ROM Picks: 4 Kornerz RLS3 for the HTC EVO 4G
4 Kornerz RLS3 is a custom ROM built on the Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system with some CyanogenMod and LOTK SmurfMod underpinnings for the original HTC EVO 4G. We covered a previous Android Gingerbread incarnation of this ROM, but it’s come quite a long way since then.
As there are no completely functioning ICS or Jelly Bean ROMs for the HTC EVO 4G yet, there are a couple of things that don’t work. In this case it’s 4G/WiMAX and the front facing camera. If you can’t live without those, this ROM’s a deal breaker.
The first standout feature of this ROM is the Xperia Arc launcher, which gives 4 Kornerz its four corners. The corners stay out of the way until tapped, and then you can select from one of four icons stuffed away in a corner. Those bubble corners are completely configurable and can stuff 16 icons in the space taken by one row.
Less explosive stand-out features include the Sony Walkman music player, the Jelly Bean play store, a very neat boot animation you’ll be staring at a long time, and a custom housekeeping process that runs regularly to make the phone feel like a fresh boot regularly.
It ships with Xloud, Xperia widgets, the Sony Bravia Engine, Beats, the Mason 15 kernel, and nearly everything is customized.
This ROM is possibly the slowest to boot ROM I’ve ever run across. I did a battery pull at one point and re-flashed it thinking that something had gone wrong. That was not the case, it just optimizes and re-indexes some databases at each boot. If I timed it right it takes about five minutes to boot each time, longer the first time.
Hopefully however the ROM will prove to you to be stable enough to not have to reboot it often. I haven’t had any issues out of it once I got it up and running.
One thing to be aware of is there are two versions of this ROM which include or don’t include splash screens. If you flash the version that has a splash screen, your white HTC screen will be replaced until you flash another splash-screen containing ROM or the stock splash screen, and those are few and far between. So unless you want HTC replaced by HTC 4 KORNERZ SERIES EVO 4G, use the version without the splash screen.
Something interesting with this ROM is that logcat appears to have been sacrificed. This is not big deal for most people, but if you’re wanting to peek in and see if the ROM is booting or frozen or what is going on behind the scenes you’re not going to be able to.
The camera is the CyanogenMod style camera, and it works for everything except front facing camera. There needs to be some development there, but as the drivers for the camera still aren’t complete guessing we’re going to be a bit off on getting that into the AOSP world.
The ROM doesn’t include Google Now, which I’ve come to love with a passion, and the stock kernel settings seem to make my phone a bit jerky, but these are both things you can remedy fairly easily with an install and the developer options tab in settings.
It’s a great little ROM if you can look past the incredibly long boot times that make it feel like it’s broken. Once running it’s a pretty nice experience. It’s refreshing how it’s set up and laid out.
[xda-developers]
