Back to the basics: improving user experience

[Jacob Peterson]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 11:15 AM, W.Kenworthy <billk at iinet.net.au> wrote:

> 2008.9 + updates
>
> A phone that works:
>        reliably make and receive calls
>        reliably make and receive sms's
>
> At the moment, totally losing sms messages (phone sometimes
> hangs/crashes when one comes in) or not waking up if suspended  when one
> comes in means that its almost unusable as a phone.
>
> It often takes several boots before the pin dialog comes up. If you
> forget while waiting and it does come up but its awhile until you get to
> it, it will hang so you have to reboot anyway.  Sometimes restarting X
> helps, but not always
>
>
> Stability:
> My average in normal usage is at least two boots a day due to crashes,
> and often extra rebooting to check if an sms comes in (sometimes they
> will only show on fresh re-registration.  Leaving the phone on and
> registered for hours doesnt seem to help - not sure how vodafone
> australia takes to retry messages but surely its less that 12 hours.
> The only way to stop crashes is not to use the thing! No GPS, no
> wireless, no phone calls, and definitely never send/receive an sms :)
>
> I suspect the event/0 thread is at the root of a lot of this so I am
> waiting a fix for that.
>
> I dont think I am alone in this - hopefully the new focus means that
> these issues can be dealt with.
>
> I am a little concerned though that you think things like boot time is
> important enough to mention, but not basic issues like being able to
> reliably make a phone call.  Though a faster boot means less time wasted
> going through multiple bootups to get the thing registered. :)
>
> I should mention that 2007.2 seemed more stable and mature than 2008
> anything still is up until work stopped on it.
>
> BillK
>

I am with BillK on this one, Stability should be the top priority.  Getting
suspend/resume, GSM issues and fixing CPU hogging processes fixed, would be
a great help in allowing me (and I am sure many other people) to focus
limited amounts of free time to actually developing software and customizing
the distribution, instead of trying to chase bugs and scouring for
tweaks/fixes, just to get the basic features working.

So I applaud the new effort to concentrate on the basics and I am eagerly
awaiting the results to trickle down so I can finally start spending my time
working on the software.  In the mean time I will get back to collecting and
consolidating tweaks/fixes to get the basic functions to work.

-Jacob
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