Gain­ing space on Android after ART->Dalvik switch (root access required)

I (still) use a Nexus S phone. I am using Cyanogen­mod on it. After an arti­cle in a com­put­er mag­a­zine I decid­ed to give the ART-runtime a try instead of the default Dalvic-runtime. Unfor­tu­nate­ly I do not have enough free space free (and all what I can is moved to the USB stor­age already) to real­ly use the ART-runtime.

After switch­ing back to the Dalvic-runtime, I had only 23 of the pre­vi­ous­ly avail­able space free. After a lit­tle bit of look­ing around I found /data/dalvik-cache. I delet­ed with a file man­ag­er the con­tent of the direc­to­ry (you will get some “app crashed/died” mes­sages) and reboot­ed the phone (this is not the same as for­mat­ting the cache par­ti­tion in the recov­ery system).

Dur­ing boot it pop­u­lat­ed the direc­to­ry again and now I have more than 43 of free space on the inter­nal storage.

Does every geek take a pho­to of Google in Zürich?

Maybe not all… my col­leagues would­n’t have gone there if I would­n’t have said something…

To be hon­est, I would have expect­ed some­thing a lit­tle bit more shiny/geeky/… to take a pic­ture of (any­way, if you don’t see it: I have a real smile in my face on the pic­ture, so the geek in me enjoyed tak­ing the photo).

 

Alexander Leidinger in front of Google CH
Me in front of Google CH

 

Google CH
Google CH

 

ICS expe­ri­ence on the Sama­sung Galaxy Tab 10.1

As told before, I have the ICS as pro­vid­ed by Sam­sung (to it is not the stock ICS, it is the Samsung-version of ICS)  on the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Now that it is near­ly two months of using it, I want to share a lit­tle bit of my experience.

Basi­cal­ly it just works. If you know ICS already, you more or less know how it is on the Galaxy Tab 10.1.

The cal­en­dar app is dif­fer­ent, it is the Sam­sung app, not the native ICS one. I have a prob­lem to sync it with the exchange-connector as it is in Horde 4, but I did not take the time to inves­ti­gate the issue. My Nexus S con­nects just fine, so it must be some mod­i­fi­ca­tion by Sam­sung which is caus­ing the issue.

Some­times the tablet hangs, and I have to shut­down by press­ing the pow­er but­ton for some sec­onds. This only hap­pens when con­nect­ed via WLAN. When I start the tablet again, it will hang again if I am not fast enough to enter the PIN of the SIM, unlock the screen and to deac­ti­vate the WLAN. But even then it will hang after the deac­ti­va­tion of the WLAN. After reboot­ing the sec­ond time (with WLAN already deac­ti­vat­ed), every­thing works again.

The email app is also stut­ter­ing some­times. This hap­pens when I open a fold­er with a lot of emails and the email app is try­ing to deter­mine if there are attach­ments or not. Either the app is not multi-threaded, or it is not well done.

Apart from that it just works.

The Android EMail app on ICS

In the review of the Email app of Android 3.2, I com­plained that the message-list moves in a way that the select­ed mes­sage is in the first place of the message-list. This was annoy­ing for my work­flow. In the Android 4.0.4 app (at least as it comes from Sam­sung for the Galaxy Tab 10.1) this changed so that it is the sec­ond item in the list in some cir­cum­stances (this does not hap­pen always). This is bet­ter (some­what accept­able) for my work­flow, but still, I would pre­fer if it is at least con­fig­urable. Do not move the list when I select a mes­sage, except for mak­ing a par­tial­ly vis­i­ble list-item com­plete­ly visible.

The oth­er point I did not like about the 3.2‑app was the fold­er list moved so that the inbox is first when return­ing to the list. Thank god this changed too.

The two big dis­ap­point­ing points I had about this app are most­ly fixed in the ICS version.

ICS on the Sam­sung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Last week I had a look if there are some news for an offi­cial update of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to ICS. To my sur­prise there is one at least in Italy. The one I found to down­load was marked more or less for the Euro­pean mar­ket. Well… that was good enough for me and the night from Fri­day to Sat­ur­day I have spend to update the Tab by hand (unfor­tu­nate­ly this includes a fac­to­ry reset, no smooth migra­tion from an old ver­sion, but at least I still have root access).

What I noticed so far:

  • OpenGL ES speed improved from 4.2 to 6.6 FPS.
  • I had some lock-ups so far, I do not know if this may be relat­ed to some restored data (app data and e.g. Bluetooth/WLAN con­fig restored with Tita­ni­um­Back­up) or to bugs (Dalvik cache and cache par­ti­tion where clean, fac­to­ry reset was done too pri­or to restor­ing from the back­up). I had to press the pow­er but­ton for some sec­onds to ini­ti­ate a reboot. Most of the time it helped to wait a minute before enter­ing the PIN for the SIM. One time it did not help at all, the only way to get it work­ing was to take my WLAN Access Point (AP) offline, start the Tab, enter the PIN, and to restart the AP. At that point I had GPS and WLAN in the Tab acti­vat­ed, in the lock-ups before I did not have GPS active. I had some­thing sim­i­lar like this with my Nexus S when it got ICS, some­how this resolved itself. Update 2012-08-14: I googled a bit, there was a bug in ICS 4.0.3 relat­ed to WLAN, but I have 4.0.4 on the Tab, so this may not be this. I also got the freeze with­out WLAN but with the mobile data con­nec­tion active. 2nd update 2012-08-14: If I dis­able account sync­ing with the mobile data con­nec­tion it does not freeze. I have not yet tried this with the WLAN con­nec­tion. Update 2012-08-16: The syn­chro­niza­tion of the cal­en­dar data caused the prob­lem. Delet­ing all data for any app with cal­en­dar in the name and re-syncing fixed the prob­lem. No freeze since I did this yesterday.
  • When I open/close a fold­er (much missed fea­ture in Android 3.x), the Tab speaks with me (some­thing like “Fold­er XXX opened” in the con­fig­ured lan­guage… that is a bit annoying).
  • I like the default back­ground image.
  • Update 2012-08-14: The bat­tery icon does stay green even when the bat­tery is near­ly empty. 🙁

I was not able to test the Email APP yet, I am wait­ing for a warranty-replacement of the PSU of my serv­er at home (Murphy’s law: Your PSU will break when you just start­ed a big ren­o­va­tion of your kitchen and do not have time to take care about it, and when you get time a lot of peo­ple from the PSU-manufacturer which take care about warranty-replacements are in holiday).

I also need to check the mobile data con­nec­tiv­i­ty (qual­i­ty and speed), but I would expect that it is not worse than before. Update 2012-08-14: The down­load speed test shows sim­i­lar results than before, the upload speed test is slow­er, but this may be the mobile net­work here where I test­ed. At least I can con­firm that it works, mod­u­lo the prob­lem of the freezes described above.