Samsung’s latest beast, the Galaxy S 4, with its 1.9GHZ quad-core Snapdragon 600 should be the fastest device you’ve ever used. But sadly, for a lot of people, this simply isn’t the case. Whether the issue is one of perception, or if there’s something wrong under-the-hood, the device seems quite laggy a lot of the time, and it can certainly tarnish your experience of the device, as I have personally found.
Fortunately, through a long and tedious process of trial, error and reading far too many XDA threads, I’ve found some things you can do to really help with lag:
- If you haven’t already, enable developer options. Although on the Galaxy S 4, you’ll have to take the extra step of going to the ‘More’ tab once you’re in the settings application.
- In the developer options, scroll down to ‘Window animation scale’. Set this to 0.5x, and repeat for ‘Transition animation scale’ and ‘Animator duration scale’.
- Double-tap the home button to launch S-Voice. Then hit the menu button and open up settings. Uncheck the box marked ‘Open via the home key’. This will disable the double-click of the home button to launch S-Voice, which should reduce the lag when pressing home. If, for some reason you actually want to use S-Voice, you can access it from the application tray.
- Download Quickpic from the Play Store. Never open Samsung’s gallery again.
- If you’ve gone ahead and rooted your Galaxy S 4, install CyanogenMod. You’re welcome.
Hopefully that’ll help. I know it’s really made my Galaxy a lot faster and even though I still see the occasional lag, it doesn’t interfere with how I use the phone any more. Now we just have to wait until Samsung rolls out an OTA update that will make the device really fly.
