Hands on with Deck’s unofficial CyanogenMod 10 for the HTC EVO 4G LTE
CyanogenMod 10 is a custom AOSP ROM based on Android Jelly Bean for a large variety of phones that adds several features, removes bloat, and generally gives developers and users a much richer playing field. The HTC EVO line of phones last saw fully functioning CyanogenMod builds with the 7.2 release for the original HTC EVO 4G. Developer Kushdeck seems intent on remedying the EVO series’s CyanogenMod-less streak with his unofficial CMX for the HTC EVO 4G LTE.
It should be pointed out that this is a work in progress, and as such there are some minor bugs, but for the most part the ROM is working and a beautiful thing. So while I’ll be pointing out some issues, the ROM is a daily driver candidate already.
I’m working off of the August 20, 2012 release so any newer versions will probably have many of the bugs squashed.
The working: front-facing and rear-facing camera work for both photo and video capture. Barcode scanners appear to work for both barcodes and QR codes. WiFi works on 2.4GHz Wireless-N, Google Now! is integrated and working. NFC and Google Wallet are reported to be working along with MMS, Bluetooth, and most impressively 4G LTE in areas that support it. In other words all hardware appears to work.
Problems I ran into include that Mount Storage only works for internal storage, the phone process crashes on boot at least once and then is fine, Exchange email in the mail client refuses to connect to my server although works fine with IMAP, touching the screen while recording video is supposed to take a picture but it causes weirdness, sdcard2/external SD card is not mounted or visible by default, Netflix doesn’t work, and WiFi doesn’t work at 5GHz.
Deck’s CMX is fast, has the fastest face-unlock I’ve ever run across. So fast that I started thinking it wasn’t working and just unlocking on any face, but it seemed to be working properly. Titanium Backup seemed to have some issues restoring things, not entirely sure what was going on with that but a few things just would never restore or applications that were three to five megabytes would take minutes to restore.
CMX/Jelly Bean seems to be running slightly faster than ICS although is missing some of the tuning. It reminds me of a slightly overclocked EVO 4G LTE stock-based ROM. I’m assuming as things get nailed down it will probably become a lot faster.
The Google Now! application is sweeter than the one I have on my ICS-based ROM, and may be worth a switch just for that if you’re finding it more and more ruling your day.
I’m impressed where this thing is at the moment. After spending a long time in HTC CyanogenMod limbo it’s nice to see that there’s a working CM coming to my current phone, and both of my older EVOs at different times.
The one thing I hope someone works on is porting the Sense camera application over to CyanogenMod. That is one thing that HTC really seems to have gotten right in HTC Sense 4.
If you’re interested in trying some work-in-progress CM10, getting Deck’s is a bit different than the usual method. If you want it go to the HTC EVO 4G LTE channel on Freenode IRC. After you’ve logged in, links are at the top of the page for CM10 and JB GApps. Although the direct download links are short and available there, please do not post them here.
