10.1 Pro Experiences & Performance Tips

I recently bought a Tab Pro 10.1 and I was quite disappointed with the performance of it. For a device that -- on paper, at least -- was really powerful, I felt like the entire experience was very sluggish and clunky.

I wanted to share a couple of tweaks I made that helped boost performance dramatically.

1. Ditch the Samsung launcher. As cool as some of those tiled screens looked, it felt really slow and choppy to me. I gave Nova Launcher a try (I've also heard good things about Apex and Launcher Pro) and was extremely impressed with it. The tweaks that yielded the best performance gains were:

• Scroll Speed - Faster Than Light
• Animation Speed - Faster Than Light
• App Animation - Slide*

* The stock animation on the Galaxy devices [the window that starts out minimized and then grows in size] is very choppy; let me add that the "Icecream Sandwich" option offers even better performance, but I thought it looked a little tacky.

Because the device is running such a huge resolution, these animations still look fine when set to such a fast speed. On my phone (Galaxy S4), I toned the settings down a little bit, because they were too fast. On a huge tablet though, they feel great to me.

2. Tweak the Scale Multipliers
In order to do this, I had to unlock Developer Options. Unlocking this mode can easily be done without rooting. Simply go into Settings -> General -> About Device and click on "Build Number" tab 7 times. This will unlock Developer Options (it'll show up as an entry in your left menu). After unlocking this, go into it and change the following settings:

• Window Animation Scale - 0.5x
• Transition Animation Scale - 0.5x
• Animator Duration Scale - 0.5x*

This settings netted huge gains. The tablet felt so much more responsive for me, especially with regards to animations. In particular -- and perhaps this is a complete placebo effect -- I felt that scrolling (web pages, app lists, etc) was dramatically improved. Sluggish scrolling has always bothered the hell out of me with Android devices. This seemed to help a lot (again, it could just be a placebo, but I genuinely think it helped).

After making these two changes, it seriously feels like a brand new device (okay, well, I just bought this 2 days ago, it already is a brand new device). I went from being extremely disappointed in the performance to blown away by how snappy / responsive everything feels now. I know the 10.1's are sort of lacking with the ROMs we have available, but these tips will help a lot. Please note that all of this is sort of generic advice -- you can find most of this info available on other sites. However, I just wanted to share the changes I made that netted me the most dramatic performance improvements.

I'm guessing a lot of people are probably well-versed in suggestions like this, so hopefully I'm not preaching to the choir.

I hope this helps!

Not sure if you're referring to the same tablet. The T520 that the I have is super fast and responsive!

Sent from my GT-I9505G using Tapatalk

dknotty said:

Not sure if you're referring to the same tablet. The T520 that the I have is super fast and responsive!

Sent from my GT-I9505G using Tapatalk

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The tablet is not necessarily "slow" per se, but it feels slow and sluggish. For whatever reason, stock Android animations have always been terrible. Have you ever used an iOS device before? I prefer Android for about a billion reasons, but one thing iOS absolutely nails is their animations in their user interfaces. Everything on those devices feels as smooth as butter. One thing I've found is that that this is all a matter of perception; for some people, it doesn't bother them at all. For others, it drives them crazy. It's subtle, but once you notice it, it's really annoying. It's almost impossible not to notice if you've used an iOS device for an extended period of time (I owned an iPhone for a couple years). Responsiveness is something that Google has focused on (check out search Google for "Project Butter" for more info).

With every Android device I've used, the animations have looked cheap and clunky. They're not smooth (and never have been). They are choppy and they stutter; the best way I can describe it is like when you're playing a computer game on high settings and your framerate starts to drop. It doesn't look smooth and natural anymore -- it looks inconsistent. Android animations often look like frames are missing.

With the stock settings, go to your home page and start cycling through the pages quickly. For me, whenever it loaded those tiled pages (the thing with the calendar/email widgets, or the digital newspaper page), there was a noticeable hiccup. Successive cycles through the home pages would often feel smoother -- it seems that the device must temporarily cache some of the rendered data for a while. However, when it's of memory and needs to render again, the stuttering returns.

Also, try opening an app. By default, it plays that animation that looks like a window maximizing from a taskbar. That animation was always very choppy for me. Again, it looked like it was missing frames. Using Nova Launcher, I've switched to the Ice Cream Sandwich-style animation (sort of looks like a tube TV turning on), and it feels way more responsive and instantaneous to me.

Again, none of these changes are actually speeding up the device. It's just lowering animation times so that things feel faster.