[Galaxy S 4 i9500 Original Android Development] lukair1983:
Every intelligent person on this earth has it's own preferences. For me that's number one reason, for example, why Android surpased other mobile OS's so fast, because it's (not completely, but way ahead of others) open platform, and lets any customer customize it almost in any detail if he only digs enough.

Do you have the Android OS in the exact same state, as you received it from a store, or mobile provider? Well, if you do, then you are in great minority (I'm speaking here of people who actually are not afraid to touch their phone, I'm not speaking of a person who jumps to Android from Nokia 3310). But if you don't, then it's only natural. You tweak the phone to YOUR LIKING. Same thing with me, with Andrei, and anybody else on this forum. For any person, something is very important, while for the other it's irrelevant.

Let's take you for example. From your description, you have a power source almost anywhere you are during the day. That's great. But not everybody has that. You take your settings, use your phone normaly(it's relative, but for me normaly it's AT LEAST 6 hours screen on time) and deprive yourself from those power sources, and you will be without your phone already in the afternoon. If I travel, and I'm not home for 16 hours nor any place close to a power source, or I don't want to travel with cabels all around my jacket, and I do use my phone very heavily, for me number one concern is exactly the opposite to yours, which is battery life.

Going to the device. First let me say I only pick Samsung nowadays, because of their components. I have 2 of their SSD's, and I know how much they have grown technicaly since their HDD years. So I do want their RAM components, their CPU etc, because I subjectively think all things taken into account their "guts" are the best in the industry, for the money. Well, the problem we have today, is that Samsung is not in the business of customizing their hardware to every single customer. If they did, sure... I could fix my perfectly matched phone for maybe 2/3 of the Galaxy s4 price, or 1/2 of it's price maybe, but I can't because Samsung does not do that. Wouldn't I like it? Sure, but that's not how things work at least not yet.

So why don't go with the next thing in line? Well, because the differences are too huge on the other side, and when I calculated all, I came to conclusion paying a little more is better for me than paying less and getting the next lesser phone from Galaxy series. Either the screen is smaller (or not as great as with galaxy s4), or the battery is not large enough, or the wolfson chip is missing (I'm listening to a lot of music and that was one of the main reasons why I wanted i9500 aside Andrei Kernel), or there is not enough RAM, or Android updates are not as often(quick), and you can go down the list.

Most what I did was undervolting really, which is just a fine tuning of the phone without compromising of the performance. Second thing I did was getting rid of the services I DON'T USE. Maybe I should leave them on, to pride myself on the parties showing they are running? :P IF I will need them, then what's stopping me from running them again. Nothing. But until I do, they won't be sucking up my battery life. Third, I disabled the eye features, and the other silly features of Samsung, not because I like to do it, but because I never would use them, and even if I did, from what I heard they don't exactly work 100%, and I really hate manually repairing something that should be working all the time.

Bare in mind probably over 50% of users of Perseus kernel are doing only the above without underclocking, so they are using exactly what they paid for, just tuned battery wise, without sacrificing performance (enhancing it in fact if we include getting rid of bloatware you will never use in the first place)

So if we come down to it, the only really thing I did that "destroyed" my 700$ toy was underclocking from 1.6GHz to 1.2GHz. I did this mostly because of the batter savings, but also because I don't play high demanding games, and personaly I'm not irritated when the app is opening 5% longer, than it would if I enabled 1.6GHz frequency. Maybe you do, and that's why you did overclocking, but I don't.

Lastly, noone said that doing all this stuff above is choping those features away from the phone that will never come back. Who said that. If I come into a situation (say I would like to play a Nintendo DS Game that will need a powerful cpu because it is badly optimized for the emulator) then I can open Synapse, and give the game extra juice it needs.

Now, like I've said before, for you performance is your number one concern, for me it's battery life. IF mobile world would implement a new power source, say a battery with 10x the capacity of today's, and with equal amount of charging time, would I still do all those things above? Some yes (that wouldn't affect performance - undervolting, or getting rid of all the samsung **** I don't use, or some stupid services), some don't. I might even overclock it. But that's not the present. The present is, we get less than a day (say 18 hours on average when you don't sleep) when we use the phone heavily.

I'd like to join HassanM and just repeat myself (again and again), that Andrei you are doing fantastic job, and don't forget there are a lot of people who appriciate greatly what you're doing for the community, and those users who "buy Mercedes, but use it only like an old Ford" ;)