E2 menu scroll is slowing down my moto like hell

[Exploited]

Here is the test that I done - I took a chronometer and did the following test:

1. Using default menu on Titanium edition (3x3) with reduced font size I have no scroller on the screen in the menu (I have total 9 icons and there is no scroll bar).
2. Turn off the phone
3. Turn on the phone and wait 2 minutes to make sure that all working processes are finished loading for sure
4. A friend starts the chronometer and I immediately hit the following combination of keys (no significant delays between pressings):
menu > 7 (that's System) > 6 (phone settings) > (wait until it shows up) > right soft (back) > right soft (back > 6 (office tools) > 1 (alarm clock) > (wait until it shows up) > right soft x3 (back back back to desktop) > down (phone book)
5. Result is 12 seconds

New test:
1. Using default menu on Titanium edition to (3x3) with increased font size I have a very small scroller (like when you go to the bottom three icons the screen blinks a little)
2. Repeat the same procedure
3. Result is 18 seconds!!!

Third test:
1. Again the small font using 3x4 menu and added one more incon so the scroller will show up
2. Repeated the same procedure
3. Result is 18 seconds!!!

So we have a 50% slower menu when we have a scroller? Can somebody confirm?

[keaglez]

I think its true...

[huatz84]

I think E2 is a 312 mhz phone with a slow firmware.It has to be quicker coz V3xx with 220 mhz is far faster.First time I bought E2,I think it was faster and no lag coz it has 312 mhz processor but the reality is it's just faster a bit than my old E398 modded.I don't like OC.I need firmware optimization from scratch.

[Exploited]

no the problem is different - the problem is that it is running software, which is not developed for it's operating system and it "emulates it" if I can say that.

I'll give you an example - take the game Mortal Kombat 1 for Arcade. The original processor on the arcade machine is something like 18Mhz and the RAM is few KB - the game worked perfect. Now we have an emulator (Mame), but it is barely able to emulate the game properly at processors slower than 500Mhz. The original machine is a RISK processor with it's own set of instructions - now we are on Intel and we do not have those instructions, so for simple operations we are making tons of calculations that the original was making on one cycle

So here is the same - Motorola did not rewrite the phonebook, the skin system, etc for the new processor - it just ported the already developed software and made emulation on linux kernel... Maybe just visual look and feel updated, but the kernel of the software is not optimized for Intel XScale

[keaglez]

I did a similar test like Exploited, and this is what i used:
- Katze3 with some edited system (using DDSH's full access method, but placed in ext3)
- Apmd 208/416/624 mhz normal voltage (using the one in DDSH's apmd changer2 package)
- Swap partition 64mb
- Kaleidoscope's am and phone daemon with related lib
- Main menu 3x4, font size 9 (highlight 11), scrollbar show

I wait for a little while after phone startup and every process finished, then i start:
right softkey (main menu) > 1 (office&tools) > 4 (alarm clock) > right softkey 2x (back to main menu) > 9 (settings) > 3 (themes) > right softkey 3x (back to desktop) > down (file manager)
The result is 13,36 seconds... Not bad...

[fade2black]

E2 Processor is fast, it's similiar with Treo 700, severeal O2 type, and any other PDA phone. The problem is memory, too small  I think firmware modification will be solve this problem.
e.g: ZM Player suppot Intel XScale iMMX instruction, i can play movie in VideoCD format (352x288 25fps) with smoothly.

[fade2black]

www.openezx.org

The OpenEZX project tries to gather information about the Linux-based Motorola EZX phone platform (mainly the A780, E680 and E680i phones).

The main goal of the OpenEZX project is having a mobile phone which runs on 100% Free Software.

See at the Project Status, E2 support still minimum, but the CPU support is 100%. Maybe if this kernel fully supported for E2, it will improved E2 performance. E2 kernel version is 2.4.20, openezx kernel version is 2.6.21.

[sjj]

I think we need someone to rebuild the UI and applications to make it optimized...
Maybe arctu can do it....

[arctu]

The problem lies with the UI. AFAIK, the kernel is fine as it is. Based on my experience, I think motorola does "dirty" codings - they code things not systematically. I may be wrong though. But, an example of this is the comparison between the music player and the file manager. The lists in FileManager doesn't lag like the one in Music Player despite that they used the same UI. How can that be? Only if the scroller is programmed

Besides that, you can see for yourself their bad coding style - how the File Manager works. Images thumbnail loading should be "threaded" so as not to interfere with scrolling. But, motorola people doesn't care. It irritates me when the scrolling stops a second or two to load the thumbnails.

Solution? Wait for optimized OpenMoko to work on our phone. It's the UI engine and program problems. OpenMoko should fix this. It would be better though if someone could port Qtopia phone to E2 so we can test the difference between ezx's modified qt and the original qtopia.

[Exploited]

yes - that's a good point. We see the same with almost every popular PC software in the world. Compare the differences between Corel Draw 5 and Corel Draw 10... yes version 10 has much more features, but compare them for the equal basic operations... Do you think corel 10 can do them with the same speed on Pentium 100Mhz processor? Most probably it will not run at all. The software vendors are directly related with the hardware vendors - nobody wants you to buy something and forget about buying THE SAME NEW THING again for 10 years... they want you to upgrade upgrade upgrade.... so they write slow code with unnecessary cycling just to make the new version of the program slower so you must buy new computer... Sad but true

In a matter of fact I remember that I was able to convert AVI movies using Adobe Premiere on my old 200Mhz Windows 95 PC... I made a quick benchmark and it came out that my current Core 2 Duo processor is only 230% faster with the new version of Adobe Premiere (same movie, same operations, just new versions of software and codecs)... Count it the C2D is 2x2160 Mhz = 4320Mhz and my old comp is 1x200Mhz... It is supposed to be 21 times faster right?

[Taurnil]

U're totally right, exploited.  Just like E2 and Z6. They're similar phones but Z6 is more optimized.

@Exploited: dude, would you mind making a mirror to Only U V4 @ e2mod.com? pleasssse