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Not Happy with your Droid Charge? Try these 3 easy fixes...

Not happy with your Droid Charge? Easy fix, flash GummyCharged 2.0 to it and finally have a phone that's decent to work with.

Here's what I see as being wrong with the Charge. Will it fix all these things? 1) Phone calls are hard to hear and indistinct/muffled on quite a large proportion of the calls. 2) 3G data will drop and never come back sometimes during the day or especially overnight after I haven't used it. Reboot required. 3) Battery life is short (3 or 4 hours) if you are using the phone regularly especially if you want to see that beautiful display in good brightness or you don't have good reception for calls and for data. (I live kind of in a valley) 4) The browser is jumpy and breaks up into a cube pattern while you are moving around a page often 5) The browser crashes several times a day (though it's quickly resumed again) 6) Moving around screens and between apps can cause quite a lag of a few seconds sometimes after you've had the phone for a while and put a fair amount of stuff on it. 7) Acquiring a GPS lock can take 5 to 15 minutes probably. 8) Processor is probably too slow for most recent games since it's getting to be a kind of old processor for such a premium phone that I paid $300 for. 9) Ringer sounds and other sounds are not loud enough (it seems like the phone is always being polite) I mean, I like the phone very much overall, and that might be partly since it's my first smartphone and I can see how many wonderful things I can do now, but still, one thing I hate is having to keep having people repeat things during phone calls or not hearing my phone ring. And who wants to wait for things to happen while they are working?
 
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1) Phone calls are hard to hear and indistinct/muffled on quite a large proportion of the calls.
Never experienced this issue so I don't know what to tell you.

2) 3G data will drop and never come back sometimes during the day or especially overnight after I haven't used it. Reboot required.
The EP1Q modem firmwares have shown promising results with fixing this issue but some people have stated that it effects call quality so I wouldn't flash that to your phone quite yet. It's a leaked firmware so there is a very good likelihood that we'll see something new soon.

3) Battery life is short
That I have to agree with.

4) The browser is jumpy and breaks up into a cube pattern while you are moving around a page often
Yep, but it seems that is a bug that Google has to fix in the browser.

5) The browser crashes several times a day
I don't think it's a crash, more like the browser process is killed due to low memory. Yes, this phone has low memory but we can thank Verizon for that for loading this phone down with a bunch of needless crap and bloat. Loading GummyCharged on my phone I can finally multitask like it should.

I had SlackerRadio running in the background playing music, SugarSync syncing files to my phone, and I was browsing the web in the browser. The phone didn't even sweat or show signs of slowing down. This was of course after GummyCharged. Good luck doing this on the stock ROM, that thing will lag like hell doing all of that at the same time.

6) Moving around screens and between apps can cause quite a lag of a few seconds sometimes after you've had the phone for a while and put a fair amount of stuff on it.
I blame TouchWiz for that. TouchWiz is a POS. I replaced it with GoLauncher EX from the Marketplace and even before loading GummyCharged, there was very little lag according to that of TouchWiz.

7) Acquiring a GPS lock can take 5 to 15 minutes probably.
Yep, I agree with that. Apparently people who have flashed GummyCharged has had this fixed with that ROM.

8) Processor is probably too slow for most recent games since it's getting to be a kind of old processor for such a premium phone that I paid $300 for.
Apparently this CPU can do two threads at the same time but the APIs to take advantage of it aren't in Froyo and we'll have to wait until Gingerbread to see the speed improvements. Also, remember all the bloat I talked about in point 5? Yeah, that's going to slow things down too.

) Ringer sounds and other sounds are not loud enough (it seems like the phone is always being polite) I mean, I like the phone very much overall, and that might be partly since it's my first smartphone and I can see how many wonderful things I can do now, but still, one thing I hate is having to keep having people repeat things during phone calls or not hearing my phone ring. And who wants to wait for things to happen while they are working?
Never experienced this.

Honestly, if you wanted a perfect phone... you're not going to get it. Period. I don't care if you go buy yourself a one of those "fruit" phones, even those have issues of their own. Namely it's so locked down you can't do crap with it.

I feel that the carriers are doing us a disservice by loading all of the crap onto these phones. I swear it's a way to make us buy new phones all the time. The Android Community of course is fixing all of that by giving us excellent third-party ROMs to load and take the bloat off.
 
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Here's what I see as being wrong with the Charge. Will it fix all these things? 1) Phone calls are hard to hear and indistinct/muffled on quite a large proportion of the calls. 2) 3G data will drop and never come back sometimes during the day or especially overnight after I haven't used it. Reboot required. 3) Battery life is short (3 or 4 hours) if you are using the phone regularly especially if you want to see that beautiful display in good brightness or you don't have good reception for calls and for data. (I live kind of in a valley) 4) The browser is jumpy and breaks up into a cube pattern while you are moving around a page often 5) The browser crashes several times a day (though it's quickly resumed again) 6) Moving around screens and between apps can cause quite a lag of a few seconds sometimes after you've had the phone for a while and put a fair amount of stuff on it. 7) Acquiring a GPS lock can take 5 to 15 minutes probably. 8) Processor is probably too slow for most recent games since it's getting to be a kind of old processor for such a premium phone that I paid $300 for. 9) Ringer sounds and other sounds are not loud enough (it seems like the phone is always being polite) I mean, I like the phone very much overall, and that might be partly since it's my first smartphone and I can see how many wonderful things I can do now, but still, one thing I hate is having to keep having people repeat things during phone calls or not hearing my phone ring. And who wants to wait for things to happen while they are working?

1. I Love the call quality and loudness of my ringtones - default ones as well as my own. The speaker is very loud and even the non-speaker is very loud! :) haven't had any complaints of me sounding muffled or a hard time hearing the person on the other line.

2. I started having issues out the blue with losing 4G in areas I was always getting it before. It would either go to 3G and the only way I could get 4G again would be to reboot or battery pull or turning Mobile Data off and then on again, or I'd constantly get the roaming 1x non-stop. Ever since my Sim Card has been taking out for a few seconds and then put back in, it's been MUCH BETTER!!! :)

3. I 110% agree about the battery life. Heavy use gets me about 5hrs max!!! And there are times where I can get up to 7-10 hours on light to moderate use. I always try to keep my brightness low or turned off unless when in the sunlight. GPS is never on (doesn't work anyway) and the only time my WiFi connects is when i get near home. My battery life is too funny!

4 & 5. I mainly use Dolphin HD and the times I do use the stock browser, I haven't experienced that problem.

6. No matter how many Factory Resets I've done or if I'm using Go Launcher Ex, ADW Ex or " trying" to like TW, I get lags between my screens and when switching back n forth between my apps also. My app drawer is always loading 50% of the time, even if I just had it opened and they were all loaded before. I NEVER experienced that or other lag issues with Go Launcher on my MyTouch 4G. I'm using thee EXACT SAME APPS & WIDGETS that I used when I had that phone.

7. GPS locking is a real pain! I ONLY use it when I have to use Google Maps which isn't often. I NEVER had that issue with my original purchased Charge until lata down the line. I got kinda happy when my Google Maps automatically updated the other day - hoping it would fix that issue...

8. I only have like 3 games on here, but I ONLY play Wordfeud on here. I filled my Tablet up with all the games.

9. As I mentioned in "1", all my default ringers n personal music and notifications are very loud!

FYI: I'M TRYING TO HOLD ON, HOPING THE OFFICIAL GB RELEASE IS BEFORE NOVEMBER GETS HERE!!! :-( IF NOT, ONLY THEN WILL I MAYBE TRY ROOTING
MY CHARGE. I rooted two different ROMs - Humble n Gummy on my original and still had issues, so, that's why I'm putting off rooting again for now.
 
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