Samsung Galaxy S Firmware XXJVR Review

In the ever long quest to find the perfect ROM for my Samsung Galaxy S I decided to give the latest leaked XXJVR firmware a try.

Over the 9 months I've had this phone I've changed the ROM on it more times than I'd like to recall.  In that time I came to the realize that I personally want only a few things out of this phone. So once these 5 requirements are met you shouldn't need to change your ROM like your underwear (daily I hope?).

Stability - First and foremost I need Stability in all stock apps as well as the OS.  There is nothing worse than seeing a "Force Close" in ANY stock app or during an OS related task. Kills the experience and the user loses faith in the manufacturer/developers ability to create quality software.


Performance - It's not a huge ask given a phone that has a 1GHz processor.  If the iPhone can pull it off then Android should be no different. My phone has PoweVR's SGX540 graphics chip in it which is supposedly 3x faster than the SGX535 found in the iPhone 4.  Until Android Ice Cream Sandwich is released all UI is still being drawn by the CPU instead of the GPU (one noticeable advantage the iPhone 4 has).


Battery Life - This can vary greatly depending on what I have running in the foreground as well as the background.  When it comes to software I try to be a hard ass since no developer is perfect out there. Take the official Facebook app for example....no in fact I'm sure you already know about that one. I usually enable Wifi only when I'm at home and I never let Samsung check for it's own software's updates.  Other than that there's not much else I do to monitor this and I don't think I really should have to either.

Browser - With full flash support in a browser I often find the right browser for the job really does matter.  I can live without tabbed browsing if only the page loads quick and is actually scroll-able given the large amount of flash found on many websites. I hate the checker-boxing effect on pages that can't load the page quick enough so the less of this the happier I am.

Camera - I have a 5MP camera capable of fluid 720p video capture in varying light conditions.  I've come to expect a high quality equal to or in some scenarios greater than the iPhone 4.....yes I just compared it but it's true and worth pointing out.

Installation
I flash all my rom's according to these instructions found here :
http://www.theandroidsoul.com/xxjvr-latest-galaxy-s-firmware/

There are some other blogs out there but this one consistently releases an updated guide for every firmware that is either released or leaked by Samsung (even Miui too!)

Rooting & Lagfix
Again the same blogger has an accompanying root guide which is perfect : http://www.theandroidsoul.com/how-to-root-xxjvr-using-odin-on-galaxy-s-i9000/
Now by default all of Samsung's firmware use the RFS partition type which is not ideal and is the cause of a lot of slow-downs especially in firmwares 2.2 and lower.  In the past I have always applied a lagfix by converting the /system and /data partitions to the EXT4 partition type.  This was done in the recovery menu of my rooted kernel.

Now even though this XXJVR firmware is FAST I still feel comfort in using EXT4 instead.  In saying that this isn't as straight forward as it sounds.  The newer gingerbread ROM's consume more space on the /system partition than previously, so YOU have remove some bloatware in order to convert to EXT4.  I removed the Alkido bookreader and GoogleMaps both which can be re-downloaded from the Market.  This freed up about 12MB.  I then installed ChainFire's Ext4-Addon apk and all I had to do was press the convert to EXT4 button.  5-10mins later and 2 reboots I'm now running a snappy EXT4 based phone.

Performance & Stability
As I said this is really up to the user as to whether they feel the need to convert the partitions but I feel it has made a difference during my daily use.  As a result of applying the lagfix I've found apps are incredibly speedy to start up.  I had read that some users of XXJVQ had issues using the stock Phone.apk in that it would crash under certain scenarios.  I can say that I have NOT had any issue with this.  It might be worth noting that I have a bout 30 or so main contacts synced up.  I've experience no random force closes from any of stock apps (thank goodness!). My home launcher by choice is Go Launcher and it performs admirably.  I should mention that I did apply this little trick to ensure the home launcher remains in memory and doesn't get killed by the Android OS :

su (enter)

echo ro.HOME_APP_ADJ=1 >> /data/local.prop (enter)

reboot (enter)

Browser
Words cannot express how impressed I am with the performance.  XXJVQ's browser was good but this is even better yet again!  I did a small test between my wife's iPhone 4 and my SGS's browser using the engadget.com website.  I can smoothly (like butter) scroll up and down the page with no checker-boarding.  This is with flash enabled to!  The iPhone 4 was not able to match this standard set by XXJVR's browser.  Very happy!!!! Pinch to zoom is also great and the experience has improved since the days of my Nexus One.  Here's a hint : if you pinch inwards as if to zoom out and just hold it in the centre you'll find it goes to window selection mode so you can easily switch between background windows.  Feature that has been needed for a while.  There were only 2 scenarios where I noticed checker-boarding and that was when I pinched to zoom and when the page was still loading.  This is still normal on other top phones so I can live with that.

Camera
Straight up the camera app is quite good and the 720p video recording performance in normal and low-light conditions is nothing less then superb for a mobile device.  Maybe I'm praising it a little too highly but this feature was the main reason I wanted the SGS in the first place and I'm pleased to say it hasn't let me down in that regard.  There's only a slight wobble when moving the phone around a lot during recording but it's no more than the iPhone 4 (less maybe?).

Battery Life
To date I have never had better performance as I have had with XXJVQ.  I'm not sure whether that was due to my conservative use or whether the battery stats were a little off.  Despite this I can't deny the fact that my phone lasted my 3 whole days with no charge.  Now I'm still trying to figure out what combination of settings I used at that time but I'm pretty sure I've got it set the same on XXJVR.  So far I've found the drain to be quite good, in that it's been a slow trickle during idle.  I recalibrated the battery after flashing XXJVR to be sure of this and managed a day of constant use and 33% brightness.  I know this isn't really much of a benchmark but I can say that I was happy with this and I give it my tick of approval on my Battery Life requirement.

Conclusion
The longest ROM I stayed on prior to this was XXJVQ, I feel that this will last me til Ice cream Sandwich (fingers crossed it reaches SGS).  Great browser, excellent camera performance, snappy OS after applying lagfix(possibly not required) and decent battery life.