Video: Nokia N8/Symbian^3 How to: speed up homescreen swiping/remove perceived lag between screens

Now for some reason or another, the Symbian^3 homescreen introduces a perceivable “lag” when switching between screens. This is apparently designed that way (due to the active widgets on screen). The homescreen lag is less visible when in landscape (where the swipe movement would be more obvious than a possible mispress in landscape. You could of course just press the middle homescreen button to switch, but that’s unidirectional. What happens if you just want to go to the one on the left? Press Twice? No.

I’m not sure this lag was designed at all (if the reason being due to prevent widget action confusion). If you go into

MENU>SETTINGS>THEMES>OPTIONS>THEME EFFECTS>OFF

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You’ll notice that your homescreen swiping is now INSTANT. The “animation” is obviously now gone but the trade off is an instant homescreen with no perceived delay. Were there an issue with widgets, shouldn’t the speed be the same? I don’t know what the reasoning is for the unecessary swipe delay other than to fire up the transition.

The much bigger disadvantage of this is that you lose the animations everywhere else too (though everything does become a pinch faster too). The theme effects which actually (for me any way, dunno about you) made S^3 that extra bit more palatable than S^1 (S^3 has other major improvements, don’t get me wrong).

I’m not sure why we couldn’t have had something like Maemo 5’s homescreen – which was both responsive but also WITH the active swipe animation – but that’s another story (a possible battery saving one)

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Eagle eyes amongst you would note the unintended demo of the iPhone death grip. It’s T-Mobile. The signal is very, very bad and cycles around between having signal and not having signal regardless of being gripped or not. Tried SIM in a Samsung genio and it doesn’t even pick up signal here. O2 sim in N8 – full signal.

Tags: Homescreen, How to:, N8, Nokia N8, p p p p power

Category: How to:, Nokia, Nseries, Symbian, Video