yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Chirality:
I will once you stop indiscriminately attacking everyone who uses task killers all the while being terribly misinformed yourself. I have consistently provided counterpoints to your points and you are unable to refute any of my points. Yet you remain convinced that your point is the right one. I sincerely hope it's out of stubbornness or a desire to save face, and not because you are lacking the intelligence and good sense to correct your views. My goal, after all, is not just to argue with you, but to try to get people like yourself off the bandwagon and start thinking independently and with factual evidence, not just regurgitating something you read off a blog somewhere (seriously, go read something more informative. You linked me to a blog that says "You realize that killing the Mail app will stop you from getting mail, or that killing the system clock will make you late for work" for crying out loud).

And yes, he refutes your point. He says there is a use for task killers in some instances, just as I was arguing. Whereas your argument is that there is never a use for task killers.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] lukesky:
I'm assuming when u say "app", u mean normal apps and not apps that run as services? I have used task killers previously and killed everything on the list and when I run the task killer again, I see some apps (or services, I can't really tell ) on the list again. So are the magically appearing apps appearing because they are services and not normal apps?
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] NexusDro:
I understand your analogies and explanations. But I think reloading a program from the saved state still saves people more time in the end then actively using a task killer to manually choose and kill tasks. Besides, once the killed app is reloaded, people will need to keep opening more apps before the app of interest gets killed again. If the app is frequently used, it wouldn't get killed in the first place.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] DirgeExtinction:
I remember a few weeks ago when I walked into a Verizon store, while walking passed an associate recommending "must have" apps to a customer, I heard her include Advanced Task Killer. I almost turned around to tell the customer not to install it. D:

Btw, isn't there a difference between task killers and task managers?
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Chirality:
That shouldn't be the case. Even with an advanced eviction policy algorithm that tracks usage patterns (which Android doesn't have, its eviction policy is simple LRU), the OS will not be able to accurately predict which processes the user wants to stay in memory. In most cases, the user will be able to do a better job of deciding which processes are kept in memory to maximize cache hits (a cache miss being reloading a program/paging in a paged out process) than the machine. Thus, a simple eviction policy algorithm combined with user input should be able to outperform even the most sophisticated eviction algorithms at maximizing cache hits.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] titooo7:
Chirality I got a question, hope you can answer to that:

-I got a Galaxy S, which has 512mb of ram, back in the day a group of users (let's call them A) complained that it shows less ram than what it was suppose to have: It was showing around 320 320 mb of ram but samsung advertised that it had 512mb.

-Another group of users (let's call them B) explained that from 320 to 512mb of ram are used by the system and GPU or something like that. That's cool.

-But then other users (let's call them C) started to say things like: "320mb of ram is enough, why do you want to have more ram? free memory is wasted memory. Android is smart and it will free-up the memory when you need it"

I always had doubts about what the group C said but as I dont' have any idea about how it works, I didn't comment the issue. So my question is:

If users of group C are right, why my phone starts to be laggy as hell when the free ram is around 35mb?

I can see clearly that my phone works much faster when the free ram is around 100mb than when it's around 40mb. I know that basically because I check the available ram every time the phone starts to lag.

Thanks in advance for your answer,
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Chirality:
The lag is due to two reasons.

1. Unless memory is really really low (for example, so low that the foreground process needs to be killed), Android won't actually kill background processes outright. It'll call their onStop() and onDestroy() methods so that the activity can save persistent data. So if you don't have enough free physical memory to launch a new app, Android will have to do a lot of IO operations to shut down background processes to free up RAM. These blocking operations will be perceived as lag.

2. When free physical memory is low, Android needs kill background processes as mentioned above. Then, when you go back to one of the apps that was killed, the app has to be reloaded from persistent storage into memory. This process is worsened by the fact that Android doesn't actually page processes out to disk, it actually kills them and uses process-specific methods to save state. So when you reload the process, not only does the app need to be reloaded into memory, but all its activity objects will have to be reinitialized. This is a whole lot of overhead, and will be perceived as lag when the user is switching back and forth between several apps, some of which are terminated.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] atoy74:
Advanced Task Killer...AHHHHHHHH!!! People, do the simplest of Google searches and you'll find article after article, Google engineers/devs blogs and Google+ posts from Google devs all saying to please stop the task killer madness.

They have not been necessary since 2.0 and they actually work against the system.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] mohitrocks:
Honestly, I understand that it "works against the system" but I just wanted to see how much free ram I had available without going through settings :P Thanks, I guess you guys are right; free ram is wasted ram. I just have a few questions though:

1.) The multitouch is on and off for me. Sometimes it wont recognize the second touch on the bottom right of the screen, but when I lock it then unlock it again it does recognize it... is there any fix?

2.) I know this is sort of random, but if I root my device and I want to return it to Bell, could I make it stock again with no visible sightings of root ever applied to my phone?

3.) I was using my phone normally today, and all of a sudden there were some green marks on the screen and it went into "Odin mode" and said downloading for a long time even though there was no SIM card and wifi. Is it possible that it could happen again? and frequently? And is there a fix for this issue?

Oh and also to the person who asked me how I got it so early (sorry forgot name, don't want to scroll back :P), I preordered it on the first day so I guess they maintained my priority

Thanks so much,

Mosh
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] enumBoss:
Not sure about 1 or 3, but rooting doesn't do anything to void the warranty. Just reflash the original stock ROM and you're good. Now if you're talking about the bootloader, yes you can restore that as well, but it requires using a PC with fastboot and a command line (this is what causes the unlocked padblock on boot).
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] snoopstah:
Just got mine from Virgin Mobile in Vancouver.

From what I'm seeing:

1. No problems with Wifi here... seems slightly better performance than my Galaxy S II, and vastly better than my HTC Desire.

2. Very true, and disappointing. Even at full volume, notifications are *very* quiet. The GSII is hugely better in this respect. I can see me missing notifications when the phone is in my pocket and I'm in anything other than a very quiet environment.

3. Covered in detail, but essentially, don't use task killers, don't obsess about free memory. If it's anything like the GSII (and I very much expect it to be) you never need to care.

4. No problems here, Multitouch Visualizer 2 doesn't show any weirdness. I'd be most concerned about this from your point of view, recommend you take it back and try and compare it with a store model.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] solipsism:
I just got mine 3 hours ago. I am having problems with wifi not staying connected (2 feet from my router).

Also the notification are way too quiet.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] snoopstah:
I see there's a new option (new to me, anyway) in the advanced Wireless settings -- 'Avoid poor connections'. Reading on the Google site:

http://support.google.com/ics/nexus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1649770

It says:

'Check to automatically avoid using networks with a low-quality or intermittent Internet connection.'

It's checked by default on my GN. Might be worth unchecking it and seeing if you get better stability (regardless of how good your Wifi is, as it may be an error in the detection routine)?
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] CanaganD:
You have a valid argument. However, a significant portion of the ram used by the OS is not app memory, but rather, OS cache optimizations that is used to speed up your navigation through the OS which is probably why the OP can't get a significant block of free ram.

The average app does not use more than 30 MB of data (most use less than 10MB). Go ahead, download Memory Booster and check out how much mem is used per app. Even when operating 6 tabs in the stock browser, the ram usage is 35MB for that app.

Additionally, there is a large buffer room for unlaunched apps to launch in. 100mb free? What app would require 100mb of ram? Obviously, the answer is 'games' or vid editing software etc. However.... these apps are expected to take a little longer to load, meaning that the lag effect is almost negligible. And even with 100MB of ram free, unloading background apps is done in a staggered on demand state. Not with a "all at once" scheme.

Now, I did notice that using task killer on my honeycomb tablet did make navigating a lot quicker, however I have not noticed improvements with ICS.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] solipsism:
Thanks, Ill try that. I saw the option earlier. It was turned on. Could have been what it was doing. I did try resets and forgetting and remembering the network.

Anyone know if the volume fix update for european phones applies to our model. Sorry if its the same model. Im not sure.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Chirality:
What you said is most likely true for the Galaxy Nexus with 1GB of RAM. This is why my argument for the use of task killers initially did not revolve around these out-of-memory considerations. However, it's not always the case that Android has that much buffer room with only terminated but cached processes to work with. My answer was directed toward the poster who asked about his Galaxy S with 512MB of RAM. This is a situation that I've also experienced. With 512MB of RAM, it's actually pretty common for services and running background apps to take up nearly all of it, leaving Android with no buffer room. In this state, everything in RAM is either a running service or a running background activity, and not cached OS resources or cached terminated processes as you said. In this situation, launching new apps would result in significant IO overhead.

But you are right, with 1GB of RAM, this situation should rarely arise. The OS should have enough buffer room that's filled with only cached terminated processes that it can immediately dump to load new apps.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] doormouse:
Analogy

Your ram is the clean uncluttered surface of your desk.

Your storage is a filing cabinet

Your apps are documents you want to look at/work on

You have to take files out of the file cabinet and put them on the desk to look at/work on them.

Lets say your desk is big enough to hold about 5 documents at the same time.

You pull 5 documents out of your file cabinet and place them on your desktop, your desktop is now full, there's no room left to look at anything else.

When you pull out a 6th document, The OS takes the oldest document and puts it back in the file cabinet, making room for the new document.

If you pull out the document it just put away, the OS look around and put away the next oldest least used document away to make room for that one in stead.

Whether you have out 2 documents or 5, you cannot work any faster, having free desk space may give you inner peace, but it will not make you any faster at working on a single document.

Even if the desk was too small and the file cabinet so far away as to take a long time swap pages out, your OS would still figure out what you're using least and put it away when you need to pull new stuff out, it's going to do a much better job at this than you could ever hope to, it could swap out pages many times every second if it had to.

People make the mistake of equating apps in memory as a load on the system, that's largely not the case.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Clyzm:
This RAM argument is hilarious.

Task managers are useless. Especially in ICS. ICS' multitasker has the ability to kill apps (swipe sideways, yes this DOES close the app).

Unless you're running so much crap that you're using a full 600mb+ of RAM, you shouldn't worry in the first place. Apps suspended in RAM use no processing power and hence cost no battery life.

If you magically hit the huge RAM limit allowed by the Galaxy Nexus, just swipe to close an app on the built-in multitasker. If you fail to do so, Android will close an app that you haven't used for 6 hours (since really, you have to be opening apps for about that long to use that much RAM), not something actually running in the background (i.e. your music playing, or an active download).

Again, third party task managers are useless. Using them is only wasting processing speed. End of discussion.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] vash1053:
Actually, his point is the correct one.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Chirality:
Your metaphor is a good one. But it's important to note that "what you're using least" is not the same as "what you least recently used" which is not the same as "what you will use in the near future".

Let's go with your metaphor. Say you can only have 5 documents on your desk. And while you can always retrieve more documents from the cabinet, it takes time to do so. Which 5 documents do you want on your desk to have the best productivity (best productivity defined as requiring the fewest trips to the filing cabinet)? Do you want the 5 most recently viewed documents (this is what Android does)? Or do you want the 5 most frequently viewed documents (this is what Android in theory approximates)?

The answer is neither. You want the 5 documents that you will want to look at in the future. This is why manual control can get you better performance than automatic memory management. With a sophisticated algorithm, a computer can do a pretty good job at predicting which 5 documents you will look at in the future and place them on your desk. But if the user knows exactly which 5 he will work on that day, then he can do a better job than any computer at predicting the 5: he has 100% accuracy, while no computer can achieve that.

So we know what Android does: it leaves the 5 most recently viewed documents on the desk. And we know what is the optimal situation: we want the 5 documents that we will use in the most immediate future on the desk. How do we go from the former to the latter? Let's say that the 5 most recently viewed documents are A, B, C, D, and E, in that order. Let's say that the user knows that he will use A, B, F, G, and a fifth one that he does not yet know. If the fifth one turns out to not be one of C, D, or E, then Android deciding by itself in the worst case will make 5 trips to the filing cabinet, if it kicks out A and B before C, D, and E. In the best case it makes 3 trips. If the fifth one turns out to be one of C, D, and E, then the worst case is 4 trips and the best case is 2 trips. So Android on its own take an average of 4.5 trips in the worst case and 2.5 trips in the best case. Now let's have the user help out Android. Since he knows that A and B are definitely needed, he removes C, D, and E first. Then, regardless of what the fifth turns out to be, it takes 3 trips to the cabinet for the best and worst cases. We see how, even when the user cannot predict with certainty what he needs in the future, he might improve on the Android-only outcome by improving the worst case performance at the loss of a slightly worse best case performance.

Of course, how well the user can do depends on how well the user can predict what he needs in the future. This is a key lesson here: if you know exactly which files you want on your desk, you can do best by manually managing the files on it. If you don't know what files you need in the future, you can't really do better than letting the computer handle it.

By the way, what we just did is a cache simulation. Hope that was enlightening.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] ChongoDroid:
Task managers are still useful even for ice cream sandwich.. and this is why.

Rogue apps

That's it.. no battery saving no faster phone.. just to kill rogue apps when it gets wonky. If you wanna kill multitasking do it in the developer settings.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] case0:
Lol.

Um no, just hit the multitasking button and swipe it off. And if for some reason that doesn't work then just go into settings.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Chirality:
That's also a task killer (in ICS)...

We are talking about task killers in general. What does it matter whether it's the default Android one or a third-party one? On Android you can replace what app the recent app button brings up just like how you can replace the launcher and the keyboard, etc. Why do you care whether the user is using the default one or a different one?
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] ChongoDroid:
Swiping does not kill the app you can long press and select app info and then force close if you must.

Edit: I might be wrong actually... I had read that swiping only hides the process instead of actually closing it.. it does however seem to kill the browser so maybe it does. Interesting:) I prefer that actually.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Clyzm:
Because the Android multitasker will run anyway unless you remove it. By getting a secondary task manager, you're just duplicating its capability and wasting processing power/battery life.

If you believe that a third party app is doing a better job than Google's core implementation, more power to you. I strongly believe that you're just wasting your time though.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Chirality:
I will just use the built-in app switcher because it does what I need. But I see no need to bash other people's choices. If they think a third-party one is better for them, then it's their preference.

And no, the default Android app switcher will not run if you use an alternative one. In Android, every process is broken up into Activities. Only the Activities that are being used will be created. If you never use the default app switcher, its Activity will never be created and it will not be consuming any processing power/battery life.
[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Perka:
Hi, what radio do you have? Can u dump it an share it?
[HTC Sensation] htcsensation:
Is there any option i can end the calls while im on call with power button?
[HTC Sensation] rddocke:
yes! i just dont know how to activate it lol. sorry i hated that feature cause on speaker phone, screen would sleep then id get asked to press 1 or something so i would always wake it up and end the call... lol. i was on 3.6.1 when this was goin on and after flashing the update the feature was turned off.
[Huawei Ideos X5 U8800] sbasil:
This caught my eye... :)

http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1...id-market/page__pid__594500325#entry594500325
[Motorola Droid Bionic] Nicelysedated:
So when I first got the phone I had zero connectivity issues. After about 2 weeks I started having very occasional problems with it taking awhile to re-connect to 4g going in and out of weak signal areas. Now my phone refuses to connect to a mobile data connection of any sort. W T F.....and of course this happens after having the phone for 38 days.

Running Liberty 3 2.0 atm w/ 5.5.886.

What is the latest official release so I can flash to it before calling and *****ing at Verizon?
[Motorola Droid Bionic] 1sl02:
idk bout the probs you're having other than you're rooted, etc, yada.

i'm still stock, no available updates, running sysver 5.5.886.XT875
[Motorola Droid Bionic] nstallion:
Verizon is having nationwide data issues right now. Try switching to CDMA only. If I'm on CDMA/LTE it won't connect to any data but if I switch to CDMA only I at least get 3G.
[Motorola Droid Bionic] MikeG7265:
I was thinking the same thing, I haven't had the data issues that a lot of people have with the Bionic. I was getting 34mbs download speeds this morning on 4G, then when I got to work, no data.....so I did all the known fixes, and still nothing, thought it was my phone until I read about the Verizon issue. Took me a while to get 3G running, but now it seems OK, just no 4G. Hopefully it will be back up soon.
[Motorola Droid Bionic] cmhfdisker:
Yup, the outage has been acknowledged by VZW. I think this is the 5th nationwide LTE outage I've experienced since purchasing the Tbolt on launch day back in March. It proves once again that VZW is very good at selling phones and not so good at running a reliable network.

I know that if the network where I work experienced 5 major outages in 7 months people would be fired. I'm sure the lower level engineers are hard at work fixing the problem but the Director or VP of wireless networks needs to go .... now.

As an operations guy who runs applications for a major health care system I know I plan changes in stages and must present and document validated back out procedures before I get to do the change. The change control process at VZW is SERIOUSLY BROKEN. I know what you network engineers are thinking .... someone fat-fingered a change. Nope, the severity and duration of this outage (and the ones before it) are a sign of much bigger problems.

I never thought I'd see the day where I seriously contemplated leaving a carrier because of network unreliability. Bad coverage is one thing but not knowing how to run a major network speaks to bigger problems.
[Motorola Droid Bionic] Nicelysedated:
Tried switching to cdma only first thing and no connection there either. Guy right beside me with a Samsung Charge was still getting 4g with 20mbps down.
[Motorola Droid Bionic] cmhfdisker:
For those keeping track you can add another data outage today. I'll echo my comments from above ... VZW is great at selling phones and not so good at running a reliable network.
[Motorola Droid Bionic] chazm:
Oh yeah, wasn't it Verizon that used to make fun of AT&T's network reliability? Sounds like they are following AT&T's footsteps. I just came back from Chicago which should be a strong 4G area, and I kept losing my data connection and my phone was already set to CDMA only. At home in the southeast I will occasionally lose data connectivity but not as bad a what I experienced in Chicago.
[Folio 100 General] Amdathlonuk:
Hi all.

Just got my lad a folio 100.

The wife and i both own Acer Iconias and Dell Streaks. We've had android devices since the G1 and played with them all.

However his Folio has just come up with the message 'sd card damaged' whenever it is switched on.

When i try and format the card it just does nothing.

I can get into the recovery (clockwork) but it won't let me mount the sdcard so I can't reinstall rom.

I bought this second hand and its been fine for a month. do I need to return it to Toshiba under warranty?

JJ
[Folio 100 General] Jon2555:
Is that external? CWM uses external except if you didn't install mblaster CWM version.
[Folio 100 General] Amdathlonuk:
hi.

No the message appears even if I have no card installed so it must be the internal one?

The tablet works but we have to enter the details as if its the first switch on whenever we reboot it.

Sounds like the internal storage has lost its partitions or something?

Need to try and reflash it (it was flashed when we got it) however I can't even mount an sdcard in CWM.

Any ideas? anything I can do in ADB?
[Folio 100 General] Jon2555:
Did you install mblaster's CWM version?