[Optimus One, P500 Android Development] linuxgeex:
Going from locked Froyo LG P500 to LineageOS 11.0 - Part III

Here's my experiences over 24 hours of use. LineageOS/CM11 provides a lot of creature comforts that Froyo didn't have, and that I painfully missed. There's also a huge amount of peace of mind running software that's been recently security patched!

First, the good news:

o profiles! OMG living without this was hell!

o much smarter dialer

o configurable voice dialing from lock screen

o custom ring tones and SMS alerts per contact/number

o SMS and call blocking.

o custom font sizes in messaging app.

o emoji keyboard, inline emoji in messages.

o improved keyboard accuracy and prediction

o install Kitkat apps that still work online

o kill (all) apps from recent apps menu

o brightness control by swiping status bar

o screen off by double-tapping status bar

o camera low light performance is way better.

o some cool camera features (even panorama)

o sound DSP for headphone compression / speaker equalization.

o way better control over haptics

o much better looking contact list

o huge selection of ringtones / alert tones

o nice data/battery reporting

o USB multimedia device support

Then the bad news:

o WIFI wakelock murders the battery literally 100x faster than Froyo on standby (7 hours vs 26 days)

o Hotspot kills the battery just as fast; reboot to use WIFI after.

o GApps is pretty much unusable, but I'm still hopeful for workarounds

o no app store, no app updates, ARMV6 is rapidly becoming unsupported regardless.

o sideloading apps is inconvenient, finding ARMV6 Kitkat versions is getting harder.

o Starbucks and Skype no longer support Kitkat.

o no live calendar / contact / email / browser / etc. sync.

o no app/photo backup to gdrive.

o camera app is way way slower - 13s minimum for first shot from lockscreen shortcut.

o panorama, while possible, is not really usable. Use Fotoxx or Panotools to stitch instead.

o time lapse crashes the camera app - delete app data to recover.

o USB multimedia support limits transferring of certain file types.

o USB-storage only via TWRP, and only the first FAT partition, oddly.

o believe it or not I miss the LG XT9 predictive keyboard.

For me the pros outweigh the cons. Sure I gotta carry a portable charger to be sure I'll be able to take calls since it's dead easy to kill the battery by mistake leaving WIFI on, but that's better than living with Froyo's microscopic fonts, terrible sound library, one ringtone to rule all contacts, missing emoji in messages, no sound profiles for work/home/recreation/sleep...

Thanks again to Hardlight for making this available.

If I can get past the Gapps and wakelock issues, I could see myself happily using this phone again another 2-3 years... I almost wonder why I replaced it. :)

---------- Post added at 11:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:17 PM ----------

It really is great and it's possible thanks to you and several teams you draw from, so kudos to all of you.

Once I get it working I'll write up a walkthrough. It may be possible to get real Gapps working from an older version. Believe it or not Froyo's Google Services still work fine (other than the Play Store which stopped working earlier in the Spring.) Maps works fine - even street view. So I found it really shocking that Kitkat was in worse shape than Froyo from a Gapps POV.

All of these phones that came with Froyo are the old baseband. For many of us we don't have access to Windows PCs to run the LG software to update the phone to Gingerbread and the newer baseband. So yeah, I needed to copy the libraries and I think you'll find there's a lot of your users in the same boat.

Thanks for the pointers...

It's funny but I never actually stopped using this phone, because it was a great wifi hotspot in a pinch and a great little alarm clock. I have a strange affection for it, and keeping it alive makes me happy. Not that it would be easy to kill it even if I tried... this thing is almost as durable as my old Nokia 3390, which survived being run over by an intermodal transport truck on the highway when it fell off my belt while I was cycling. Its outer shell was utterly smashed but I collected the inner phone/battery/sim/keyboard insert, walked into Wireless Wave, and $20 later I had a phone that looked and worked like I'd just bought it. Okay, lol, Optimus isn't *that* tough, and it's awfully slow these days, but it was $99 7 years ago, and I'd still pit it against any $1000 flagship on the market in a drop test. :)

---------- Post added 16th November 2017 at 12:04 AM ---------- Previous post was 15th November 2017 at 11:54 PM ----------

Oh yeah I agree and once I've figured out what I need to do for a good shot at success, I'll be right on that. As I already said twice above...

LOL, I love your enthusiasm. :good: Please recognise though, that sifting through 46 pages of this thread is going to result in some "hesitation" before I actually do it. ;)