Home screen freezing

[Noodle999]

Hello all,

I have an HTC Magic, not yet 2 weeks old, and 9 times out of 10 when I return to the home screen (regardless of which screen I left it on last, left/middle/right) there are no icons on the screen and it can take up to 30 seconds for the icons to come back. I also cannot open the app list from the bottom, but I can still open the notification window, and hold down the Home button to access recently used applications. This often enables me to immediately launch Task Manager which never shows abnormal CPU usage at this time, there is seemingly no reason for the freezing.

I have a handful of popular apps that run in the background for various reasons, which don't show on Task Manager, these are:

We-Fi Connect automatic Wi-Fi (only cuts in when I turn on Wi-Fi via my Battery widget)
Screen On (set to keep screen on when using SyncMyPix because it messes up)
AutoLock (set to 1 min delay)
NetSentry

Screen On was only installed a couple of days ago and the problem was already present so I think this can be discounted, I think the main question is is this small selection of "background" apps too much for the phone to cope with, and thus causing the problem? I have disabled all widgets from all home screens to no avail. I have also uninstalled about 10 apps (albeit not ones that stay running) that I didn't want.

If anyone is able to shed any light on this it'd be greatly appreciated!

 

[Carl C]

Hi Noodle999

I and many others have this Problem , I've seen this been ask in many other forums I've glanced and yet no-one has found an answer to completely get rid of this

It only started with me a few months ago out of the Blue while i was still running 1.5 and Still doing it now running Donut. I've also Noticed all the post's I have seen , It's only HTC Magic's being effected.... I'm yet to come across someone with a Hero or something along the same Problem.

I'll be keeping a close on this thread to see if the AF community can sort this out?

 

[Noodle999]

Hi Carl,

Many thanks for your reply, yes it is indeed rather strange! I'm glad it's not only me...

Although I don't have an understanding how how the Widgets talk to the GUI, it would have made a lot of sense to me if it was a buggy widget, but I've disabled all those to no benefit

I neglected to mention that the phone had 1.5 on it when I first got it and the problem started, and it has continued after the phone was upgraded OTA to 1.6, so my experience is the same as yours in that respect...

Sometimes I can go in/out of several apps and the icons always come back, but most of the time they vanish for 20-30 seconds, and there's no pattern with regards to which applications I'm using.

I hope somebody somewhere can shed some light on this for the sake of all of us who are having the problem, I'm going to continue trying to rid myself of the problem by a process of elimination and I'll let you know anything I discover!

Chris

 

[kabbie_mcfeely]

This happens to me sometimes on my G1. If I have to many widgets or forget to clear my cache.

 

[Noodle999]

This happens to me sometimes on my G1. If I have to many widgets or forget to clear my cache.

Tried both of those and still no closer to solving it You're lucky yours is temporary, it is possibly the most annoying thing ever!

Thanks for the input though!

Chris

 

[Carl C]

Likewise I tried that ,

I can't narrow it down considering I experience the same as you like I can't notice any Specific app. Sometimes I could literally just go to the menu of an app like the Market home & Press the "Home" button or the back button and it starts all over again. However it is not all the time.

I've tried removing all the widgets but the same thing happens , when it happens I can even pull up the menu and see all the icons loading on them too. Maybe it's an app but we're gonna have 1 hell of a time finding which one & that's even if it is an app!

Looks like were stuck with it for now...........

 

[cyberbob25]

I used to have this problem regularly as well on my G1. I've managed to eliminate it however after having rooted my phone and setting up compcache backed by swap.

Cyanogen's also made a stab at this problem in his latest builds with an option to save the home screen in memory (which prevents it from having to be loaded each time to exit out to the home screen), though there are sporadic reports of it messing up other things (such as sync).

 

[Noodle999]

So the phone is basically unusable by design and the user has to try and fix it by performing an unauthorised flashing of the phone software (to root it) and generally messing around?

I've had this phone just over a fortnight and in some ways it is becoming seriously lame I like the concept, the features and the apps but through a series of silly little faults it's becoming unusable

Thanks for the suggestions, I guess I'll watch this space and see what happens!

 

[cyberbob25]

I wouldn't say unusable by design, just underpowered, which is because of the manufacturer (HTC), not necessarily an android shortcoming. The iphone suffered from this problem in it's first couple of revisions as well.

As for "unauthorised flashing", as far as I am aware, that's not entirely correct. It's your device and as such, you can run whatever software you want on it (as long as you are licensed to use said software). The only aspect that could be considered 'unauthorised' is that you will void your hardware warranty.

 

[Noodle999]

Thanks for the reply

I am referring to the phone itself not Android, it's so bad I may pursue something through Vodafone to try and get it swapped for a more powerful phone...

When I said about unauthorised flashing of the phone I was indeed referring to the warranty, which I have no desire to void. Whilst members of this community may be able to tell me that there are solutions to be found through "rooting" the phone, the manufacturers and supplier can't go down this route so it'll be interesting to see what they say!

Chris

 

[venictus]

i also have the same problem and i find its mostly when i exit out of the web browser or youtube,

i don't have to many widgets on the home screen but i do have some icons, i have tried taking everything off but no luck.

so i'm disabling the syncs 1 by 1 to see if they have any affect.

At the moment i have hotmail email, gmail, gcalendar, facebook and contacts being synced.

so far just hotmail is disabled and so far so good!