17 Feb 2011

Boosting Performance on my HTC Dream

I love my phone. It’s an HTC Dream (AKA the G1) and was the very first Android-powered phone. This is actually the second one I’ve owned, the first stopped being able to hold a charge a while back. I’m running Cyanogen Mod 6.0 which in all honesty is more than the phone can comfortably handle memory-wise. However I recently made a couple of tweaks that really helped performance so I thought I’d share them here (This is actually a re-working of a post I submitted to Reddit recently, but I think it deserves a permanent home here too).

First, I checked the option in Cyanogen Mod Settings to keep the home app in memory at all times. I used to find that pressing the home button would result in the screen freezing for a good 5-10 seconds. Now it comes back instantly. This alone will probably extend my usage of the phone for a few months before I decide to upgrade.

Second, I switched my launcher app to Zeam Launcher

Zeam is designed as a lightweight launcher and I like it a lot. It’s no longer in development but the current version is great and I highly doubt I’ll be trying any more recent roms that it might not work with.

I imagine that this will help performance on other older devices, but naturally your mileage may vary.

Thanks for reading! If you like my writing, you may be interested in my book: Healthy Webhook Consumption with Rails

David at 21:48