ROM Picks: ICS Tranquility RLS1 by Bad Seed Customs for the HTC EVO 4G LTE
ICS Tranquility is a custom ROM for the HTC EVO 4G LTE based on the latest 1.22.651.3 firmware, with a lot of custom features and different ways to access those features.
First off, what you’ll notice is everything is blue and transparent, as nearly all of stock ICS green is gone. There are also several icons and apps, such as Pandora, that have been modified to reflect the overall transparent blue hue of the the ROM. Everything seems to fit visually from notification icons to the modified apps.
The next thing you’ll notice is the hardware key remapping. Multitasking has been replaced with the menu option, meaning you have a lot more screen space on apps that would otherwise pop up a virtual menu button. Also, long pressing home will now bring up program select. I wish the developers would have gone ahead and made long pressing menu open voice search, but evidently you just can’t have it all yet.
The quick settings menu was a little hard to locate initially: when you pull the notification window, down there’s just a blue bar that indicates that this is Tranquility, as opposed to the general Quick Settings tab. Tapping Tranquility brings down the nicely themed quick settings menu.
One notable feature of this ROM is that the standard seven-in-one power menu is gone from pressing the power button. The functionality for this still exists, but just not off of the power menu. The power menu is simply power off, airplane mode, and restart. For recovery, bootloader, etc., you access that via the quick settings power option. The listed reason on their development page is to save wear and tear on the power button, but it’s kind of weird having it there. Quickboot is also gone, not that you should ever need it, but it’s worth noting.
Wireless Tether for Root Users is built into the quick settings in place of the Sprint Wireless Hotspot. It ships unconfigured but instructions for setting it up are in the development thread.
Landscape Rosie is included, along with configurable shutter sounds, smooth scrolling, MMS compression disabled, roam-only mods, flashlight, and several others.
The Exchange mail client is still non-html, and the ROM ships without an IME select in the dropdown. For me these are both major annoyances as I get HTML Exchange email, and I deal with some apps that hate Swype with a passion.
However, there are flashable mods to enable the IME switcher notification, along with mods to remove the status bar block along with many others.
The ROM itself is smooth, if not particularly fast feeling. Animations are visible rather than blinking by so fast you have no idea what’s going on. I’m pretty sure this is by design, and not by lack of performance tweaks, though. It doesn’t feel slow.
Tranquility also ships without GPU rendering forced. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s intentional, as the screen driver seems different somehow. Chrome flashes a bit when rendering some pages, like it did on very early ICS ports for the EVO 4G and EVO 3D, but without the screen corruption. I’m not sure what that is about, but it’s not distracting or noticeable most of the time.
I’m pretty impressed by this ROM overall. While I disagree with some of the choices they made, I’m sure there are those who disagree with what I’d want, which is why we have so many wonderful custom ROMs. I was able to beat it into a shape I liked very quickly, other than the HTML Exchange email mod, which nobody except for MeanROM seems to include.
[xda-developers]
