Guido Kollerie

When reading up on reviews of the Samsung Galaxy S I often came across a side note or a Pros and Cons section that the phone would experience the occasional lag when switching between applications. During my first week of usage I did not experience this at all. However starting yesterday I’m experiencing serious lags.

For instance when I am in the dialer/Phone application and the Keypad is selected, switching to the Contacts tab can now take up more than 5 seconds! That really is an impediment to using your phone comfortably. And this is not the only spot where it happens. Switching between any application can take up many seconds.

The Culprit

Some people think they have found the cause for this issue. They claim the internal SD card of the Samsung Galaxy S is kind of slow. Supposedly it is this SD card that is used for caching application data. Solutions suggest using the internal memory or faster external SD card for this purpose. Both solutions however require rooting your phone.

Having said that Samsung is the one that should provide a solution. For a phone they tout as harboring the fastest mobile processor (the 1Ghz Snapdragon) application switching performs horribly on this phone.

Update

It seems that a couple of utilities I had installed had at least something to do with it. Following popular advise I installed both JuiceDefender and SystemPanelLite. Those tools each serve a purpose and might be exactly what you were looking for, but for me they were a solution looking for a problem I did not have.

Once both tools were uninstalled my phone felt somewhat faster. There still is an occasional lag and it still feels slower then what I would have expected from a phone with a 1Ghz processor. As such Samsung still has an issue with lags to solve and they better use the Froyo update to deliver it.

See also:

• JuiceDefender making my phone pain-stakingly slow!
• I stopped using a task killer last week to see if there is a difference. There is, and it’s huge.