ROM Picks: CyanogenMod 9 – Devil Toast 0.7.1 for the HTC EVO 3D (working WiMAX)
Devil Toast is an Android Ice Cream Sandwich ROM built off of CyanogenMod 9 AOSP source and modified to work with most of the HTC EVO 3D hardware.
Usually when we talk about ICS ROMs for the EVO 3D, the list of daily driver and usability issues is a deal breaker. Generally they have no Netflix, WiMAX/4G, 3D video, front facing camera, stable camera, or Bluetooth, or they contain a host of problems that make considering them a daily driver a slim possibility.
With Devil Toast, most of these hurdles have been stomped to the ground. The list of what doesn’t work contains two items: 3D and some Bluetooth connectivity issues when the phone is in deep sleep.
The first thing you’re going to notice after installing Devil Toast is the booting animation is in portrait-3D. It’s really quite impressive, and a bit sad as well, as after you get the ROM installed the boot time that it’s displayed is only about 14 seconds. I rebooted several times just to watch the animation; it’s pretty neat.
For my first round of tests, I decided to throw some test applications at it: Netflix, Quadrant, Balloon Gunner (for a 3D test.) Netflix worked fine with audio and video, Quadrant Standard reported fairly unimpressive scores which didn’t seem to reflect my experience, and Balloon Gunner could not detect the 3D, which is listed as not working.
Turning on WiMAX results in a fairly long delay in which I can see by the log entries that it sets up drivers and scans, it finds Sprint WiMAX service, it attempts to connect, and it fails. That’s most likely because my EVO 3D does not have service. I can only verify that it claims it’s working, but I don’t doubt it.
Playing with the camera resulted in being able to take 2D photos and videos on both front and rear cameras. There were no blurs, weird colors, random crashes, or anything that I’ve come to expect with AOSP ICS based ROMs these past few months.
I installed Chrome to see how web rendering worked, and in most scenarios it blew anything out of the water I own now, including my EVO 4G LTE. Pages are just there instantly. One thing I did notice, and I’m not sure where the problem lies, is that YouTube videos when watched through Chrome seems a bit Smurfy, and the colors are off. The issue doesn’t appear to affect the YouTube app however.
The ROM can be clocked from 128MHz up to 1188 MHz in the settings menu, or what the unit shipped stock with the HTC kernel. My bet is there will be some overclocking features in the future, but that’s not really something that needs to be done as the ROM feels like it’s outperforming my theoretically much faster EVO 4G LTE in every way at the moment.
Devil Toast uses what I think is the standard ICS stock camera app. Unfortunately the biggest drawback of the 3D still is its cameras. They work beautifully when doing 3D photos for capturing hyper-realistic detail (which you can’t do yet on this ROM,) but fall pretty short in the 2D realm. This ROM doesn’t have a magic fix for that, which might be able to be done via software, but who knows.
One bug I did find when playing with this is in the camera app: when recording front-facing video, the recording is garbled when saved. This does not seem to affect the rear camera’s recordings. It appears the apps such as Barcode Scanner also seem to not function quite properly with the camera drivers yet.
Devil Toast has brought ICS AOSP in for the EVO 3D, and it’s done it extremely well as far as I can tell. If you’re rocking the EVO 3D and looking for a mostly functioning ICS/AOSP ROM that screams (in spite of what that lying app Quadrant might say,) Devil Toast CM9 is it.
I’m very excited to see some huge breakthroughs in AOSP ICS appearing on the EVO 3D lately. I’ll be checking back on this ROM as it progresses.
A quick note before this posts is that Chad over at Anthrax-Kernels.us released a new kernel that works for this that allows for overclocking and appears to increase performance greatly.
[xda-developers]
