After setting up and using the phone for a day, some more information
- The device was very slow to start up - around 2m50s from pressing power to launcher home screen. To fix this I reflashed the stock firmware using ‘flashtool’, then flashed the Pie GSI. Startup time was back to normal
- In the stock firmware, the dedicated camera button will a: start the Camera app if it isn’t already started, or take a picture / start video recording if it is running. In the GSI it does nothing. This is not surprising since the camera button is device-specific.
- With ‘Advanced restart’ enabled in Developer options, Restart | Recovery doesn’t work. Instead the device restarts as normal. Restart | Bootloader does work, so long as the USB cable is plugged in. If it isn’t the device restarts as normal, which is waht you would expect
- When I first inserted the SD card (containing theTWRP backup of the stock system as well as other things), the software claimed it was corrupt and needed formatting. I checked the card in other devices which read it with no problem. Eventually I formatted the card in this device (after copying the stock backup to a computer) and it’s been fine since (in this and other devices). I recall this happening when I first installed this Pie GSI on my earlier broken device. Other SD cards were recognised with no problems.
Apart from these points everything is behaving very nicely. I have a few more apps to install, and a lot of music to copy to the SD card, then it will become my daily driver.