Droid Hype

Droid Incredible users will probably know this feeling where they hear the dreaded low battery alert in the middle of the afternoon. With just a few hours under the belt, the stock battery is quite the let down in terms of powering this smartphone. There are a few aftermarket extended batteries like the 1750 or 3500 mAh varieties from Seidio or the oversea 2600 mAh cheapies from eBay. I’ve tried the Seidio and the cheapies and they seem to be great the first few days and then it kind of just goes downhill. Would you be satisfied only being able to pull 5.5hrs on the 1750 mAh Seidio? Nope, neither was I.

Luckily, Verizon had the 2150 HTC branded extended battery and door in stock. I had some great performance with the OEM Motorola Droid 1/2 extended battery, so I thought why not try an OEM HTC extended battery. The package comes with a replacement door, since the extended battery is roughly double the size compared to stock.

I was real happy to start using this new found power, but in doing so, I lost the ability to use my Seidio Innocase Active. I’ve grown to really like the combination of a hard case and a silicone case in one. So to remedy this roadblock, I grabbed my utility knife, some snips, and a metal file and started working on the case.

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Who doesn’t love their Droid? From left to right, CyanogenMod 6 stable (2.2), Stock 2.1, Simply Stunning 4.7 (2.2).

The Motorola BP7X  is the 1820mAh extended battery for the Droid 2. Since the D2 and D1 use identical stock batteries, this new D2 extended unit will also work! The battery comes with a new battery cover since it sticks out just a little bit more.

If you have a Seidio Innocase, leave the blue battery door that the battery comes with off. Then snap on your Innocase and you won’t see a difference. Enjoy 5-6 more hours of performance.

Grab yours here! Enter the code FREEOVERNT to get free overnight shipping.

Update: Here are some pics of the extended battery installed. See it after the jump!

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ChevyNo1 has released Simply Stunning 4.7 with a bag full of goodies.

1. Screen lag on any of the launchers should be improved! That being said – I really do recomment another launcher. I’m partial to ADW – ADW.Launcher v1.0.1 standalone Application for Android | Productivity, VERY small memory footprint. It is also now an option in RM, which also installs an ‘mvadw’ script. If you DO use another launcher, use my tools to DELETE the stock Launcher2 (it will back up to SD). Otherwise, it will still take resources even though you don’t run it.

2. You can now control your tunes (Media Player, Pandora tested) while the screen is off! Longpress volume up/down to skip tracks. Camera focus (lightpress) to pause/play. Camera shutter (hardpress) to toggle the extended media controls on/off (not permanent like Tools UI which sticks beyond a reboot). I did NOT add graphical controls to the lockscreen. To me it seems pointless.

3. Google fix for Pandora (all streaming AAC) included – this is NOT the hack that disabled stagefright; this has FIXED stagefright

4. Ability to change the carrier text to whatever you want! Should not affect any other apps.

5. Now when you ‘delete’ system apps, they are backed up to SD. So just in case you want it back .. you can get it back

6. rstapps has had a few fixes – you should see no FC’s while restoring, or much less than the past. Also, there is a fix to prevent future market update errors (ie. insufficient storage).

7. Extra low dimness now available. Check out Settings -> Display

8. OTA patch capability – yet to be tested (on YOU )! I can now push out updates to all phones running my ROM. Everything EXCEPT a full ROM update. That is better left to you or Rom Manager. But any other updates, including patching APK’s, I can now do automagically

9. Chrome To Phone now included

10. Bypass lockscreen option added in Tools

11. MORE things to hide in the statusbar – alarm clock, cell signal, 3g signal, battery, adb, usb. I have heard you all ask for being able to customize images themselves. I will get there

12. All options (ie scripts) selected in Tools are remembered, at least until a reboot.

13. I’m told I don’t promote this enough – you can change pretty much ALL colors in the statusbar, ON THE FLY. No reboot, no xml hacking.

I just loaded this over SS4.6 and everything is working like it should. The audio controls mapped to the volume rocker and camera button are top notch. I also really like the menu key as unlock option. This was in CyanogenMod, which I sorely missed.

Download the rom and load via recovery or find it Rom Manager!

A user by the name of slayher over at the CyanogenMod forums has released his kernel compiles to the public. Included is the very neat interactive governor.

The CPUfreq governor “interactive” is designed for low latency,
interactive workloads. This governor sets the CPU speed depending on
usage, similar to “ondemand” and “conservative” governors. However
there is no polling, or ‘sample_rate’ required to scale the CPU up.

Sampling CPU load every X ms can lead to under powering the CPU
for X ms, leading to dropped framerate, stuttering UI etc..

Scaling the CPU up is done when coming out of idle, and like “ondemand”
scaling up will always go to MAX, then step down based off of cpu load.

There is only one tuneable value for this governor:

min_sample_time: The ammount of time the CPU must spend (in uS)
at the current frequency before scaling DOWN. This is done to
more accurately determine the cpu workload and the best speed for that
workload. The default is 50ms.

Running the 1200 low voltage version, my Quadrant score shot up to over 1700+. This is about 270 points more compared to running ChevyNo1′s 1250 low voltage. Wow.

Our Droid rooting guide has been posted! Here’s the direct link or just click the menu link up top.

As many Motorola Droid users know, the included micro-usb cable is really short. Unless you have an extension cord, it’s most likely not going to reach your nightstand for bed time charging.

You can of course grab a new 6 foot cable from Best Buy or any major retailer. However, expect to pay almost $30 for it!

I prefer going directly to an online retailer that sells a huge amount of cables, Monoprice. I’ve shopped here for years and they sell quality cables for just about everything at ridiculous prices. I found a 15 foot micro-usb for a whopping $2.02. Yes, two pennies over two bucks. You can’t even find this length at most brick and mortars. Shipping was only about $2.50 to New York. You just can’t beat this quick “fix” for the price.

We’re on a Launcher Pro kick over here since it’s such a great home replacement. One great option for LP is the ability to set a dock background. You can create anything that will fit the allocated space and load it up to match your theme. The above screenshot is from a quick mash up of a dock I found in this great LP custom dock forum thread.

It’s pretty easy to set it up, just follow these directions.

1. Save the downloaded dock image to your sdcard.
2. Open up LP preferences and go to Appearance Options.
3. Choose the dock background -> custom option.
4. Navigate to your downloaded image and select it.

Update: Here’s a site dedicated to LP Docks, there’s even an app!

After upgrading to CM6RC2, I noticed my SetCPU settings were not sticking after a reboot. It would revert back to the default CPU speed of the kernel and clear my Advanced settings (32000, 50, 0, 0). A simple tap on the speed bar in SetCPU and it’ll bounce right back up, but this was annoying for someone who flashes roms and reboots constantly.

To fix this, you’ll need flash su (superuser) from the supplied version 2.2 in the rom with version 2.1. After loading up your rom, download su 2.1 below and save it somewhere on your sdcard. Then reboot into recovery and install the zip via the update.zip method.

You’ll now just need to save your default speed in SetCPU one time and it’ll stick after a reboot.

su versions 2.1 – Please login to access downloadables

Update – SetCPU version 2.0.2 appears to have fixed this problem!

If you have Launcher Pro, or any other home replacement running, sometimes you’ll notice it will restart itself (redraw icons) when you try to go back to your homescreen. This can be caused by the app running out of memory or something crashing in the background causing it to restart. Either way, it’s ok if it happens once in a while but if it’s every time you hit your home key, then it’s a problem.

I’ve tried just about every setting in Launcher Pro on my Droid. From setting the memory usage to high and checking and unchecking various settings to see if anything changes. Here’s what I’ve noticed that made an improvement.

1. If you have more than one home launcher, remove the ones you do not use. I had ADW and the default Launcher2 loaded as well as Launcher Pro which I was using. I removed all of them except Launcher Pro.
2. Set Launcher Pro option to keep it in memory and change memory usage to medium or high.
3. I had SetCPU‘s widget on the main homescreen showing me my CPU speed. Upon removing it, the screens appeared quicker coming out of an app.
4. If you are running CyanogenMod, change the option for VM heap to 32M.

With these changes, I’ve noticed about 60-70% less redraws. Your mileage will vary of course depending on how your Droid is set up.