1.4GHz

That’s the overclocked clock speed of my Nexus S’s 1GHz Hummingbird. Yeah, the G2’s up to 1.9GHz but I don’t know if it has a PowerVR GPU under the hood like my phone (nor do I know what it is, just saw it on Wikipedia). That’s a 40% increase over the stock with decent stability, kernels brought to us by XDA’s Team Whiskey (they do other phones too) after less than two weeks of screwing around while working on their own rom. It’s unclear if we’ve topped out at 1.4GHz or if they will manage to crank it up a notch or two further. Their rom ain’t bad either.

There’s probably a whole lot more to these modified kernels than just dialing in a different gigahertz figure and zipping it up, for example proper scaling to maximize efficiency of both speed and voltage, somehow keeping everything working right like Bluetooth and the camera – it sounds complicated and I’m pretty impressed by both these guys for figuring this out and also I’m impressed with the phone for being able to climb to 1.3GHz with very solid stability and 1.4GHz with noteworthy stability, a chip originally set for 1GHz.

Now I mainly use my phone (the things I do regularly) for email, RSS, GTalk, Chandroid, a police scanner, my checking account balance, Google Maps Navigation, Google Voice, occasionally screw around with SIP, guitar tuner when I want to get it perfect, a little IRC and Youtube sometimes, bandwidth speed tests, cell tower war driving app that exports to KML, Google Calendar and Google Tasks, Latitude, an app that helps me keep track of how much time I should bill clients (syncs up with Google), Google Maps Navigation, Google Analytics, web browsing for girly pictures which I then beam to my computer or my server with a couple taps over FTP, Wikipedia and IMDB front-ends, Facebook (don’t judge me),remote control for my Google TV, Android’s gallery app which syncs with my Picasa – shoot I started out trying to say I only do a few simple things so I don’t really need the juice but I guess I do use this sucker for all sorts of things. Which leads me to a tangential remark, I love my Google Android phone.

You see, I am addicted to benchmarking. It sounds so pointless and bizarre but I’m hooked. I install certain roms, kernels, I uninstall everything and just sideload the benchmarking thing, tweak what gets started up and what runs in the background — I actually have a Firefox plugin that checks the first post of this kernel’s XDA page every fifteen minutes and alerts me if there’s any change to it and I do all of this so that I am a new gigahertz level pioneer for my device and so that I have a shot at taking a screen shot of my fastest Quadrant score to email to the fellas who tend not to care unless it’s David K emailing me Quadrant tests of Android running on his old HD2 (winmo), claiming they worsen as you use the phone because Android has poor multitasking (unlike wp7?) because he knows it pisses me off.

I’ll leave you with my Quadrant score. I installed a WordPress plugin that lets you upload jpgs in your comments specifically for this article so that we all can play the Who’s Got a Bigger Quadrant Bar contest.

Why is it that these phone OEMs release a phone with a certain clockspeed that could be cranked up 20% to over 200% and still have pretty good stability, kernel tricks hobbyists figured out in a short period of time? Why wouldn’t they figure that out themselves and release a phone with a more impressive-sounding set of chips inside? After all, they know the chips inside and out, they ought to be able to figure this out.

Unless it’s some sort of marketing trick, everybody taking steady and not full speed competitive steps in releasing improved technology timed with perfection to get people to spend the most amount of money over time. Is that it? And could one of you please pep talk or ridicule me into kicking this addiction? Will I only break free of this if I hit rock bottom by bricking my phone from overclocking? I think I’d still keep doing it.

Doug Simmons

Oh right, the Quadrant score in full res so you know I ain’t jiving. Got distracted which is another addiction I can’t seem to kick.

Quadrant Advanced is a real bitch to buy but I just had to get it. So now that I’ve shown you mine, show me yours with this new comment image uploading thing I mentioned.