Undoubtedly there's several of you who have come to notice that during screen transitions, messaging, and most notably using the gallery, there's quite a bit of stuttering on the Galaxy S4. Before I go any further, i want to make sure people keep in perspective that this is from the release software on the US versions.
During screen transitions on the home screen, there's an animation that's shown when you scroll from left to right or when you go into the app drawer. Occasionally, the animation will catch and you'll notice a stutter between the transitions. Fortunately for this particular issue, a quick remedy (but not a cure-all) can be applied. In some cases, people have reported that it's fixed the issue for them, but I can't guarantee that.
-Under "About Device", tap on the Build Number 7 times until it text pops up on your screen that you've enabled Developer Options. It's under the "More" section. From there, there's 3 options I would suggest to turn off: Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale. This should stop any animation issues you're having.
It's important to note that while this particular issue can be perceived as lag, it is not. Doesn't make it anymore acceptable, but it's not an issue with your phone not being fast enough to handle the software. It is.
Once we get past that, there's still some other areas that making those changes may not fix. Some of you have reported that keeping the sensors for Air View/Gesture and Smart Scroll/Stay on can negatively impact the performance of your phone. I haven't been able to replicate that, but it is entirely possible that those sensors are CPU hogs and are slowing your phone down. I'd be curious to hear the exact conditions people are experiencing this with (Power Saving mode on, etc).
The home button issue has been well-documented on other Galaxy phones. If you don't use S Voice, or don't need the ability to pull it up via the physical home button, you can go into the S Voice settings and remove the option that opens S Voice after double tapping the home button. This generally makes using the home button quicker as it no longer has to process whether you're going to hit the button one more time to open S Voice.
Stock applications have also been referenced in some of the issues, including messaging, calendar, browser, and gallery. I've recently gotten the gallery to stutter, especially upon opening the application. I'm not entirely sure how much of (if any) these issues are fixed by turning off the scales. One thing I've tried is forcing GPU rendering through Developer Options. It has made a difference in the loading of the stock applications, but gallery seems to be immune to it.
So having to force GPU rendering and turn off animations may seem like we're doing their job for them. I would agree. If I had to pinpoint these issues, it would be with two things: Touchwiz is buggy on every new itertation of a device from Samsung and they rushed 4.2.2 out without optimizing it for their software. I can understand their reasoning behind it, but I would have expected a little more, even at launch.
So what does this mean for the end user and prospective buyers? Not too much, but you won't get the consistent UI experience that you'd get from an iPhone 5 or HTC One (for now). Even with some of the stuttering, this phone is an amazing device that has some buggy software at launch. I fully expect Samsung to rectify this sooner rather than later as I don't see these things being massive fixes. Performance enhancement/bug fix updates are very common soon after a launch and from what I gather, there's already been an update to the unlocked versions.
Some good news? Battery life is pretty damn impressive. Keep an eye on the Battery Screenshot thread as people are getting some really good numbers.
During screen transitions on the home screen, there's an animation that's shown when you scroll from left to right or when you go into the app drawer. Occasionally, the animation will catch and you'll notice a stutter between the transitions. Fortunately for this particular issue, a quick remedy (but not a cure-all) can be applied. In some cases, people have reported that it's fixed the issue for them, but I can't guarantee that.
-Under "About Device", tap on the Build Number 7 times until it text pops up on your screen that you've enabled Developer Options. It's under the "More" section. From there, there's 3 options I would suggest to turn off: Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale. This should stop any animation issues you're having.
It's important to note that while this particular issue can be perceived as lag, it is not. Doesn't make it anymore acceptable, but it's not an issue with your phone not being fast enough to handle the software. It is.
Once we get past that, there's still some other areas that making those changes may not fix. Some of you have reported that keeping the sensors for Air View/Gesture and Smart Scroll/Stay on can negatively impact the performance of your phone. I haven't been able to replicate that, but it is entirely possible that those sensors are CPU hogs and are slowing your phone down. I'd be curious to hear the exact conditions people are experiencing this with (Power Saving mode on, etc).
The home button issue has been well-documented on other Galaxy phones. If you don't use S Voice, or don't need the ability to pull it up via the physical home button, you can go into the S Voice settings and remove the option that opens S Voice after double tapping the home button. This generally makes using the home button quicker as it no longer has to process whether you're going to hit the button one more time to open S Voice.
Stock applications have also been referenced in some of the issues, including messaging, calendar, browser, and gallery. I've recently gotten the gallery to stutter, especially upon opening the application. I'm not entirely sure how much of (if any) these issues are fixed by turning off the scales. One thing I've tried is forcing GPU rendering through Developer Options. It has made a difference in the loading of the stock applications, but gallery seems to be immune to it.
So having to force GPU rendering and turn off animations may seem like we're doing their job for them. I would agree. If I had to pinpoint these issues, it would be with two things: Touchwiz is buggy on every new itertation of a device from Samsung and they rushed 4.2.2 out without optimizing it for their software. I can understand their reasoning behind it, but I would have expected a little more, even at launch.
So what does this mean for the end user and prospective buyers? Not too much, but you won't get the consistent UI experience that you'd get from an iPhone 5 or HTC One (for now). Even with some of the stuttering, this phone is an amazing device that has some buggy software at launch. I fully expect Samsung to rectify this sooner rather than later as I don't see these things being massive fixes. Performance enhancement/bug fix updates are very common soon after a launch and from what I gather, there's already been an update to the unlocked versions.
Some good news? Battery life is pretty damn impressive. Keep an eye on the Battery Screenshot thread as people are getting some really good numbers.
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