ROM Picks: ICS 4.0.4/MIUI 2.5.11 for the HTC EVO 4G
I’ve tried many flavors of MIUI in the past, but I’ve never been particularly fond of any of them so when |0xD34D|’s latest MIUI.us port was released for the HTC EVO 4G I didn’t have high expectations of particularly liking it. I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong about this version.
First off, the bad stuff: no WiMax/4G, no front facing camera. If those are your breaking points, this ROM is not for you.
The good stuff: ICS 4.0.4. Camera appears to function correctly up to three megapixels and takes panorama shots without force closing, it can correctly scan barcodes in Barcode Scanner, and it has full hardware based acceleration and runs very smoothly.
The full hardware acceleration means things that require HWA like Google Chrome run, and run smoother than you have a right expect on a two-year-old phone.
One of the nice elements about this is the four-in-one unlock screen. While not particularly innovative, it’s laid out so you can blind-unlock the phone and know what you’ve selected – camera up, text right, unlock down, call left, all with haptic feedback to let you know you’ve pressed something. Useful if it’s raining and you’re trying to minimize your EVO’s exposure to the elements.
Permission monitor, which I’ve not run across or at least paid attention to before is included. This not only grants superuser access to programs, but also allows you to define individual permissions an app is allowed to have, so if you see no reason an app needs access to your contact list or to know your position to within five feet, you can deny those requests.
I can’t really comment on the battery usage of this ROM as my 4G does not currently have cell service. It appears to run using the battery fairly sparingly, which is what I’ve run across in most of the ICS-based ROMs I’ve played with.
The theme chooser lets you slap in downloadable MIUI themes on the fly with no reboots required to apply, although it does take a minute to install them, and switching back may require a bit of hunting for what the themes icon now looks like, but generally this shouldn’t be a problem.
My experience with this ROM has been very good, but not without one issue that I’m uncertain if it was the ROM, Google, or random demons. After I installed the market would not work, clearing the market data and rebooting did not help, and I kept getting an error -101 whenever I tried to download anything. It cleared up by deleting the Google account (menu, settings, complete settings, accounts and sync,) and setting it up again. Or perhaps it was just waiting for a few minutes.
A bit of research on that claims that error is a Google-imposed 24-hour data download limit, however other than one app updating automatically last night, not been a terribly heavy usage day. So, who knows. It’s resolved.
As stated before, I’m not really an MIUI guy, but I have to say this particular presentation I really did enjoy. It feels like a nearly perfect package.
I’d love to see a better camera, a front facing camera, and WiMax in there, but my bet is we’ll not see WiMax in an official MIUI port for a long long time as it’s never been a priority for them.
[MIUI.us]
