ROM Picks: Strike 1.0.2 for the HTC EVO 4G
Strike is an AOSP Android 4.0.4/ICS ROM for the original HTC EVO 4G with bits of Jelly Bean thrown in for good measure.
As with pretty all of the ICS ports for the EVO 4G, there are some things that are not working and may be a deal breaker for you. These include the front facing camera, WiMAX/4G, barcode scanner applications, and Netflix. Should those not be a concern for you, read on.
Strike is one of the newer Team D.I.R.T. offerings. It’s wicked fast, with the only delay I’ve noticed being a slight one between pressing the app button and the screen fade, and that seems to be because of one animation running into another, which you can disable.
Anything that uses the camera, other than the actual camera app, seems a bit slow; I’m not really sure what that issue is, but I’m hoping it gets squashed soon. It’s not unusably so, but when you’re dealing with a greased-up cheetah of a ROM and run across the camera poking along in third-party apps, it does pop out at you.
What really strikes you is when you run applications like Chrome, especially if you’ve had experience with Chrome on much faster phones such as the EVO 3D or EVO 4G LTE. This ROM beats the stock EVO 3D in rendering speeds and seems on par with the EVO 4G LTE, although it may be a bit more laggy.
I decided to slap a copy of TSF Shell on this, and other than a little bit of a slowdown when I was transitioning between screens with a live wallpaper running in the background, it functioned like my EVO 4G LTE. I am quite impressed with that.
If you’ve been playing with a lot of ICS ROMs, you’re not going to notice too much drastically different. As each new ICS ROM comes out, more bugs are squashed and more functionality is added, and that feels a bit like the case here: lots of good work, a few more bugs squashed, a great base ROM, feels solid.
I couldn’t get a feel for battery life, although being based on AOSP, I’d wager it’s significantly better than stock Sense.
Hopefully now that almost all the kinks are worked out on the EVO 3D, someone can pay attention to getting 4G/FFC working properly. If this ROM had those final few kernel issues stamped out, the over-two-year-old HTC EVO 4G would blow 80% of brand new phones right out of the water.
[xda-developers]
