[Galaxy S II General] ph3n0mII:
Hi, I apologise in advance for this long post, but I like to be thorough :D

Firstly, Im just wondering if anybody else has had any of these 3 minor issues in any of the nightlies since 12th feb:

1). A few times, several nightlies apart, shortly after flashing a new nightly, the battery percentage has been a bit wonky.

For example: I flash with 50% battery, and have say 48% on first boot after flash, but the first reboot after that it's reporting 16%, but jumps back up to 48% instantly when i plug the charger in, which i did within seconds of noticing it, and nothing of the sort re-occurs at all under any circumstance until a maybe few nightlies later, and once again, only within the first few mins of flashing. Hasnt happened for the last 12 nightlies though, but just thought i'd share my experiences.

I dont see it as a problem anyway, and it could have happened more times but i wouldn't have noticed unless i just happened to be looking at the battery percentage in the miniscule window in which it occurred.

Battery life is EXCELLENT for me under all conditions (except skype video calling which makes my phone get really hot and drains 'slightly' quicker than expected) and im lucky to have not had any battery problems at all as others have posted here.

2). Occasionally at random the autobrightness stops functioning properly and will be stuck at full brightness if left on auto, but manual settings work fine and toggling auto brightnes on and off a few times doesnt help. Ive had it like 7 times since 12th feb, never before that on cyanogenmod but 3 times few times earlier on samsung stock ICS roms.

I've found the only way to get it functioning properly again is a simple reboot and then it works flawlessly again as usual.

I just got this bug again an hour ago after not having it for a couple of weeks, and it could have been unrelated, but it happened when I tested out my gps locking speed by turning on gps then opening google maps, and upon closing google maps it instantly went to full brightness, but is working perfectly again after a restart, and I can not manually reproduce it.

3). I forget how long, maybe since about 12 nightlies ago, there has bee a 'logs' folder appearing in the root of my SD. The folder always contains 3 files. the first 2 are 0 bytes and empty, i forget their exact names, boot_done_XXXXX or somethign similar, but the 3rd one is like boot_done_ril_something_xxxxxxx and get as big as 7mb by the end of the day.

I delete the folder and it doesnt come back until like 2 days later. Since the last time i deleted it it hasnt come back at all, 4 days now i think.

Im not sure if its related, but optus australia has been very unreliable in my area of adelaide between midnight and 4am on several days over the last 3 weeks, and often 'offline' with no signal during these times. At first i was worried it was my phone playing up, but when it happens my housemates sony ericsson e10i (cm7) and his galaxy tab 2 (cm10.1) also get no signal at all, even if we go down the road, and it even happens on my pocket-wifi device. It could be related to the ril crash or ril error logs maybe, but the logs first appear during the day when signal is EXCELLENT. Maybe the logs are related to network errors or bugs/optus messing with and testing out things lately as they implement their 4G or something, who knows, i just thought its strange tho.

I have a Galaxy S2 international/unbranded bought in australia, its about 14 months old and still going strong.

I never use an external SD card in my phone.

Last year, when using cm10 in its early stages, i tested out a few custom kernels for a week or 2 each, such as philz kernel, dorimanx and several versions of siyah. I didnt like them much (except siyah seemed promising) and found them to all be either buggier, slower or worse on battery than stock cyanogenmod kernel in one way or another.

When cm10.1 first came out i held off for the first few nightlies. To start fresh, i did a factory reset and wiped internal storage, then used odin to flash back to stock samsung 4.0.4 rom. I then flashed cf-root, then flashed cm10.1 and gapps using CWM, and did a factory reset before first boot. All was pretty much fine with the few expected bugs that most people had, and i updated almost every nightly since.

BTW, out of personal choice, I dont update using cmupdater, i download the latest nightly manually via pc and copy it over or sometimes I use androget on-device, then flash from cwm and always clear cache and dalvik before boot.

After the 12th feb nightly, the rom seemed to be a bit (expectedly) buggy in random ways(not all of which were caused by cyanogenmod, some were app specific, which have since been fixed with updated versions) and when cm10.1 moved to android 4.2.2, just to have the best possible chance of perfection, I did a full wipe again, but this time I i used a different approach than I usually would:

I formatted internal SD, then copied over to the root of my internal SD: the latest nightly and gapps and also copied over the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th zips from here - hxxp://d-h.st/users/ApriliaM3/?fld_id=9253#files - A few have already mentioned these GS2nuke scripts, i personally love them.

I chose to be overly paranoid and be all OCD like, so i went full on: I rebooted into CWM recovery, did a factory reset, formatted /system and /data, then flashed all 3 nuke scripts. I then flashed cm10.1 and gapps, then did another factory reset, wiped cache and dalvik cache, then formatted /emmc and rebooted. Im not sure, i probably did alot of those steps unnecessarily, maybe there was traced of something left over from my previous year of fiddling and experimenting, but since then, my phone has been running flawlessly, besides the few little bugs that are to be expected with nightly builds. Also I did get a few occasional SOD's in a few specific previous builds like 6 months ago before this OCD flash :)

Now, ive seen people discuss MTP and UMS problems lately.

My experiences are: MTP is only ever slow or buggy for me if i install samsung drivers, either via kies or from other sources. If I let windows download and install whatever drivers it wants, MTP works lovely, except sometimes i have to plug in and replug my phone several times before it shows up in explorer. I personally find it quicker and more convenient to just use the pull down menu and switch from MTP to mass storage and back rather than physically replugging my phone

I have tried using mass storage mode a few times, several weeks/nightlies apart, and for me the transfer speed either maxes out at ~2.6 MB/s, or it suffers the same random interruptions that MTP mode does, regardless of what drivers are installed. Some days it will transfer slow but rock stable, even with multi-gigabyte files or thousands of tiny ones.

The best way i've ever found to transfer by usb is either using android commander or qtadb, but i cant be bothered finding the right combination again of drivers/mode to use them lately, but i must say i used to get up to 22MB/s write speed and 17MB/s read speed using either of these programs when setup correctly, but it took a while to find the ideal setup. Maybe in the following weeks I will find out how to get that great speed back using those programs, which can be portable BTW, and I will let you's know exactly what steps i took to get it working. I tried a few days ago but none of them worked at all, coultnd find my device. Could be that i have to run adb from a command prompt first and give permission, i read something about adb changed recently.

As far as wifi transfer goes, i tested so many apps and the simplest and best 'all rounder' for me is FTP server, the one by rapfox.

Anyway, thats my experience so far, and I can't thank the cyanogenmod team enough for all their hard work and efforts. For me, this rom is 99.999% stable for me now, at least for everything i do on it :)

and Thats my 10 cents worth...