ROM Picks: Nitrous v1.3.1 for HTC EVO 4G
We are continuing our look at stock-based ROMs for the HTC EVO 4G, and today let's spend some time with Nitrous ROM (version 1.3.1) by developer raafaell. Its tagline is "Welcome to the Garage! You are about to Boost your HTC EVO 4G," so how can you not be intrigued?
As I will reiterate with every stock-based ROM we review, this ROM is completely stable because it's based off of the latest 4.67 OTA update straight from HTC.
In my opinion, Nitrous is one of the most revolutionary Sense 1.0 ROMs to hit the OG EVO in awhile. The difference between Nitrous and most other ROMs before it is "The Tuneup Kit." We'll thoroughly detail what this is after the break, but in brief: it brings many tweaks and mods under your EVO's hood (gotta love wordplay).
On top of the highly improved base, raafaell has added in many experience-improving features. Nitrous does a great job of providing a fairly stock ROM with some excellent transparent dock, lock bar, and status bar elements added. The dev has also managed to get the Swiping Notifications mod (introduced by ca1ne) to work with Quick Settings.
Keep reading for full details on the Nitrous ROM.
So what are the goods?
- Based off of the 4.67.651.3 OTA Update from HTC
- Apps2SD, itit.d scripts (including V6 Supercharger), and JPEG quality increased to 100%
- Advanced Power Menu and CRT Animations
- Quick Settings/Recent Apps, Swiping Notifications, true data displayed, and no GPS icon displayed in status bar
- Google Talk with video and voice working
- Native Screenshot and Overscroll Glow also Flying window transitions
- Right dock button remapped to LaunchKey (open LaunchKey and map the right button to any app)
- Transparent dock, lock bar, and status bar also blue neon popup windows
- Stock kernel
- /data/app enabled and Bash/Nano support
Tuneup Kit includes:
- Force launcher in memory – faster switching
- Render UI with GPU – GPU UI rendering
- Decreased dialling delay – faster dialling
- Improved scrolling responsiveness – faster scrolling
- Tweaked Browser (7) windows capability
- Dalvik-cache to SD – to free up internal memory
- WiFi scan set to 150 seconds – saves battery
- Enabled WiFi sleep mode
- Disabled USB debugging icon notification
- Increased overall touch responsiveness
- 3G Tweaks – increased 3G network speed
- Net Speed Tweaks – increased WiFi network speed
- Disabled phone wakeup on volume buttons
- Heap size is 48MB
- Increased photo and video recording quality
- Zipalign on boot
- Battery calibration on boot
- Other tweaks for speed added
More Screeshots
Add-Ons
raafaell has already added a few mods and themes for his ROM. Let's hope that he keep this up with future releases.
The first mod will change the window animations to be a little fancier (these are flashable .zips).
ICS | Rudolf | Fold | Flip | Flying
There are some theme-changing .zips too.
Black Status Bar (reverts window animations to Flying)
As I stated while reviewing Red Line, rooted HTC EVO 4G users must make sure that their dev is committed to the ROM they are using. Some developers release a few big updates (think EVO Classic) that each take huge jumps and correct minor errors. Other developers, like raafaell, are constantly releasing updates.
This is great for the ROM's performance, but can be difficult on the user. Users are constantly wondering if they are on the latest version and if they should or should not update. But I know that Nitrous is one of the best, if not the best, Sense 1.0 ROM available at the time of this writing.
Let's face it. When you have a ROM as great as this, it gets hard to find flaws. I hope raafaell will forgive my nit-picking. Bottom line: you won't regret giving your EVO a tune-up from Nitrous ROM.
