[myTouch 3G, Magic General] WoefulDerelict:
Post-mortem

I'm starting here with a perfectly clean install of the Update from the Fender Pseudo-SAPPIMG that was put together by the very talented people in this thread. Figured I'd offer a slightly objective review and see what other's experiences with it have been. Also, hopefully get some questions answered.

The updated Setup Wizard is nice, especially the ability to skip the Google sign-in because it still modal and refuses to yield focus. Skipping that you can later set up Wi-Fi and login there. The wizard drags a little but, no more than I remember the original one dragging. The poor phone CHUGS through all of the fading and scrolling, especially under any load. The initial sync with Google takes quite a while but, the phone is more responsive afterwards. After that's finished a trip to the Market reveals out of date software that will update at a ridiculously slow pace. (Was this phone always this slow? I don't remember installs taking this long... damn EVO has spoiled me.) T-Mobile My Account is gonna need a update as well. You'll have to attempt to start it for it to auto-update.

After all that is finished the poor thing actually seems to come to life. The old apps really seem to drag it down, especially the old Market. It really seems to pick up once that's installed... too bad you can't force it. Stupid silent update.

My experience with Froyo is pretty limited but, it all looks pretty standard. (Sue me, I really like what HTC did with Sense.) All the goofy music apps still work and the Fender still lacks Swype as all the music apps, especially Pandora, don't play well with trying to Swype while they are running. Granted, with all the fading and **** it seems an even dumber point than it did in 1.6.

While a little on the boring side the camera seems quite responsive and works well but, the Gallery is painfully slow... It takes quite a while to start and thumbnail generation is molasses slow. Overall SD Card performance seems to be somewhat of a drag. The good news is that once it's finished generating all the thumbnails is seems to read them in relatively quickly but, I wager all the fading and **** isn't helpful in overall speed. The drag is it seems to generate them in batches so you're navigating blind at the top level until it manages to generate them all. Actual function isn't too bad, it responds to tilt (for no other reason than it can, which seems a little dumb considering the meager resources available) with mild lag as with changes in orientation. For all that the actual images seem to load rather quickly and navigation and other features seem to work rather well and aren't painfully slow. A little lag is to be expected with larger images. A cold boot will have a long gallery start again but, the thumbnails are thankfully persistent... and probably taking up space on your SD card. I suspect removing a Picasa from your sync may speed start-ups.

I can't help but think a-lot of the little snags could be alleviated with some careful over-clocking. Sure, you might have to find a wall sooner when you're actually tapping around but, I don't remember this phone having great battery life to begin with. I'm actually surprised they didn't try to tune it themselves to give users decent performance. I wager most would take a 30-60 min battery life drop if the phone actually performed well after the update. You'd only see poor life after heavy use with good speed scaling.

The biggest, and in my eyes most annoying, gotcha is the power saving Wi-Fi feature. After a rather short period without user interaction the phone will disable it's Wi-Fi... doens't matter if it's running Pandora or downloading an update. If you aren't touching it, the Wi-Fi will turn off. I haven't managed to track down where to turn this off. Overall the phone's Wi-Fi performance seems pretty bad compared to other devices in the same location.

Correct me if I'm wrong but, currently we have to clean way to root one of these updated Fender installs? I know SuperOneClick seem to be unable to write the su binary or the superuser.apk even after claiming a successful root. Any efforts to get them rooted for people who still use them?