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Will ICS bring along improved performance?

L

lucasv1179

Newbie
I got my wifi only tab a week ago and am a bit disappointed with general performance.

Performance within apps is generally fine, what bothers me is the sluggishness of switching between apps, multitasking, moving between home screen and app drawer, etc.
It seems the tab needs a lot more memory than it has.

I paid a lot for this tablet and was hoping to get a flawless performance in par with an iPad 2 or my Galaxy S II.

What keeps me optimistic is the imminent release of ICS. So, can we expect a definite performance improvement? What do you guys think?
 
ICS is out there and I can say it has brought massive improvements to speed on this device.
It is only available for those that don't mind taking the risk and flashing it.

You will not be disappointed with ICS when it's released.
 
LoyalServant said:
ICS is out there and I can say it has brought massive improvements to speed on this device.
It is only available for those that don't mind taking the risk and flashing it.

You will not be disappointed with ICS when it's released.
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You've put my mind at ease. I can't wait for it to release. Thanks for the reply!
 
Szadzik said:
1. No one know what ICS is going to bring.
2. Use an alternative home launcher and it will be much faster.
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What home launcher do you recommend? As the OP stated, the lag switching between screens or launching certain apps is my largest complaint.
 
Are you using a live wallpaper on your Galaxy Tab?

I notice that live wallpapers really seem to impact performance switching between home screens and different apps. Going with a static wallpaper seems to make things work much more smoothly.

-SF
 
I went to best buy this weekend and tried out the TF Prime and the difference in speed is very noticable. I cant believe how much faster the prime is then the gtab, i still love my tab but whew. Quick question, is honeycomb taking full advantage of the tabs dual cores and if not will ics be taking advantage of them?
 
The galaxy tab is most definitely NOT taking full advantage of the capabilities of the dual cores, there are known issues doing any sort of hardware acceleration on video decoding, and I'm sure there's plenty of other things that aren't working cleanly in honeycomb. ICS will hopefully fix those issues, because the hardware is there, it's just not being used (fully)
 
erjennin said:
What home launcher do you recommend? As the OP stated, the lag switching between screens or launching certain apps is my largest complaint.
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I recommend Zeam. It is supposedly not compatible with this device, but as you can see from the screen shot below, it is. I have contacted the developer about getting this corrected, but no apparent action has been taken (though the launcher itself is still being actively supported and updated).
SC20111225-123120.jpg


No lag with this launcher... even with several interactive widgets loaded on the other screens.
 
lucasv1179 said:
You've put my mind at ease. I can't wait for it to release. Thanks for the reply!
Click to expand...
I concur. ICS is the first official release from Android that has hardware acceleration built into the system. This acceleration will greatly improve graphics performance, and that is 90% of the lag one may see on any tablet.
 
bfksc said:
I concur. ICS is the first official release from Android that has hardware acceleration built into the system. This acceleration will greatly improve graphics performance, and that is 90% of the lag one may see on any tablet.
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What is your source of information for this 90% figure? It seems odd that many people (myself included) see all lag disappear when they switch to a different launcher, which obviously has nothing to do with harware accelleration.
 
How can I get a launcher to keep my current layout? I've tried GO launcher but it removes all my apps from my home screen and there's no obvious way to access the shortcuts/widgets area and put them back. I've noticed the increase in smoothness and speed and would like to take advantage of that.
 
I don't know if is my imagination or not, but I installed GO Launcher but not running it, and it seems to be running a lot smoother. I guess the only way to know for sure is to get used to this, then uninstall it and DDR if it gets noticeably chopper again.
 
Mr. Lucky said:
What is your source of information for this 90% figure? It seems odd that many people (myself included) see all lag disappear when they switch to a different launcher, which obviously has nothing to do with harware accelleration.
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I pulled the 90% figure out of my butt, although it's probably close to the actual value. Hardware acceleration will speed up the graphics quite a bit, and screen drawing graphics is probably where any device lag is occuring. Remember that single core tablets running Android work just fine too, so a dual core should be much faster and have less lag. But if it does have lag, it's likely a graphics issue.

As for other launchers showing less lag, it's due to two reasons:

1 - They don't have the desktop interaction that TouchWiz incorporates into its overlay. That overlay has a lot of heavy interaction which will slow things down a bit. Remove that interaction code and things get faster.

2 - I don't really have any bad lag issues with my Tab. Flicking from screen to screen is fast and responsive, just like flicking through photos in the viewer. However, there is a deliberate "bounce" effect to how pages/photos are flicked from side to side that makes it appear to have some lag. If you remove that "bounce" effect (which many of these launchers may do), then it appears faster or less laggy. Think of turning off the "eye candy" in Ubuntu or Windows, and the computer seems much more responsive. It's not really any faster in a processing sense, but the more instant reaction to the desktop makes it SEEM faster.

I'll be interested in seeing how the ICS update with TouchWiz works, that's for sure.
:D
 
Btw, just to update, yes, my tab is definitely running smoother, even though I'm not actually running GO Launcher EX. I just have it installed. Give it a shot.
 
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