Sony Xperia 10 II Review (a lot of problems)

Devices
#1

Hi there,

i am a sailfish user since the beginning. First i had the Jolla 1, then the Intex Aquafish and was very happy about those phones. Now i bought a Xperia X II and can’t believe how many bugs it has. I want to describe a few for you all and hope somebody, hopefully Jolla itself, helps out with them:

1.- Wifi: only the 5 Ghz band is working. I tested the phone for a few weeks with the Android 10 and 11 that it came with. There was no problem with the 2,4 Ghz band.

2.- Fingerprint: I added 5 fingerprints and they are getting deleted from time to time. I have no idea why, i can’t replicate the behavior. They appear again after some time, but that makes that function pretty useless. Please fix Jolla.

3.- App-Shop: I can’t find many of the apps that i found on Jolla 1 and Intex Aquafish. I can understand that the 64bit support is responsible for that, but right now the native apps lack a lot of core functions. Examples: the weather app “MeeCast” is not working anymore, also there is no app for making the sound output louder. The most important app for me was “Lighthouse”, which also doesn’t work anymore and now i have to close unwanted apps in the console. That is not comfortable. Also 90% of the games and other apps are missing. Will there be a change in the future?

4.- GPS: GPS is not working at all. The only app that can use it from time to time is the “GPSInfo” app, which does not much more than just giving a few informations. GPS did work properly on Android on the same phone. I need it especially for the Android e-scooter-apps that can’t display a map without this function. Some don’t work at all without it. Will there be a fix? This problem exists since a long time. Please Jolla, it is a core function of nowadays phones.

5.- Ram Usage: The Jolla 1 had 1 GB of ram and used about 300 MB after booting, The Intex Aquafish had 2 GB of Ram and used about the same like the Jolla 1 after boot. Now the Xperia X II has 3 GB of Ram, but uses about 2 GB after booting. WHAT THE …? Apps get closed constantly when i open more than one. This is not okay Jolla, please optimize this.

6.- Responsiveness: Since Ram is at its max almost all the time, the phone is not very responsive. This is easily to see when i swipe down and touch the keylock to switch off the display. It takes about 1 or 2 seconds until the display gets black. I expected to get a faster phone. In Android it was much faster.

7.- Touchscreen: the touchscreen is not working properly. If i touch something in the four corners of the display, i often have to touch them multiple times, because it doesn’t recognize my input. That did not happen in Android before installing Sailfish.

8.- Android App Cache: I can’t delete the app cache of Android apps. If i click on “delete cache” or “delete data”, nothing happens.

9.- Downloads bigger than about 2 GB: I can’t download apps from the Google Play Store that are bigger than about 2 GB. It just stops downloading at some point.

Can we expect to see updates to these bugs? I have the phone for multiple months now and there was no update yet. But these are big bugs that should be fixed immediately.

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Too many issues to be usable on Xperia10 II
#2

At least upon this point I can refer you to a solution:
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/meecast-doesnt-show-the-places/8823/3
https://openrepos.net/content/vasvlad/meecast-sailfishos

1 Like
#3

Since no official Sailfish X image exists for Xperia X II, it seems you are using some community port? How did you manage to install Android app support then?

There is a known issue regarding fingerprints. Some crashing service causes no fingerprints being recognized anymore, a simple service restart is known to fix that temporarily.

What do you mean with “apps don’t workanymore”? Could you be a bit more specific? Lighthouse and Meecast are both available for Aarch64 on openrepos.net (Storeman).

Shortage of available RAM can be a problem after some weeks of usage, maybe some services have memory leaks. My Xperia 10 II has the same issue after two months of uptime. The OOM killer gets active specially when using the browser (which needs lots of RAM). Remember that free RAM has no value at all. It is correct and necessary that all available RAM is used by the OS, so the amount of free RAM should be minimal.

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#4

I am using the official licensed image: https://jolla.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003837053#devices

I meant that the shop is not nearly as full as it was on Jolla 1 and Jolla C.

The ram usage got checked by “free -m” in the console and that tells me that 2 GB of RAM are used even directly after a reboot. A lot of apps get closed in the background if i open another app.

#5

Since the Xperia 10 II is aarch64 based, in the Jolla shop you only can see the apps that suit the Xperia 10 ii. Indeed, these are way less apps than for the 32 bit devices because many apps are not yet ported. Hope this will change over time.

I had the fingerprint issue only once at the very beginning. Now I use only two fingerprints and never had problems since. As pointed out by @ziellos this is a known bug.

In addition to the Jolla store and openrepos you can also install apps from Chum

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#6

What device are we talking about, I don’t know Xperia X II. Xperia X Dual SIM? Or Xperia 10 II?

The Jolla store seems pretty much dead, I think. The frequency of new or updated apps is indeed very low. Openrepos and Chum are necessary to get current software.

The current 64bit OS version tends to use more RAM than the older 32bit variants, that’s sure. In order to check what processes or apps use how much RAM, you may use the top utility with the Shift-m option in a terminal.

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#7

#9 + #5…
Downloads more than 2 GB from Google Play and no more RAM?

seems like a problem in the usage of the phone :wink:

I have no RAM probs on my 10ii. But I also don’t download Games or whatever, running Android…

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#8

Can you please check your RAM usage with “free -m” and tell me how much it is using after a reboot?

top + shift + M doesn’t work here, it still only shows the cpu usage, but in a different form. The behavior is not as expected or not as on a desktop with linux installed. The three right threads show “CPU #”, “%CPU” and “command”. No matter what i do in top, it doesn’t show the RAM usage.

If i sort top with Shift + M it puts two processes on top named “mediaswcodec” and “mediaextractor”. Is it the same for you guys?

@ziellos: We are talking about an Xperia X 10 II.

#9

@aspergerguy: Thanks for the info.

#10

There is no “Xperia X 10 II”. There are “Xperia X” and “Xperia 10 II”. Would you mind fixing the thread title and the first post, to avoid confusion?

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#11

Oh, my bad. I can change neither the title, nor the first post. The forum let me only change the later posts.

Maybe a forum admin can help out?

#12

Not an admin, but I have the power to change the title.

1 Like
#13

re #2 (fingerprint disappearing): it’s a known bug, they’re not disappearing, it’s just the fingerprint daemon who crashed.
You can restart it from terminal, as devel-su, with:
systemctl restart sailfish-fpd

you’ll have to do it twice, as the first time does not work (I believe it produces a core file).

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#14

Yes that works - I have saved this in ShellEx :slight_smile:

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#15

I’m not a systemd guru at all, but could this just be done automatically with a rule in the service file ? I don’t have a fingerprint on my JollaC so I don’t have such file to test, but for instance, if I look at the msyncd daemon responsible for the sync processes, there is a line like:

Restart=always

see /usr/lib/systemd/user/msyncd.service.

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#16

Right now the fingerprint is working fine. I’ll check the restart of the daemon later. THANKS a lot for the info.

#17

RAM management is horrible I think since SFOS 4.0. I have smartphone with 4GB RAM (Redmi 5 Plus) and often after few day using, system freezes and reboot itself because of low free RAM. To prevent that, I use in terminal command free -m to see available free RAM and then use one of these commands to release some memory, often it goes free from 100-200MiB to 1.0-1.5GiB.

devel-su sh -c ‘echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches’
devel-su sh -c ‘echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches’
devel-su sh -c ‘echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches’

In times of SFOS 2.0 on Nexus 4 with 2GB RAM I often had uptime about 3 weeks and never had this problem with RAM management.

4 Likes
#18

@emva: thanks for changing the title.

@Kuba77: i tried that and it freed a lot of RAM, but the system is still using 2,3 GB of the 3,5 GB of RAM, when i check it with ‘free -m’. Still thanks for the hint. It helps a bit.

I guess we need help from Jolla. They have to rollout an update for a better situation.

#19

Openrepos has a Lighthouse app that supports 64bit architecture. Works at least for me.
https://openrepos.net/content/karry/lighthouse-aarch64

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#20

Unfortunately I can confim some of the issues mentioned here for Sailfish OS 4.3.0.12 on Sony Xperia 10 II (64 bit) e.g. lost fingerprints, sudden re-opened permission dialogs and sometimes apps stop when put into background (e.g. the media player stops playing music when you open a browser).
Well, might this last one caused by application boosting / lib preloading described in the blog post: What's up with Sandboxing? | Jolla Blog ?

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