[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] Zettai:
Hi everyone,

I have my GSM Galaxy Nexus for nearly 2 months, and I'm really pleased with this phone, which replace my old yet good Galaxy S. The device is snappy, smooth, I can play every games and watch nearly every movie files I want etc, perfect for me, especially with its huge wide screen.

That said, I always try to find a little thing to reproach to my phone. Not so easy, but even so, I find something which can be a bit annoying.

We all use our launcher a lot, obviously, it is like the core/bridge app of our Android device. I noticed that the 4.0 launcher has some performances problems, let me explain you how to easily reproduce them (close all your apps in order to have the best performance as possible) :

-The transition between the app-drawer and the desktop panels can be not so smooth as it should with such a powerful device. Try to go in and out the app-drawer, you will notice that sometimes it lag, sometimes not. I asked myself why it behave like that, and I may have found the problem. When you enter in the app-drawer or when you flip your panels on the desktop or in the app-drawer, you surely have notice this little blue bar at the bottom at the screen, which indicate you where you are. If you try to go in/out the app-drawer while this bar is on the screen, the transition will be laggy. Just wait it disappear, and it will be smooth (if not, do it 2-3 more time, and it should be good).

-When you clicked on a widget in the app-drawer, a message will pop out about how to add it to your homescreen blablabla. It also notice that if you try to flip your panel in the appdrawer or the desktop while the message is on the screen, everything will be laggy, especially in the app-drawer, it will have horrible performance, but as soon as this message disappear, everything become smooth like before.

Why ? It don't know. At first, I thought the problem comes from the launcher, but maybe not. Indeed, if messages like the one I talked about above appear anywhere while you're using your device, like in the Web Browser for example, it will lag, maybe less than in the launcher, but it will.

So what ? Maybe the launcher is not fully hardware accelerated, or it lack optimizations ? It may be the case, but I try to run CM9 on my old Galaxy S, and it doesn't have such problems (the performance will depend on the old hardware itself), it is also the same on a friend's Galaxy SII, its launcher is butter-smooth even if you do want I explain.

Is the OMAP4460 or the PowerVR SGX540 too bad to run it correctly ? I doubt it is the case, since my 2 years old Galaxy S run it good. Indeed, even if I overclocked my device to 1400MHz with the "performance" governor, only the 1st case problem will be partially solved, the 2nd one will still make your device run like crap.

Since those lags can appear everywhere if above conditions are met, the problem may be that our phone can't run correctly if there are 2 "layers" on the screen, the message on foreground and your launcher on background for example. It is probably the case, and even if I study IT, I can't explain it really well, sorry :D

I obviously try a lot of ROMS : Stock 4.0.2/3/4, AOKP, CM9, ARHD, with stock and custom kernels, and they all have the same problem. If you want to have better performance, try to put the minimal CPU frequence to 700MHz, you will maybe lose 30 minutes of battery, but it is globally more usable if you want my opinion.

Do you experiment the same problems ? Have you any ideas about how to solve them ? Thanks to read me !

PS : The Galaxy Nexus also has performances problems if you are using it in landscape position. Everything will be less smooth and snappy. The best example is if you use the app-drawer, it back absolutely unusable.