Just because I can, doesn't mean I should....

[Guest derffie]

Hi guys, as I'm sure you all are very aware of newbe5 and corvus's amazing progress, well if not, where was this rock of yours you are hiding under, and thanks for nothing for not letting me borrow it the other week while some royals got married...

Anyway, heres the thing, is there anyway to figure out the best rom for pesonal usage, as in I only wanted my tablet for painting, artistic purposes, so at the min I'm using the corvus5 without a stress, but is it the best for my needs? I mean can anybody else give a example of their usage and rom choice, I'm trying to establish whether I "need" honeycomb on my vega or is this a case of ooooh, shiny shiny, but no hmmph, or will it inprove proformance more the current roms? Sorry if this seems like another bloody honeycomb post, its not honest, its a genuine look at how people use their vegas, and the right versions for the tasks they use it for, like my grandad said, don't use a hammer to saw wood.

Cheers guys.

[Guest mintvilla]

Hi guys, as I'm sure you all are very aware of newbe5 and corvus's amazing progress, well if not, where was this rock of yours you are hiding under, and thanks for nothing for not letting me borrow it the other week while some royals got married...

Anyway, heres the thing, is there anyway to figure out the best rom for pesonal usage, as in I only wanted my tablet for painting, artistic purposes, so at the min I'm using the corvus5 without a stress, but is it the best for my needs? I mean can anybody else give a example of their usage and rom choice, I'm trying to establish whether I "need" honeycomb on my vega or is this a case of ooooh, shiny shiny, but no hmmph, or will it inprove proformance more the current roms? Sorry if this seems like another bloody honeycomb post, its not honest, its a genuine look at how people use their vegas, and the right versions for the tasks they use it for, like my grandad said, don't use a hammer to saw wood.

Cheers guys.

honeycomb is still android, unless the apps that you require are honeycomb only, the smoothest experience you would have for your needs will not be the honeycomb alpha, mainly because its still in alpha, its made from ports from a few devices, and to be honest its damn near a miracle it works as well as it does without any of the source codes from google. WIth that being the case, while it is pretty stable, its not as stable as the corvus 5 rom, or as fast. Having honeycomb is mainly about alot of things looking nice in tablet form, for example the lockscreen, the lockscreen of the corvus rom looks pretty stupid, mainly because its designed for the phone and thus portrait mode, where as the vega is designed to be held in landscape mode. Honeycomb improves the little things, like the gmail app, fully optimises the use of the screen real estate, the stock browser is better, its all the little things that makes honeycomb better, but doesnt technically make it better for you.

The honeycomb port is in alpha, if stability is important to you, just wait for it til it comes to release canditate stauts.

ALso there is nothing stopping you doing a nandroid back up of your corvus rom, trying honeycomb rom, then if you dont like it for your needs, flash back to stock rom, install clockworkmod, then reinstall your recovery.

[Guest derffie]

honeycomb is still android, unless the apps that you require are honeycomb only, the smoothest experience you would have for your needs will not be the honeycomb alpha, mainly because its still in alpha, its made from ports from a few devices, and to be honest its damn near a miracle it works as well as it does without any of the source codes from google. WIth that being the case, while it is pretty stable, its not as stable as the corvus 5 rom, or as fast. Having honeycomb is mainly about alot of things looking nice in tablet form, for example the lockscreen, the lockscreen of the corvus rom looks pretty stupid, mainly because its designed for the phone and thus portrait mode, where as the vega is designed to be held in landscape mode. Honeycomb improves the little things, like the gmail app, fully optimises the use of the screen real estate, the stock browser is better, its all the little things that makes honeycomb better, but doesnt technically make it better for you.

The honeycomb port is in alpha, if stability is important to you, just wait for it til it comes to release canditate stauts.

ALso there is nothing stopping you doing a nandroid back up of your corvus rom, trying honeycomb rom, then if you dont like it for your needs, flash back to stock rom, install clockworkmod, then reinstall your recovery.

Thanks for the input buddy, I mean I was going to be sitting tight on the corvus5 for awhile, just a curiousity post really, do you think that the vegacomb will be as good corvus5 once it is stable? Reason I ask is this the same in essence as a windows upgrade, as I did for a friend awhile ago? A old pc low on ram took the windows 7 from XP as she wanted, told it needs more ram than 512mb really, but did it all the same, only to have a her winging its really slow. I can't find a answer on google to hardware dependancies for honeycomb, but all the decives that have it preinstalled have at least a gig of ram, so you can see why I'm interested! Cheers dude.

[Guest simonta]

Thanks for the input buddy, I mean I was going to be sitting tight on the corvus5 for awhile, just a curiousity post really, do you think that the vegacomb will be as good corvus5 once it is stable? Reason I ask is this the same in essence as a windows upgrade, as I did for a friend awhile ago? A old pc low on ram took the windows 7 from XP as she wanted, told it needs more ram than 512mb really, but did it all the same, only to have a her winging its really slow. I can't find a answer on google to hardware dependancies for honeycomb, but all the decives that have it preinstalled have at least a gig of ram, so you can see why I'm interested! Cheers dude.

You can't compare Android with Windows so the comparison is not valid. With Windows, it needs a certain amount of memory to load and run smoothly. It will run with less than that amount but to do so, it starts using your hardisk as an extension to memory so that it can fit. The problem is that your hardisk might seem fast but compared to memory, it's really sloowwww. "Embedded" operating systems like Android are different because they exist only in memory. It either fits or it doesn't so the question of how much memory does Android need is more accurately asked as "how much memory does Android need and still leave me with enough to do anything useful". So, if Honeycomb uses 511MB, and the Vega has 512MB, you're not going to be installing a lot of apps but, it will run exactly as fast in a 512MB device as a 1GB device with the same hardware.

Honeycomb, in fact each new release of Android so far, has all kinds of goodies but also performance enhancements and there are lots of things to consider in performance. The kernel is key (and that's why the "overclocked kernels" which boost the speed the hardware runs at make such a difference. However, the graphics driver, network drivers like WiFi and a host of other components can dramatically affect performance.

Honeycomb, when the wrinkles are ironed out should[/] be faster but so many variables how knows? Without source code, it's hit and miss, as someone said on another thread, it's amazing that newbe and corvus have it running at all, let alone in a state where it's already almost usable.

In practical terms, if you're in an image manipulation app applying effects or whatever, you are very unlikely to see real differences in performance between any of the ROMs. The performance gains tend to be much more about overall feel and smoothness, fluidity of things like page transistions and so on. Going for an overclocked kernel is of little value to you as only the CPU is boosted. The GPU (the graphics harware) and the connection between the CPU and GPU are not overclocked and as the load of graphics processing is by and large handed off to the GPU, you won't see dramatic improvements.

I would urge caution in looking at performance benchmarks as well. They can be broadly indicative of performance but usually bear little resemblance to real world experience. As an example, many benchmarks show the Vega well ahead of my Desire but the Desire flies all the time. I am hard pressed to see practical differences between them.

In summary, I think you are unlikely to get much benefit for what you want to do from Honeycomb and I would say stick with Corvus/Newbe5. That said, Honeycomb is much more than eye candy but boy does it look good :unsure: If you care about good looking home pages, much better "stock apps", widgets and so on, then it's going to a wait worth waiting. If what you care about is doing your graphics work, much less compelling.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

Simon

Edited May 13, 2011 by simonta

[Guest derffie]

Thank you simon, that really does help, sorry for the windows comparitive, but I was struggling to get a decent contextual referance, but I'm so glad you understood my post, so I'm sticking with corvus5 and honeycomb theme, and will possibly vegacomb my wifes when we get her one in a month or so, she got me mine as a pressie, and has fell in love with it! Thank you again, bit of quality advice that helped out tremendously!

Cheers.