[Verizon Droid Charge] lazarus0000:
I've been experimenting with this issue for a LONG time now & I don't have an answer but I do have more data to supply.

My fiancée insists that we rock the same phone @ all times. She has no geek DNA whatsoever and relies on me for any / all tech support (I keep telling her that's a serious over confidence in my abilities as well as a horribly poor choice...). As a result, we both have Charges (now, both S3s) and mine has been Rooted / ROMed from the start while she has been total stock from day 1. The only adaptation she has made @ all is using GO Launcher.

So, she has served as an excellent control throughout this experience. And I can say, without any hesitation or doubt, that her experience has been much poorer than has mine. With the earlier ROMs (Gummy, Eclipse, etc...) we had comparable experiences though my phone had a much better user interface & options she never had a clue of. But with later iterations of the Samsung adaptations to Android, my experience has ALWAYS been significantly better than hers.

I occasionally had the issues with the phone lagging when I wanted to make a call or whatever but she was doing restarts constantly including multiple battery pulls every day. Her phone hot boots often, force closes apps all the time & just generally makes trouble for her all day, every day.

Somewhere on this forum, someone posited that they believe it's just a case of the hardware not being able to handle the performance expectations of Gingerbread. I know that on Eclair & Froyo, these phones were super snappy & never had issues like this. But when we started rocking the Gingerbread experience, performance took a serious hit & continued to get worse. It's my theory that the earlier posts are looking @ this issue backwards - DWith & Tweaked have made this phone much more usable than the stock experience.

We have a tendency to look @ a home brewed ROM as an amateur attempt. But something to remember... Most of the Devs here are either already employed in the industry or are serious tinkerers who know as much or more than people who do this for a living. And, all the ROMs for this phone are just ("just," HA!) adaptations of closed source code issued by those iron fisted whore mongers @ Samsung (no disrespect intended....). So it's not like our Devs are huddled over glowing monitors developing code through the wee hours of the morning while having more caffeine than hemoglobin in their blood (and yes, I know there's a few of you out there like that but that's because that's what you LOVE, not, as far as I know, because it's necessary!). The people who did that work are, for the most part, people with Google & Samsung.

So, my theory is just what I've said. These phones have a life cycle just like a desktop or a laptop. And just like with an old 8086, you're not gonna be running Windows 8. I think we've reached the hardware maximum for this platform. Had I kept the phone any longer, I was actually planning on rolling back the updates to Froyo. I think that would have done the trick. Though I may have still run into difficulties as the apps are expecting a minimum of Gingerbread and possibly being optimized for ICS or even Jellybean.

Just my $0.02 worth...