app but people with other phones have reported that problem under ICS.

The other annoyance was loss of some system settings even though I backed up and restored everything. Things like notification sounds changed. All of the screens had to have apps and folders put back manually - I can live with this.

I'd welcome other opinions.

TIA

Wallport

 

[psionandy]

I'd agree with the fact its pretty disapointing when compared with Gingerbread. 3D gaming performance is lousy too. Taps seemed to work, but then i hadn't really had any problems with them in gingerbread anyway. Its just that sometimes there is so much lag in the system that nothing appears to happen for a while.

I was about to roll back to gingerbread after a week, and would have done so if the Cyanogenmod9 rom hadn't been released. This features hardware acceleration for the UI and really makes it feel like a better device. Full details available from modaco.com

Now this won't be for everyone. Battery life isn't as good as it was under gingerbread, and some users have had a few problems with it. You'll also need to do a bit of reading, and root your device (which may compromise your warranty).

 

[wallport]

Yes so far I've taken the view that the warranty is something i want to keep. Think its 24 months too so may be a while before my mind changes on that one. Did you really get 100% response (eventually) to taps even with the vodafone stock Gingerbread software? I don't anyone I've read has had that experience so that would be interesting.

btw no scientific measurement but I would say my battery life is one thing which may have improved.

 

[psionandy]

well, claiming 100% of anything is near impossible... I can certainly say that I never noticed any problems with taps not responding on my device (which is nearly, but not quite the same thing, but is more subjective).

Since moving to CM9, my battery life has dipped, but performace has increased, so i'm happy to make the trade up. My alternative would have been to downgrade to GB which I was going to do. However with ICS the device just got slower, and slower running programs. Gaming was hard from day 1, especially if it involved 3D.

I did backup from GB before I went to ICS, but I decided not to restore anything (apart from my text messages) as I didn't want to bring over something that might contaminate my new device. Call it spring cleaning if you like.

 

[wallport]

Interesting that you didn't restore and I think your saying that it may have been Ok except for gaming. Has anyone else tried upgrade without restoring backup?

If I do a reset after ICS upgrade, so I go back to GB or just a raw ICS? With a lot of pain I could give in and try this.

 

[psionandy]

Gaming was very bad.. Apps like Flipboard (which I use for google reader, Facebook and twitter) were disappointingly slow. ven stuff like browsing wasn't great. ICS made it look prettier, but sucked all the life out of it. I think even Huawei acknowledged this, and so produced a method to fall back to GB. I don't think a simple reset will do it for you.

 

[wallport]

I found that when I went through the settings to put them back after the upgrade, I had set "Force GPU rendering" in developer options thinking it would speed things up. I have now switched it off and think its missing less touches. However K9 did crash earlier and it never did that in 4 months under Gingerbread. Only once so far though.

Anybody else out there want to offer an opinion of the ICS experience on G300?

 

[easychord]

I picked up a g300 second hand to use while I play a game with HTC where I send back my One S to them and they fail to repair it. Just about to go for round 3.

Anyway, I've only had it a few days but I ran through all the updates when I got it, so it's now on ICS B952. I find it generally pretty good. Occasional lags, but only a couple of seconds, which I find perfectly acceptable for a phone of this price. Battery life isn't great, it struggles to last the whole day and the battery indicator doesn't seem particularly reliable. I'm tempted to get one of these for it:
Huawei Ascend G300 3.7V 1800mAh Extended Mobile Phone Batteries