[Acer Iconia A500] Pyra Gorgon:
Gorgon-rated: ICS

Thank you for creating this thread. I love to offer feedback.

I was just responding in the thread about browsers dying, and had a thing or three to say there about the ICS.

I spent nearly 9 months on HC. When I bought my iconia a500, it had the initial release of the Honeycomb. During my time on that ROM, it updated twice. The first OTA choked like 5 times before it decided to install. The last OTA just sprung on me. I did not notice any differences to the system.

I rooted my iconia after 3.2...and it worked great. Except for two persistent problems that plagued my tablet since day 1:

A: ALL WEB BROWSERS would auto-die intermittently during usage. The HC stock browser was the absolute worst culprit. I got to the point I refused to even bother with it, instead opting for Opera, which only crashed 1/5 of the time. Dolphin would crash and burn too. I removed it from my device.

B: My Motorola bluetooth keyboard would act stupid on me with HC, and also with the ICS. It would stop working, keys would continue to post typeset without actually typing, the keyboard would disconnect from the tablet. Basically, the pairing was unreliable and unresponsive.

Now on ICS, I had the same two problems. So I rooted the ICS, or so I thought. I only had a "make believe root"....you know...root check SAYS you have root, but when you try and mount the system as writable, it would say "no no you dont". I could not delete Acer crapware (I despise apps that come pre-loaded without the ability to remove them)

That is one thing I hate more than anything about these stock ROM's....lack of root out of the box. ICS followed suit with all previous android flavors. Since learning all this, I refuse to buy any product that has a ROM that is unrootable or unhackable. I hope these OEM's are taking notice of this. We are talking $$$ in a competitve marketplace here.

I need a ROM that is snappy, fast, 100% reliable and flawlessly runs Internet, chat apps, and 100% control over file management and file opening/transfer for mobile computing. I don't give a tiddle about computer games, and would rather have more space for email-based inter-connectivity to cloud applications running in Microsoft environments. (Like getting my Outlook to work on my tablet) ICS and HC did not satisfy those requirements for me. I want video and audio to work when I tap the app. Anything less is a fail.

I hated ICS more passionately than I did Windows Vista. I hated ICS so much that it motivated me to study and learn how to break it and remove it. Guess what? I did. :D

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On a side note, something I can never grasp....

WTF is this android mindset of manufacturers that dont offer root level access to their ROM's anyways? Compound ontop of that this utter B.S. of "rooting voids your warranty"?!?!?!?!

The ROM has absolutely squat to do with hardware level malfunctioning. Imagine if Microsoft put that line of crap out there??? Yet, Android gets away with this nonsense.

Imagine if Windows or OsX and up denied you admin privilege out of the box. Imagine having a crapware filled desktop and no way to remove it. People would riot against that. Yet here in Android-land it seems to be status quo to get unrooted devices and then have tons of headache to figure out a way to hack it and own it. What is this? Some sort of stupid techie game between developers/hackers and manufacturer's developer's and vendors???

It's headache nonsense to typical users that have fifty billion things going on in life and like the last thing most people need to bother with is fussing with their new tablet or phone so they can get it to perform the way they want.

Soapbox over. Had to vent that. Really.