History
It has been over 6 weeks since I got my Samsung galaxy S with Verizon, and I am very pleased. It has been the best Android experience on a phone for me. I had the HTC Eris before this and I was very happy with that phone however it did not have the power to handle the GUI and other phone functions efficiently.
First Impression
The Samsung Galaxy S has the TouchWiz 3.0 GUI, and it is flawless. I am a tinkerer, and I have always rooted my phones within the first day of getting them. But I have to desire to root or do anything untoward with this phone. Why? I have felt to need to, it does what it is suppose to and I feel there is nothing I can do to improve on that.
Some Issues
If you have read any user review, you have heard about the ‘lag’ issue. Its when the phone thinks for a few moments between tasks. Now I hate lags and will do anything to get rid of them. But the lag with the Samsung Galaxy S is very minimal and what I mean by that is, I have seen it only 3-4 times in the last month and a half. I am heavy user and that is compliment.
I will not deny that there is a lag but it is nothing to complaint about. However, there is a ‘lag fix’ available online here
How does the lag fix work?
The theory behind the lag is that the OS is waiting or lagging when it is doing its I/O operations (reading and writing from memory) so if there was a virtual buffer between this process then reading and writing can take place faster and with less or no lag. Well it is a creative way of solving the problem, if indeed that is the problem. I am on board with the idea and believe it will made the I/O operations faster but I believe the lag is more fundamental to the Android 2.1 OS.
Lag Fix Details
I found the following explanation from XDA Developers (the best forum for anything android related)
The fix creates an virtual EXT2 filesystem inside the stock RFS filesystem on the internal SD card with a 4kb block size. This means that this lag fix creates a buffer between the real filesystem and the android system. This buffer should reduce the amount of disk I/O required for all operations by utilising EXT2 buffering, as well as not writing file access times to disk etc. It allows only 1GB for application data at this stage, down from the 2GB of application data when running stock.
