Quote:
Originally Posted by mightyzazz
Thank-you Difflugia for your kind offer. Sorry for the delay in replying, but you have given me much to consider (If it were my own Kobo, I would immediately risk it and rise to the challenge, but it was a present for my son). What would decide it for me would be to have an idea of how much better a rooted device would perform. At present, it seems to take a long time to boot up (probably in part to the amount of apps on it, and having the wifi switched on so that it feels obliged to update everythng on start-up). Would it be significantly quicker, and would it run quicker, if rooted? Finally, what would I need (a new SD card? - whats specs/speed/capacity etc.)
Thanks, Roberto.
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Unfortunately, the long boot time is just a feature of the Vox. Equally unfortunate is that the stock internal card (8GB SanDisk class 4) is probably optimum for speed. Higher speed cards (class 6, class 10) tend to be optimized for read/write of larger files and are good for secondary storage, but are actually slower when the OS is running from them. You could upgrade to a 16GB or 32GB class 4 SanDisk card, though.
The biggest problem with running speed on the Vox is just that the processor is a little slow and outdated (800MHz compared to the 1.3GHz dual-core in the NOOK HD, for example). The Kobo software itself is kind of a dog, too. There's a little bit of bloatware that can be removed, but the speed improvement was much less than I'd hoped (and some of what I thought was "bloatware" turned out to be needed). The Vox's Android build seems a little glitchy as well and I've noticed odd screen artifacts on a few games (Bad Piggies, for example).
The two things that ultimately improved speed didn't actually require rooting. First, I removed all the widgets (particularly the one that shows your library and suggestions) from the launcher screen. I also switched launchers (to
GO Launcher Ex, but there are others; search Google Play for "launcher"), but I don't think that affected speed.
The second speed enhancement was just switching to
Mantano Reader Lite. I find that it performs much better than the Kobo software does and nearly all Kobo books can be downloaded in EPUB format using Adobe Digital Editions and transferred to Mantano Reader. Mantano also has the benefit of allowing you to keep files on the secondary card if you like, so the 8GB internal card isn't as big of a limitation. As an aside and if you don't already, you may want to consider using Calibre on your PC along with Apprentice Alf's tools to maintain your library. Lots of Calibre information is available on Mobileread and Googling for "Apprentice Alf" should get you to the tools.
Here are the main reasons/benefits I've found for rooting the Vox:
- Because I'm a hardware nerd and enjoy that sort of thing
- I switched the sdcard directory (where the apps store most of their data) from the internal to the external card
- I use Titanium Backup to maintain backups of my Android devices and it requires root for some of its functions