[Motorola Droid RAZR] krestian:
CM11 vs LS - 1st impressions

OK so... reporting from the border, so to speak. I spent the entire weekend (flashed fri night) on LiquidSmooth and these are my impressions:

- overall better reponse than in CM. Feels agile and snappy, almost no lag, no black screens. Calling the camera from the lock screen (via widget - swype left) was having me waiting long enough in my latest CM11 so that by the time the cam was ready, the picture was gone - not here.

- apps and widgets are all the same in LS than what and which I had in CM11. That's as far as the comparison is fair, because I didn't honestly go back to CM clean for a clean-to-clean roundup. I'm liking this one enough to keep it for a while.

- orange bars, (UTMS / XT910 here), been having them about the same as in CM11, and it appears that the battery usage increase associated with these is also on par.

- I had an issue with Wifi since ever with CM11, consisting on Wifi randomly getting locked in a limbo when trying to activate it - nothing would fix it except for a reboot. Have yet to find this happening in LS, but due to its random nature will need some more time before I can say for certain it's not there.

- Battery life is about the same as in latest CM. Back in May or maybe early June, I was having spectacular battery life on CM, reaching up to 30 hours between charges with moderate use. But then it all came down, and I was having hard drops going down of ~40%. It would drop to 18%, then 14%, then all the way to 4%. I was blaming this to some unaccurate battery callibration, but my attempts to callibrate it didn't improve its behavior. I'm having results consistent with this also with LS, so it seems that one or more of the cells in the battery have died. Too soon for my taste, I've had this phone for just over a year, but CM does not appear to be to blame.

- Lastest CM was giving me some long GPS sat locks. Seems to be the same with LS.

- Finally, LS features a few handy little thingies that I feel comfortable with, and were not included in CM unless you used third-party widgets or Xposed:

- LS has a direct access to lock the screen from an icon on the desktop. I was using a Playstore app for this, which I have done without. One less widget, one more MB free in RAM. You can also set an icon on the power strip for this, and there's also one to reboot the device (another third-party app gone) :victory:

- LS has notification transparency out of the box, which I had some time back using Xposed. Nice thing to have without having to install Xposed, which had me doubting about its general stability. There's also a fancy swype gesture in the notifications to quick-switch back and forth between notifications and the power panel. There's also a traffic meter in the notification bar, next to the clock and signal icon, again Xposed-free.

- LS has some pretty heads-up features, such as waking the screen when new notifications arrive (unless it's pocketed). Also nice to have, especially when you have the phone docked or on the desk while at work. Also nice to have, are the notifications in the lock screen, out of the box, no Xposed, no nothing else required.

- There is the fashionable set of features such as halo, pie, bubbles, right-swype launcher and all that stuff many like but that I don't find extremely useful. If you're into any of these, they come out of the box with LS.

- And last but not least, one I like a lot and also comes out of the box:

Well, this works exactly like this in LS. Nice to pull the phone from the pocket / pouch and have the lockscreen there ready, with all the latest notifications. A time, and power button saver.

Hope you guys find this helpful. I think I will be keeping this one and watching how it goes for a few more days before giving a final thumbs either way, but so far it's been a pleasant surprise, if you feel like trying it as well. Enjoy!