Good and EVO

ROM Picks: Deck’s ReLoaded ROM for the HTC EVO 4G

DecksReloaded_2[1]Deck's ReLoaded is a new ROM based on Kushdeck's 1.3d Gingerbread AOSP ROM. Deck's ROM was arguably the best AOSP Gingerbread build out there for the EVO 4G for a long time, so ReLoaded had a fairly rock solid base to begin with.

ReLoaded uses the Aroma installer, which allows you to choose which options you're going to want available on first boot. With ReLoaded your main options are kernel, whether to include DTA2SD b4 which uses a partition on your SD card as internal memory, and quite a few useful root tools which you can install or leave out to save space.

I have flashed a lot of ROMs, but never have I flashed one that seemed both completely developed and aimed right at the power ROM flasher. I guess usually power flashing users travel from ROM to ROM with their suitcases of apps packed by Titanium Backup, so it was interesting to see a bunch of the tools I normally restore after flashing available right from the installer.

With the half ton of root tools available I was ready to start playing at tweaking the most performance out of this ROM… and I found I couldn't do better than it was right after install. 

6a00d83451c9ec69e2016305d55aeb970d-300wi[1]ReLoaded has a lot of apps that can be installed that the average flashaholic is not going to care about, but the power root user is going to love. Among these are Battery Calibration tools busybox installer, cache cleaner, carrier name changer, hash droid, and too many others to name.

A note though. If you choose DTA2SD you're going to be thrown into what looks like an unending bootloop of the phone starting up, reporting everything crashed, and then a white screen. This can be a disconcerting experience. Just walk away for a few minutes after install if it's doing that, it's just installing options that have to have the phone rebooted three times.

There's no warning about the bootloops in the installer any more (I believe there were in the previous version,) then again, you should have read the development page before installing. Just expect four minutes of loops after you install if you're using DTA2SD scripting.

Playing with this you can tell a lot of work has gone into tweaking it into the ultimate EVO 4G engine. The presentation sometimes feels a little bit rough, but the ROM feels like it's about to break through the glass and throttle you.

Other than incomplete/buggy ICS builds I've played with on my 4G there was not a ROM I remember that felt so snappy.

I emailed with one of the developers for a bit about this ROM, one of the notes he gave me on it was only use the Mason kernels (which are included with this ROM) as the tweaks work best with them, the Enhanced COD Tweaks by Ropodope and Carhauler are what put the ROM and the kernel into overdrive, so don't mess around with other tweaks or you might make the ROM not so great.

What you notice most about this is it's smooth. You tap an app, it's open. You go from screen to screen, there is no lag noticeable. It feels almost like it's outperforming my EVO 3D, but I am on quite dissimilar ROMs at the moment so I can't do a decent head to head test.

Ok, so I love this ROM and what's been put into it, but I think it's not going to be for everyone.  If you're looking for a pre-configured social network everything pretty out of the box HTC Sense-laden ROM, walk away. If you want something that's lean, mean, and configurable to the extreme, check it out. I do not think you'll be disappointed.

[xda-developers]
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Paul E King

Paul King started with GoodAndEVO in 2011, which merged with Pocketables, and as of 2018 he's evidently the owner. He lives in Nashville, works at a film production company, is married with two kids. Facebook | Twitter | Donate | More posts by Paul | Subscribe to Paul's posts

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