Gadgetory

the Nexus 7 is one of the best value tablets that you're going to find it's affordable it's relatively fast with a 1.2 gigahertz quad-core Tegra 3 processor but there are just some areas where it could be quicker web browsing with the Chrome browser in particular so how does one go about making their device faster well for one developer it was releasing what's called the elite kernel it replaces your stock kernel and it's like running your Nexus 7 on afterburners so like I mentioned this is my Nexus 7 it's the 8 gig variety which just means that it's got half the on-board storage is the 16 gig variety but everything is pretty much the same let's go ahead and check about tablet and you can see I'm running android version 4.1 one and my kernel is 3.1 point 10 - mottely + blah blah blah a whole bunch of other stuff this is where all of the magic happens ok now what do I mean by that first of all I'm running the stock rom it's the ROM that came with the phone I have uh no e/m unlocked it which means it completely is wiped brand-new that'll happen anytime you OEM unlock after that I had to route it after I routed it then of course I put on my recovery image and once that was done I was able to flash this custom kernel so there was a little bit of homework and legwork involved there not too terribly difficult because this is a nexus device but let's go ahead and take a look we can run set CPU this is an app that's available free in the Play Store and you can see over here my minimum speed is set at 51 megahertz which is really really slow and my maximum over here is 1800 megahertz or 1.8 gigahertz some people say with their Nexus that this is a little bit unstable for my Nexus it's a little bit unstable when that's the case you just simply move this over to 1700 people have had a lot more success with it we'll see if we can get by with 1800 without too many problems now if you notice over here I'm also running the interactive governor versus a performance governor we can go ahead and change that to however we want performance of course gets you a little bit more speed once we have that's and there's lots of other things you can do in here with voltage and the governor's and whatnot I'm just going to be very basic we're going to set this at 1,800 minimum 1800 maximum everyday use I don't recommend you do this you might want to come over here and do something else like I don't know somewhere around 300 or 400 megahertz as the low-end 1600 or 1.6 gigahertz is the max but for this video let's go all out with just basics changing the performance up and changing things to 1800 both high and low once that is done we're set we're good let's go ahead and run a benchmark here we're just going to fire a quadrant because it's got a lot of stuff that it does not because it's necessarily the best benchmark on the market but it's probably one of the prettiest at least in my opinion so we're going to go ahead and run this through first of all you're going to notice how much quicker this runs then just regular normal everyday when you're running it through with a stock kernel quite a bit faster in fact this is one of the fastest times that I've seen quadrant run through and complete what I want to show you if we watch down here is our frames per second 104 107 89 110 we're getting into the hundreds of frames per second on this benchmark and it's just amazing there are no graphic anomalies there's no no hiccups no hesitations over here we've seen in some other devices will have some anomalies when the planets kind of cross each other nothing here it's perfectly clean this DNA molecule it's usually a little bit slower and not quite as high res 93 frames per second it's amazingly fast and looking at it I'm not even getting what the other people are reporting because I'm not tweaking the voltages and whatnot I'm getting 5446 now that's significant this machine the same thing without this kernel Edge's about 3,500 so not quite twice as fast but a good bit faster let's go ahead and fire up the the web browser over here now the web browser that comes stock of course is called Chrome it's not the browser browser and the first thing to look at is just how fast everything loads in and how smooth the scrolling is this is where other people have said hey there are some slowdowns there are some issues but overall I mean this it's smooth it's fluid I haven't noticed the same lagging this the same jumpiness the same hesitations that you get when you're just using the stock kernel it's amazing now I could get in and run some games and show you that unfortunately running at this speed I ran into some compatibility issues and whatnot and to my eye there wasn't a lot of difference between running this at full blown afterburner speed versus running it on the normal stock I couldn't see any difference though the gameplay felt a little bit smoother now drawbacks this device out of the box is going to give you between eight and ten hours of active runtime that's eight hours of watching an HD video 720p or up to you know ten maybe even more hours doing normal everyday activity with Wi-Fi on with Gmail going out and getting stuff so real normal everyday activities and then 300 hours of standby time running this of course at the full-blown speed that I just mentioned to you before 1800 by 1800 you're running at full speed all the time don't do that in everyday life okay it's just going to burn out your battery very fast and it'll rip right through it it's amazing in fact you can see here I'm pegged out at 1800 and let's come back down to let's say one gate you know let's say just below this stock so 1100 stock of course is 1200 it will scale up and down accordingly takes a little bit of time to do that and setting your governor to interactive helps a little bit better as well now if I back and forth here it still looks buttery smooth but it's a little smoother it's a little nicer I don't have a lot of apps installed on this ROM but you can see it's very fast it's very fluid it's very nice even when switching over to the widgets very fluid very fast it's what this device should be and then we get to another downside right back here on the back of the device it gets really really hot ridiculously hot don't run this thing at 1,800 1600 1700 maybe but it's going to get really hot and it's going to get things don't end well when devices get that hot luckily I didn't have any problem with that something else that you want to consider you've got two speakers one over here one over here when you're running at 1800 eventually you are going to get weird pops and sounds out of this all the time not just when you're playing audio all the time bump it down to 1700 they usually go away so that means you're not actually burning out your speakers we hope not but it may be you know running the extra voltage of running the extra extra speed through the circuit paths that are around wherever the speaker paths start and somewhere up in here it introduces some some extra static so it's not quite shield enough to to take you all the way up to the full speed but you know hey it's its speed it's fast and that's what we're after here right this is all about speed absolutely amazing if you want to do this if you want to get extra speed I definitely recommend this kernel again with the few little things that we've mentioned keep it around 1700 you are going to have some slower or some shorter battery lives because you've got the faster speeds running a few other things that this kernel does head over to the article at pocketnow.com there are some other fancy things that you might like such as lowering the how dark the backlight can get so if you're reading at night you have an even darker backlight very very nice for reading awesome I love it you probably will too there's a whole bunch of other technical stuff that this kernel does the article at pocketnow.com will outline all of that if you've got questions or comments want to know more about it get the link to where to download this kernel head over to pocketnow.com we'll have a link right down here at the bottom of the YouTube video if you're reading this on pocketnow.com of course you're already there if you like seeing this kind of stuff how fast we can make our tablets go and you know maybe even burn them out in the process make sure you give the video a big thumbs up for PocketNow showing off afterburners on the Nexus 7 I'm Joe Levi you