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Why is my Android slow? 8 ways to troubleshoot your phone
Give your old or underpowered device a new lease on life
Even if you own one of the latest and greatest Android phones, your device may run slower than expected. This can be due to various reasons, so don't worry if your new Android phone runs slowly out of the box.
Have you noticed that it takes just a bit longer to unlock your Pixel 2 XL when you use the fingerprint reader? If so, you aren't alone. In the last few weeks since the update, there have been multiple reports that the Pixel 2 XL takes about a second longer to unlock the device when using the fingerprint reader. The good news is that Google is looking into it.
Most app updates roll out to the majority of users either all at once or within a matter of days, but like a tropical storm, the Weather Channel has decided to take its time with its big 5.0 Android release. The update is currently available to just 10% of users, and it won't be out for everyone until mid July.
Facebook's Android team pushed out an incremental update v1.9.4 today with "improved performance and various bug fixes." Just what those improvements and bug fixes are will remain a mystery - the only useful part of such changelogs is we know what they didn't do in this release.
The intrepid folks over at XDA are always tinkering away to try and make using your Android device a better experience. And a few weeks ago, one of them (namely, temasek) found that the Android Market has some issues trying to resolve DNS servers when your device is connected over Wi-Fi. This can cause the Market to load slowly, and it's definitely something I've experienced on my own phone.
Sprint has network problems. Major problems. And they've gotten a lot worse lately. Really, really bad. Not all areas are affected - and in fact some have improved already, but more and more areas are getting so bad that Sprint's 3G data is completely unusable there, especially since the introduction of the iPhone. Troubleshooting and update my phone's "profile" and PRL didn't help, as evident from the screenshot #2 you see below.
Last night, I sent out a message from our social accounts praising the Epic 4G Touch's boot times. They amazed me as soon as I turned this Galaxy S II Sprint variant for the first time last Friday and haven't ceased to amaze me ever since. I have loaded up all the same apps and then some compared to any of my other phones, and still - the Epic 4G Touch blazes by the competition like no other device I've seen.
One of the few tech blogs who managed to get their hands on Motorola's upcoming AT&T flagship - the Atrix 4G - is, of course, Engadget. The reviewer, unsurprisingly, is the infamous cool geek and editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky, who, from my experience reading Engadget's reviews, does a good overall job but fails to go into those details that matter to most Android users. The Atrix 4G review is exactly what I had expected, and I'm going to summarize it and save you 20 minutes reading it.
The Honeycomb SDK preview, allowing everyone to take a peek and play around with Honeycomb using the Android emulator, was launched yesterday, but after we got past the initial excitement, we found that the emulator itself was dog slow and pretty much unusable. In fact, it was so frustrating to use it that I wanted to punch walls and rip out my hair after 5 minutes with it. And I'm not even going to talk about orientation problems - how the Android team managed to ship the SDK with orientation broken by default (there is a fix for it in the Settings > Display) is beyond me and beyond the scope of this article. We're not the only ones who noticed - Engadget's own hands-on says "Honeycomb's is extremely slow -- nearly to the point of uselessness in this case."
Adobe's Flash Player for Android has topped a million downloads on the Market. Someone break out the special occasion custom label champagne. I really don't mean to be crass about Flash - but I can't help it.
Is your Galaxy S a little laggy (experiences stutters, delays) at times, even on Froyo? It’s not your imagination; your phone’s internal storage is probably the culprit, and LagFix addresses the problem quite cleverly, helping you put the “S” back in your Galaxy.
Alright, I was really excited to get the HTC Hero. REALLY. I had extremely high hopes for the Hero (those are long gone) and Android (which I still do - I even began developing for it) but the Hero has so many ridiculous bugs that I am *this* close to bringing it down to the Pre level (I'm not going to dare though - Pre still leads in the "I Want To Smash This Phone Into A Wall" category).