Kiran Gangadharan

Testing your Galaxy S2 i9100 after flashing a new ROM

· Kiran Gangadharan

After a bit of boredom and a morbid desire to play with KitKat ROM’s for my Galaxy S2, here I was, pulling through the day without realising how much time I poured into getting the latest Cyanogenmod 11 nightly working on my phone. It took patience, some restarts, some flashings, some more restarts, and a plethora of network bandwith wastefulness, to finally get my phone setup with everything that I needed.

So in such kind of a situation, it is important to first test your phone with the new OS before going ahead and restoring/downloading all your apps. In this post, I’ve mentioned a few apps and tweaks that you can use to measure out the performance and battery life of your newly flashed device. I would recommend  to have these apps stored offline in your SD card perhaps, so that you can test out everything without needing to connect to the internet.

Essential Apps

*Once you have the apps installed, monitor your phone for a while to check if there are any abnormal apps hogging your CPU or Battery. *

Once the device seems to be doing well, you can now try and tweak to get more out of your device. Start with the following:

  1. First open Settings > About Phone and tap the Build number field approx 7 times until you get the notification about the developer settings being activated. Now when you head back to Settings, you should see both Developer options and Performance under System.
  2. Open Performance > Processor, set CPU governor to ONDEMAND and check the Set on Boot option.
  3. Open Performance > I/O Scheduler and set it to CFQ or Noop and once again check the Boot option.
  4. Open Performance > Memory Management and check the purging assets option.
  5. Under Developer Options, set the Window and Transition animation and Animator duration scale to 0.5x.

The above should give you a little more performance and juice. For adding the icing to the cake, do the following tweak as well: Using the Root Explorer, head to the android home directory (**/) **and look for a file called build.prop. Select the file and choose to open it in a text editor. Now, append the following settings to it:

ro.telephony.call_ring.delay=0 
pm.sleep_mode=1 
persist.sys.purgeable_assets=1 
ro.media.enc.jpeg.quality=100 
wifi.supplicant_scan_interval=180
ro.lge.proximity.delay=25
mot.proximity.delay=25
debug.sf.nobootanimation=1
windowsmgr.max_events_per_sec=300
ro.max.fling_velocity=12000
ro.min.fling_velocity=8000
dalvik.vm.startheapsize=8M
video.accelerate.hw=1

If you’re interested to know about these options and what they do, simply google “build.prop tweaks galaxy s2” and you should be able to find all of these settings and more, with their explanations.

Well, that’s all I did, and my phone seems to be pretty smooth with decent battery life. Now to take a break and enjoy the KitKat ;)