[Lenovo K900] GDikov:
General impressions and questions

Hello and Happy New Year to all,

I have owned a K900 for almost a month now and I can say that I have a lot of mixed feelings about the device.

Hardware wise - it is just a breath of fresh air and a great alternative to all the "famous" brands. Software wise - just feels immature...I cannot imagine how such a powerful device can have such an awful lag even when scrolling through the settings menus.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, I have tried 3 different ROMs already:

1. Stock ROW 131010 (non-root) which came with Gapps out of the box. (I purchased the device from the UAE by the way). Issues were battery drain, overheating, pour quality voice calls most of the time. Somehow it consumed 70% of the RAM minimum. Camera was great though - I was really impressed by that.

2. VibeROM v4 (rooted) - flashed with the sdfuse method. Nice ROM but still laggy....battery drain and overheating still there. RAM usage however is greatly improved and I loved the inverted Play Store interface. The real problem for me came with the camera quality - auto focus was out of the window...no matter what I did with the settings the photos were out of focus, very grainy and the low light quality was even worse. With the stock ROM and camera app I used to take surprisingly good photos at very low light...The camera app with VibeROM is called SnapIT for some reason and looks exactly like the SuperCamera app. First I thought there is a problem with this app and tried to replace it with the SuperCamera app, but no matter what I did I was unable to do that. So the camera problem was the reason I gave up on VibeROM, which otherwise seemed like a great alternative to the stock ROM.

3. ROW 130708 - rooted, with the Lenovo Launcher completely replaced by Nova Launcher, LeSafe and Power manager are completely removed as well. SuperSU is used to manage root access. RAM usage is very good and I have somehow managed to deal with the battery drain by using Greenify and screen filter apps. Overheating doesn't seem to be that much as well. The camera quality is an improvement from VibeROM but not nearly as good as the original experience I had. The Contact manager is a complete mess however. It stops every time I end a call and it is almost impossible to sync contacts via Google account without crashing the Contact Manager. I tried clearing cache and data but nothing helped.

Bottom line is I still like the device and want to continue using it and as much as I hate to do it I am ready to give up having it rooted. As I have the option to get the latest update via OTA, I have a few noob questions and I would really appreciate some advice.

1. Is it safe to just update via OTA or do I have to unroot first (SuperSU has this option)?

2. Can I leave a flashable image in the sdfuse folder in case something goes wrong with the OTA upgrade and I am stuck in Bootloader, or I must completely remove the sdfuse folder? (I really wish to avoid having to use the MFT)

3. Are other people experiencing the same issues with the camera, or am I just imagining things?

4. Is there actually a way to keep root after the OTA upgrade?

Please excuse my longish post and uneducated questions, but I really just want to enjoy this device as much as currently possible...

Regards,