Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe with pocketnow.com you know in the computing world there are two problems with randomness first of all it's not really random it's only pseudo-random and the process to make pseudo-random more random well it takes a lot of computing power to help keep your tablet or smartphone whizzing along there's a collection of randomness already in place apps can pull from this randomness and use it whenever they need well something random until it runs out once it's empty it's got to be restocked and until then all the processes that need a random bit they're stuck and you're waiting and it's slow but what if there were an app that could make random just a little bit less random and speed up your entire device that's the claim of one app and it might just work the app is called cedar one point one entropy generator and it's said to provide significant lag reduction how does it do that and does it work well if you want the exact technical details head over to pocketnow.com and read what the developer has to say in short the developer is utilizing a semi random pool to write in to the random pool at one-second intervals the result he says is significant lag reduction with an exclamation mark he continues Chrome maps and other heavy applications switch instantaneously and map tiles populate as fast as I can scroll wow that's pretty impressive in fact he goes as far to say problem solved but don't take my word for it give it a shot so we did we installed the app on both the nexus 4 and a nexus 7 and we went about a normal day benchmarks didn't yield much change from stock but day to day activity seems snappier maybe this app could really improve all-around performance after all unfortunately there's a lot of heated debate around this quote-unquote fix our humans from it makes you less secure - it just doesn't work are being thrown around left and right people are passionate on both sides of the aisle either it's the greatest thing since sliced bread or it's nothing more than a placebo then a CyanogenMod maintainer chimed in in short he says the recent entropy pool fad is bull the only conceivable reason some devices may feel faster is because by constantly poling it keeps the device's IO in constant use which in turn and depending on device will make the CPU stick to a higher clock frequency and keep up or ramp up the eye of scheduler accordingly but does it work ironically the answer is yeah but probably not for the reason that the developer intended to solve in our test chrome was snappier and Google Maps was much quicker drawing tiles why probably not because the entropy pool was any quicker but because the CPU and i/o processes were being kept hot by the app constantly updating the system with new and less random bits in short the CPU wasn't returning to a slower speed as frequently resulting in a faster experience and shorter battery life all in all it was an interesting experiment and an interesting concept the app or rather the device when running the app does make your everyday activities seem a little bit faster though probably not for the reasons that the app is trying to solve what would solve it faster processors or keeping your processor running faster longer unfortunately both of those probably mean shorter battery life and it's a fine line between battery life and performance it's an age-old problem but hopefully we've put this magic voodoo to bed and you can try it for yourself if you want just realize it's not doing what you think it's doing and it's going to eat up your battery life faster if you do decide to run with it on all the time but if you want that little bit of extra speed and you don't want to go with some kind of a custom solution that just keeps your processor running faster all the time this is certainly something you can try what do you think let us know in the comments over at pocketnow.com and if you liked this kind of half-and-half debunking and justifying approach to cedar one-point-one give the video a big thumbs up for PocketNow debunking stuff that sounded pretty cool i'm joe levi thanks for watching