It depends on how the battery is prepared/packaged.
Some manufacturers will ship the battery along in a special sleep state (not to be confused with the sleep state where a lithium battery is so deeply discharged that normal charging will not work) that will have a long storage life without degrading. Using the new battery or charging for the first time will break the sleep state and the battery will work as normal. No idea how Xiaomi does things.

I would just keep spare batteries (if you have already used them) at half charge for long term storage, which is what is recommended, until the capacity of the current one is used is degraded.

The ones which are good and free/offline (no data/wifi needed) are Sygic, Mapfactor and OsmAnd. Malaysia Map from streetdirectory is slow and didn't look as good. The phone gets noticeably hotter with these apps.

You can continue using Sygic as the free version.

I think someone on the miui forum said that 41 was going to help fix the memory issues.

Cofface doesn't looked like a forked work since the htcmania forum has complained about Cofface stealing their work. Htcmania/Kra105 releases his work to the public so anyone can simply compile and package his work without giving any credit if they are assholish enough to do so. I don't see Cofface releasing his source code for people to inspect/download and nowhere does he mention Htc/Kra105 for the fork.

There are a few roms floating around because like I said, anyone can simply steal Htcmania/Kra1o5's work and pretend that it is theirs. I would be very wary about installing any new roms because of malware concerns especially from China. Its not smart to be careful on the pc by using hips/antivirus/firewalls/sandbox but install unknown android roms from unknown sources. Its like installing some unknown windows8 compilation right on the pc. I would prefer Htc's one especially if Kra1o5 is active on popular rom forums like cynogen so people can vet his work.

And since Xiaomi has not officially released the source code, even Kra1o5's excellent work is considered to be a hack and there will be many bugs yet to be discovered.

This post has been edited by imbibug: Sep 19 2014, 10:31 AM

XDA won't allow an official thread because the work will not start clean and developers will have to rely on proprietary blobs including the kernel from the device manufacturer. And any resulting work will not be free. And it goes without saying that it will be buggy.

I'm quite sure all Kra1o5 is doing all the work and people are just ripping his work off since he is the only one putting out updated sources and proper changelogs.

Its not suitable because there is no proper moderation on the Xiaomi forum. Lots of useless replies like 1 line nonsense requests like "this one good or not arr?", many threads ripping off the same work and pretending to be the sold author. Very high leech to 'worker' post ratio. Its to be expected on Xiaomi (and on this forum) because most of the posters are end users not developers and the feedback is very raw, so I'm not bashing the Xiaomi forum but just pointing out the limitations of that forum.

I'm sure the memory management fix you cannot have caused the problem because it shouldn't affect the sd card.

A read only situation can happen when you got too many bad spots and run out of spare sectors and the sd card effectively becomes a read only device. What brand/type/size was it? Was it old or new (warranty?).

You can copy/backup the data because you said it was readable. Unless the data are nude selfies why bother about data? I have no idea about warranty, if you have a receipt, phone the shop and ask. My czone receipt for a recent 32Mb sd purchase says memory can only be returned for exchange with same item (no refund).

A post count restriction would just create more junk posts elsewhere and the developer forum would still be filled with fanboys who spend all day posting on forums. The idea is quality not quantity. Restricting people with relevant skills and useful information who just happened to come by from posting isn't good as well.

R1 has too many bugs. R3 only has a minor fix over R2. R3 might still have sim2 issues with calls or data (not sure).
Without the source code, theres only so much he can do.

Is it because people prefer the larger screen of the Note or are they put off by the 1S problems like poor memory management of the OS, overheating, poor battery life?

Yeah hot sun will degrade lithium batteries permanently.

It looks like 41.0 is bad and they pulled it from the download site. But 41.1 is out and might fix some of the issues of 41.0.

Thats one of the dumbest things anyone could do. The internal memory will degrade faster with swapping and when it gets to the point of not being able to write anymore, the phone will be bricked permanently.

So I doubt 41/41.1 actually does that. I'd like to see some screenshots or some intelligent investigation+discussion before believing it. But I'd rather not flash to 41 or 41.1 anyway. If its removed from the downloads, theres probably something not right with it.

If you need something that works well today using stock rom, then go for the MotoG. The 1S is awful even for lite users. Light apps will be stopped or killed while multitasking. I didn't get another 1S for my parents after my experience but got them something else instead.

But if you are prepared to wait, then the rom is improving. There is a CM11 rom but its unofficial and buggy (official source code not released yet), maybe good enough for you but not as a daily driver for most people.

zram won't kill your phone and turn it into a paperweight.

I doubt that Xiaomi would internal memory for a swap partition for obvious reasons. In any case using zram on a 1Gb phone is a shoddy way to fix the ram management issue.

With zram, there will also be some loss of battery life due to the extra overhead of having to manage zram.

It should be, because Global 43 is the same as 41 which was rolled out to the Indian customers first. 41.1 is for Indian customers on 36. There is just one minor difference, something to do with the Mi cloud which I don't recommend people use for privacy related issues anyway.

They probably overlooked it. Or maybe they were too embarrassed about having to admit to using the zram fix on their 1Gb phone when other 512Mb phones don't have the same ram management issues.

My statements were in the context of the 1S. There were many posts on the Xiaomi forum that were very quick to jump the gun over hardware (lower spec cpu, lower ram size) and now its swapping using internal memory.

The 1S strangely struggles with memory on basic tasks that 512Mb phones do not. On a 512Mb phone, zram would be great to keep those phones working well with kitkat or longer. On a phone that seems to struggle worse than a 512Mb phone, its not going to be that great, and the compression rate of zram isn't that good as well. The bloated miui is probably the reason since people running unofficial CM11 have no problems with ram.