It’s not a secret that I do not like my Nokia 3.4 one bit. It’s the laggiest phone I’ve ever owned, especially when I come to use it for the first time in an hour or so. A few days ago, I put DreamLab back on my phone to help science and discovered when I woke up that the phone seemed a bit snappier than normal – it was because the CPU had been active and the phone hadn’t been going into a deep sleep to save juice.
After a bit of Googling, I discovered wakelocks which keep the CPU active. You can turn these wakelocks on using an app like Wakelock Revamp to keep the CPU active while the display is off, when you go to use your phone it doesn’t take ages to wake up but is instantly snappy and ready to roll.
Before finding Wakelock Revamp, I tried a pretty similar app but that one didn’t offer a run-on-start feature and enabling the wakelock each time seemed like it could get annoying. As such, I moved to Wakelock Revamp which offers a run-on-start option. With the wakelock in place, it turns out the phone really isn’t sluggish after all. 3 GB of RAM is a bit prohibitive when it comes to heavier apps, but unlocking the phone and starting to use it is nice and quick now.
One question you’re likely wondering about is whether not allowing the CPU to go into a deep sleep is draining the battery. From my testing, this doesn’t seem to be the case. In the battery usage section of the settings, I can see Phone idle and Wakelock v3 listed and both have drained 1% of the battery – not too much when you compare it to the screen which has used 5%, the mobile network standby which has used 3% and my primary web browser which is responsible for draining 2% of the battery. It has been nine hours since I unplugged my phone, I’m down to 75% and there’s a predicted 1 day and 4 hours left until it hits empty.
It’s not clear how widespread the issue of severe lagging is after waking an Android phone up, I’ve personally not experienced it on other devices but many Nokia 3.4 users have complained online about poor performance and the Wakelock Revamp app mentions the Galaxy Note 4 by name as having issues. If you’re noticing any issues with your device, I highly recommend this app to give your phone a bit of a boost.
A few other things I like about this app are the absence of ads so it runs very well, and it doesn’t require you to mess with permissions or disable battery optimization. I cannot promise that it won’t affect your device"s battery life while you have it running but in my usage of the app, it hasn’t had a noticeable impact.
If you want to download it, just head over to the Google Play Store and hit the download button. It has had over 100,000 downloads and has a rating of 4.8 stars. It works on devices running Android 4.1 and higher so it’ll likely be compatible with your device. I’ve only had to enable the Processor wakelock but there are several other options too including Wi-Fi scan-only, Wi-Fi high performance, Wi-Fi normal, Screen dimmed, Screen bright, and Screen and Keyboard. Each of these options comes with a little description about what they do and if you want the app to run on start, just go to the Settings cog and toggle the feature on.
Please let us know in the comments about which device you have and whether it suffers from any lagging on wake up and whether you’ve been able to rectify the issue with Wakelock Revamp.