HTC Rezound: Sense 3.6 vs 4.0

I've been hearing a lot about Sense 4.0 for the Rezound.  I thought I'd try it out.  Here's a quick rundown of Sense 3.6 vs 4.0.  Please note I used |||bored|||'s Rez Rom s4 1.2 (4/25/2012) vs his ex 3.4 (4/16/2012) so that I could as best I could isolate sense version as the only different as both of these run on top of the latest ICS leak 4.03. 

Sense 3.6 Pros:

1. Faster, much much faster
1. Sense 3.6 was built to run on this hardware natively and it extracts a lot of performance out of Rez Rom
2. More familiar
1. Verizon hotspot was included for example, music app feels better
3. This ROM feels way faster than stock and is more stable than 4.03 leak so far
4. Little to no battery drain

Sense 4.0 Notes:

1. Much closer to AOSP
2. You could see how the interface would be cleaner
3. I like the pagination launcher employed 
4. Music app integrates all music providers
1. e.g. pandora appears as an icon along side of "music"
5. Overall this felt pretty stable but it just seemed like it was a port of something really designed to run on a different processor with expanded instruction sets
1. thus its really cool that you get to try it out
2. its also feels like your phone is running like an emulator
1. transitions e.g. are choppy
6. I like the wall papers better
7. The setup is a little iffy but initial setup program is better looking than 3.6
8. Very slow on rotation for such apps as camera

Enable Dual Core Mode HTC Rezound

There are multiple threads on notable developer forums indicating the Rezound under its latest stock kernel will run in a very conservative single core almost always mode. Rooting and just running "SetCpu" will enable independent scaling dual core mode, which engages both cores when expected. Although benchmarks may not reflect the performance gains they are significant in practice. Running complex live wallpapers and visually rich HTC Sense widgets pose no lag when scrolling. The overall effect is a phone without hiccups that's always responsive even while multitasking. Links to come.

First published on: http://blog.cliffordmark.com/

Why Retina Displays don't offer across the board improvement, yet.

As I was developing a site yesterday one of my logo images had a 200px constraining but needed sufficient data to display well.  I ramped up the DPI to a "Retina" display density of 260 px/inch.  I then realized that while native system text on these super dense displays will look much better, most web images won't.  Most websites are built to be optimized on equal/less than 1080px wide with a image density of around 96 DPI. 

I haven't conducted a study on the average pixel density across the web but 96 dpi seems to be a good guess as is the default on many professional image editing tools and there has been a push to maximize speed at the expense of density.  While I upped the density data on that specific image for a specific purpose and it looks good on retina displays, I have to think I am one of the few who has executed such retina web image optimizations yet.  Basically, until developers up the densities on their textures you won't see an improvement outside of system textures and text while using "retina" dense displays.

Further proof of this is the need for "special" retina enhanced programs on the app store.  It's cool that there are many already, but out of the gates publishers and developers will have to specifically optimize websites and programs specifically for super high pixel densities that can be displayed by devices like the new iPad, iPhone 4S, HTC Rezound, Galaxy Nexus, and that expanding list.