Is it time for a new DROID?

[iHope]

I'm an original droid owner -- bought the first day it came out and have loved it. I've had the phone for over 2 years now, and its starting to get a little sluggish / buggy / etc. For example, yesterday my wife called and even though I answered the phone -- it kept ringing and vibrating. It will also freeze from time-to-time. When its not acting up, its still a great phone.

I'm wondering if its time to get a new phone or modify this one. I did root it awhile back and am using Bugless Beast. I have overclocked it, too. I'm wondering if the hardware is just aging a bit and its time to upgrade.

Anyone out there still have an original Droid that is still 'good as new'? What ROM are you running?

 

[brad92]

Try wiping cache and dalvik cache. You might try a data wipe and reinstalling your ROM for a clean start.

X

 

[kapitankoz]

I too am an OG Droid owner and I have had some sucess preventing these types of performance bugs by increasing the minimum clock frequency of the CPU to 250. This has worked for both my wife's Droid 1 and my own. We have had both since December of 2009, and I started to notice those same performance issues about 5 months ago. Both devices are rooted and running SteelDroid 9.0. I hope this helps.

 

[JeffDenver]

I'm wondering if its time to get a new phone or modify this one. I did root it awhile back and am using Bugless Beast. I have overclocked it, too. I'm wondering if the hardware is just aging a bit and its time to upgrade.

Anyone out there still have an original Droid that is still 'good as new'? What ROM are you running?

Its time for a new phone.

My old Droid is fully rooted and ROMed and overclocked to 1ghz. But the new phones still run circles around it. One big weakness of the original Droid was it's tiny RAM...it only has 256 megs of RAM and that is just not enough anymore. One immediate difference you will notice with the new phones is that there are no "load" times anymore. I saw this especially with eBooks. Stuff just appears when you click on it. Thats not the CPU...thats the RAM. You can overclock the original Droid and tweak it to make it run better than factory, but no amount of tweaking will make up for that RAM shortcoming.

I'd say get a new phone and keep the Droid 1 as a backup.

 

[soulshot96]

If you get I new phone I recommend the nexus.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus

 

[JeffDenver]

If you get a Nexus you will have to learn to live without SD. On my Droid 1 I used SD a lot. To transfer my stuff to my Rezound all I did was swap SD cards...took about 2 minutes.

 

[syndicate0017]

If you get a Nexus you will have to learn to live without SD. On my Droid 1 I used SD a lot. To transfer my stuff to my Rezound all I did was swap SD cards...took about 2 minutes.

Its really no big deal for me. Just back everything up to my computer and transfer my files over. Kind of a hassle, but it's not a huge issue for me. Plus some devs are working on a way to partition the virtual memory to allow some memory to be used as mass storage.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

[jrredho]

Anyone out there still have an original Droid that is still 'good as new'? What ROM are you running?

iHope, you sound like you've gone down exactly the same path I found myself on two months ago. And I was having exactly the same problem with Gingerbread ROMs and continuous ringing during phone calls, among other things; the most annoying being flakey 3g/1x handoffs in fringe reception areas that resulted in a loss of data or phone connectivity.

As a last-ditch alternative to throwing down for another phone, I went here: Sholes - Downloads and downloaded the SBF file for the latest stock ROM, and using instructions here: http://www.droidforums.net/forum/droid-labs/74028-root-droid-1-regardless-os-version.html I went back to the scratch, latest Verizon-supported ROM. Of course I then flashed a custom recovery and rooted so that I could overclock the stick kernel and use Titanium Backup.

What was I left with? A phone with super-stable phone and data connectivity, no problems with ringing while using the phone, and long battery life. I don't miss the small bells and whistles of GB at all. It's extended my OG Droid's life already by three months while I wait for Verizon to sort out this whole 4g authentication fiasco. Of course I did not make my Droid have more memory or make it faster...

Anyway, that's all for what it's worth; I hope it's a useful perspective. Good luck with whichever route to resolution you choose.

cheers,
john

 

[Ghostwheel]

I'm still on my original D1, bought in Jan. 2010, and running it bone stock no less. I occasionally get the ring issue you describe, as well as the serious screen redraw slowdown - it sometimes takes over 30 seconds for my homescreen icons to appear after closing an app. I've been toying with the idea of rooting, and also eying the RAZR. I almost feel bad looking at new phones, since this one has been such a trouper for me, but I think as stated above that the 256M RAM limitation is finally starting to steer it toward obsolescence.

 

[androidlearner]

I'm still on my original D1, bought in Jan. 2010, and running it bone stock no less. I occasionally get the ring issue you describe, as well as the serious screen redraw slowdown - it sometimes takes over 30 seconds for my homescreen icons to appear after closing an app. I've been toying with the idea of rooting, and also eying the RAZR. I almost feel bad looking at new phones, since this one has been such a trouper for me, but I think as stated above that the 256M RAM limitation is finally starting to steer it toward obsolescence.

Root it and find a good ROM. That redraw issue is one of many reasons I rooted in the first place. Haven't regretted it since!

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

[TheDroidURLookinFor]

Yes...It is time.

 

[floydfollower13]

Gave up my D1 when Bionic was released. Gave it to my mom and it still runs like the first day it was released. It is still one of my favorite phones! If you fix it or by a newer phone, I think you will be pleased. But I miss my very first smartphone and easily the greatest!

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using DroidForums

 

[vey]

Unlike you guys, I ain't loaded and this phone is new to me, so it's pretty funny listening to talk about the new phones being so much better than the old ones. I tried GB and all I got was headaches with the phone not ringing and the camera not working. The GB incremental changes were way less important than advertised.

My neighbor's newish GB phone is much slower than mine and it has nothing to do with the amount of RAM or CPU -- it has everything to do with his choice of apps. I have noticed that certain apps make my screens refresh very slowly, while others, even if they are piggy, don't.

Coming to this phone after two OS upgrades, after rooting is easy as one click, after all sorts of custom ROMs, after tons of software is available and after this thing has been hacked to death means there is not much sense of adventure left. I think you guys are really looking for a new adventure 'cause you are bored with this phone.

Ice Cream promises all sorts of new obstacles to phone bliss. Maybe you should wait until there are more phones for that being made. In the mean time, make a list of your apps, take the phone back to "stock" which is 2.2.3 in case you have lost track by now by running all those custom ROMs, root it -- 2.2.3 needs superoneclick 1.7 to work. Then start adding apps in one at a time and observing what happens after each app is added. added: I forgot to mention not to use a backup -- start from scratch -- because the backup will have all your mistakes in it.

You could be surprised.

 

[JeffDenver]

Unlike you guys, I ain't loaded and this phone is new to me, so it's pretty funny listening to talk about the new phones being so much better than the old ones. I tried GB and all I got was headaches with the phone not ringing and the camera not working. The GB incremental changes were way less important than advertised.

My neighbor's newish GB phone is much slower than mine and it has nothing to do with the amount of RAM or CPU -- it has everything to do with his choice of apps. I have noticed that certain apps make my screens refresh very slowly, while others, even if they are piggy, don't.

What phone does he have? In my experience, the two biggest factors in speed are CPU and RAM.

(And you dont need to be loaded to afford a new $200 phone every 20 months IMO)

Coming to this phone after two OS upgrades, after rooting is easy as one click, after all sorts of custom ROMs, after tons of software is available and after this thing has been hacked to death means there is not much sense of adventure left. I think you guys are really looking for a new adventure 'cause you are bored with this phone.

I was looking for a lagless phone. The Droid 1 was awesome, but it had HORRIBLE load times by modern standards. You could not tweak it enough to get rid of them...all you could do was mitigate it.

I rooted my Droid 1 to be able to optimize it for that very reason. With the Rezound, there is no longer a need to root. Out of the box it does more (or at least does it faster) than my Droid 1 ever did, even fully tweaked and overclocked. This had nothing to do with "adventure" for me. My phone is a tool. When I bought a new one I upgraded to a better tool.

Ice Cream promises all sorts of new obstacles to phone bliss.

GB is very polished on my phone. I dont ever have to upgrade unless I want to. But I cant think of anything that GB does that ICS will not do as well or better. Do you have any examples of those obsticals?

 

[vey]

What phone does he have? In my experience, the two biggest factors in speed are CPU and RAM.
(And you dont need to be loaded to afford a new $200 phone every 20 months IMO)

My neighbor doesn't seem to think $200 is too much, and he doesn't think ~$75 a month is too much, either. But I sure do. My monthly bill was about $5 a month before I got this phone. Now I am up to $12 a month.

I think he is on his third Sprint Android phone. I'm not sure which phone he has now, but I know it is less than 6 months old and the speakers are blown. He doesn't root or tweak his phones so replacing a phone is a little painful for him. Seems like unless a phone is rooted, it is hard to back it up fully. Will that change in ICS?

I had a play with his phone and his newish untweaked phone was about as fast as my tweaked OG. As I said, because I am in the doing more with less, I tweak like crazy and I have seen my phone start lagging after I installed certain apps. I don't overclock and after my bad experience with GB, I'm leaving custom roms alone.

Android for me is a bit of a disappointment. My old (built circa 2006) WM5 based phone had a 520 MHz CPU and only 64MB of RAM (plus 128MB internal memory). Yet there were things it did better than Android with ooodles of RAM (comparatively) can do. Voice control for 100% handsfree dialing worked fine without a data connection for one thing.

Another is A/V. The makers of The Core Media Player (previously TCPMP) tried, but so far are unable to port the app to Android the way they did for the iphone, palm and symbian based phones. There is a very long list of video codecs that app can play. The Core Pocket Media Player - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia It's really amazing. Close watchers of the CoreAV company say the company hired android developers, but gave up after six months. I see nothing that even comes close to the Core Media Player for Android.

Bluetooth support in Android is miserable.

I see these "features" or lack of them as obstacles to be overcome. Will ICS solve them?