[Atrix 4G Android Development] moeburn:
20 Days of using CM10.1 for Atrix

I installed this ROM on July 30th, and I uninstalled it and reverted to my backup today. Here's why:

It's a great ROM, overall, and I'm really impressed by the progress you guys have achieved, especially over the last 20 days! However, keeping up with the daily updates was too much of a hassle, and even with the latest updates, the ROM wasn't in a daily-useable-state:

- Gaming lag: While its not the same horrid lag that I got when I last tried the CM10.1 for Atrix without Hardware Acceleration, it is very interesting: It appears every time a game tries to play a sound, the game lags. Otherwise, you get the same fluid, fast, responsive performance in both 2D and 3D games that you would expect from any ROM. But as soon as you, for example, fire your gun in an FPS, or crash into a wall in a flying game, or get a candy in Cut The Rope, the game lags for 500ms-1500ms (my estimate). I don't know if this is because the game does not load the sounds into memory, but rather reads the data from the EMMC on the fly, and the file system code in the kernel isn't up-to-speed yet, but it definitely made most games unplayable.

- App lag: There were many more occurences in this ROM than in the CM7 ROM where an app would freeze up for a good 5 seconds. For example, the built in texting/"Messaging" app. When typing out a message, it would freeze for about 5 seconds, then all of the sudden your typed message would appear on the screen all at once. Very frustrating. Sometimes longer than 5 seconds.

- Battery life: I was getting horrid battery life until I read the message on the official Linuxmobile site, that said to delete the Fastdormancy.apk. So I did some research on it, and apparently, if your service provider does not support Fast Dormancy, while your phone tries to use it, you get horrible battery life. However, that being said, I am on the Bell Canada network. And they do officially claim to support Fast Dormancy. Furthermore, I was not getting any kernel-level wake-locks or wake-events when my phone was in sleep mode, which is apparently the first and only sign that Fastdormancy.apk is ruining your battery life. Nonetheless, I deleted Fastdormancy.apk and rebooted, and strangely enough, my battery life issues were solved. I was getting nearly the same battery life (and nearly the same delta-time values between each % battery level change) once it was deleted. Very strange, since given the fact that Bell supports it, and I didn't have any kernel wake events in my log, it shouldn't have been the cause.

- HDMI Video: Not a ROM-killer, I would have enjoyed this ROM just fine if the lag issues were fixed and we never got HDMI video. I just like knowing that, if I need to, I can have an all-in-one media center computer on the go, just by having my phone and my HDMI cable on me at all times.

It's for these reasons that, in its current state, this ROM just isn't finished enough to use on a day-to-day basis. But hey, no one ever claimed it was finished :silly: And I never expected it to be. Just thought I'd share my experiences with you folks, is all.

Thanks for all your hard work, CM10.1-Atrix-team!

---------- Post added at 01:19 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:58 AM ----------

Read the official CM10.1-Atrix page:

http://www.linuxmobile.org/atrix/cm10-1

Notably: "IMPORTANT: If your battery gets hot, or its time is very short, try to remove the file /system/app/FastDormancy.apk."

EVEN IF your carrier supports Fast Dormancy. Mine, Bell Canada, does, and yet I was getting horrid battery life until I deleted FastDormancy.apk and rebooted.

When your phone says it is only charging to 88%, and batteryfix lets it charge to 100%, those are actually the same charge states. They both mean that your battery is 100% charged. What has happened, is that the battery level code has gotten confused as to what the 100% battery level is, and ravilov's BatteryFix helps remind it that 88% is actually 100%.

Mine too, at around 30%, suddenly and instantly drops to 15%. This is because of lithium battery wear, and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it, other than buying a new battery on ebay (and they're pretty cheap, $5-$15). Just remember than when you have 30% battery left, you actually only have 16%. (or 21% or whatever your case may be).

Also,

you'd be wise to install Cool Tool - System Stats, it can show you your battery discharge rate in milliamps

that you can have on top of the notification bar at all times (except in fullscreen games and videos). It is an estimate, since the Atrix battery does not report milliamp discharge rate, but it will be more accurate than your "3% per hour vs 1% per hour" discharge rate estimates:

Install CoolTool. Run it. Go to the 'labels' tab, make sure "Battery mA (estimated)" is checked. Go to 'advanced' tab, check "Force Estimated Current". Scroll down on the same advanced tab, and look for the "Battery Capacity (mAh)" field. Enter in your Atrix's battery capacity mAh. If you have the stock battery (the BH6X), you can either take the battery out to read the mAh values (but they're on the back, this means turning your device off :( ), but I'll tell you what mine says: Enter in 1930 mAh if the battery is brand new (they call this the 'typical' mAh), or enter in 1880 mAh if the battery is a couple years old (they call this the minimum mAh). Then, every time the battery level goes down by 1%, Cool Tool will tell you the estimated average current draw in mA in the time period of that 1% of battery. I have confirmed the values by hooking up my multimeter to the battery and measuring the actual current draw; they are very very close for just a mathematical estimate.

Use these milliamp estimates to tell you whether or not your phone is drawing more or less battery juice for different apps/settings! For example, I only get about -60 to -75mA when the phone is in sleep mode, but I've been able to push it all the way up to -893mA by playing a video in MX Player, with the volume at max, and the rear flash light/torch turned on "high" all at once! Divide your battery's mAh (the number you entered above) by the -mA number that cool tool reports, and that will tell you the number of hours that you can run the phone at that level of battery usage. For example, by the aforementioned estimates, I could run the phone for about 25 hours in sleep mode, but if I tried to play a video in MX Player with the volume at max and the flashlight turned on all at once, the entire battery would only last about 2 hours. MATH! :)