Blownfuze on the Latest NRG ROMs Plus Much More

JT: Hey Doug (blownfuze), what do you think of recent NRG ROM builds? I think many readers would appreciate your professional (and sometimes snarky) opinion.

BF: Hah I knew this was a setup! Okay, good question, good in terms of trying to get me to go on and on about something. There are just a few more things about this branch that I dislike over 23***s which were so bad that I stuck to the stable branch. So 28005 is satisfactorily stable. I’m not rebooting all the time. Things don’t seem slow. But I haven’t benchmarked anything or eyeballed ram usage, just that I am satisfied with the performance which may or may not be a bit better than before. Actually I think we may have plateaued in tangible improvements of higher test builds and the rest is just fine-tuning. Software manipulating HTC Sense/Manila and so on, now when I see someone post a landscape Sense 2.5 or maybe one day a rom with yet another tab in Manila, eye-candy stuff that if I showed off to someone they’d say Yeah, that’s definitely more awesome than when you showed me your phone ten days ago. Give me a new version of google maps, I’m all over it right quick. New Opera? Gimme a link. Herm’s got something funny? I’ve got a dollar ready. But new builds are starting to interest me less. If you want to play the rom game instead of sticking to just one rom and hoping to the next build, at least download another guy’s rom at the same time and try his first to see if it grabs you. A lot more to a rom than the CE build.

I get a little bored once every few weeks and just like to flash the rom of the first guy to grab the next build and cross my fingers that I can do a sprite restore successfully without messing anything up and I cannot say that my life has improved, phone-wise, since when I flashed the first 6.5 rom for this phone (except for collecting new software other people made). Perhaps we all focus just a little too hard on flashing every other day and restoring our stuff and tweaking everything, importing advanced config settings and going through the motions we have in our muscle memory by now, just to get a new build number when we’d otherwise better spend our time downloading new software from a fleet of brilliant and generous developers, experimenting, uninstalling, installing more, playing around and so on until something bigger than 28005 hits. I have polluted this installation with too much other software (not to mention that sprite backups aren’t always the best thing to do to get the most out of a new rom, depending on how you do it) to study clearly for any differences, however subtle, that I can notice between this and previous 6.5.3s and this versus the stable branch builds. I flip back and forth.

Returning to your question, I had 28002 going, then I saw the article you guys put up on 28005, I F5ed the rom development tab, burned a 28005 rom (again with Energy Leo), tried to do some picture rotating tests but didn’t have anything to remember to compare it to to say this is better about it, that’s not so good. The thing is underwhelmingly better than 28002, can’t really notice any improvements actually, just had to spend time shrinking things down as best as I could — BUT I do believe progress has been made in the testing branch over the past two months in terms of making the stability of the builds on par with those of the stable branch.

Though I did not look very hard (but hey I shouldn’t have to), I have not yet been stunned with any apparent improvements of this particular build over the recent 28***s, nothing worth flashing over. My next flash will either be tonight back to 218** (I don’t know why exactly, just getting that feeling) or I’ll wait until someone nails landscape Manila/Sense 2.5.

Perhaps it is the excitement of possibly bricking our phones during a rom flash if the power goes out or the USB cable somehow pops out on its own that drives us to flash over and over and once in a while write a blog post about it.

JT: What other ROM chefs would you recommend for the latest WM 6.5 and Sense 205 builds?

BF: If you asked me for a Sense 2.1 rom I would have said TPC. If Monx weren’t awol again I’d say ROMeOS. If at0mAng didn’t apparently disappear, well, no I didn’t really care for his last rom.

I’d say Valkyrie_v4.0 FireStorm as it has apparently beaten NRG to the 28008 punch but combing through the thread I’m having a tough time figuring out which version of Sense he put on this thing. So if you want 28008 and you’re up for a little adventure but you’re willing to go in on a temporary thing because you want 2.5 and this may not have it, give this one a shot, otherwise wait it out until Energy’s up to 28008.

If you ever want to see what’s doing with a more junior chef with some talent who puts a little of his own flare into his roms, but so far is only testing with 2.5 and only has released 2.1s, an xda up-and-comer is TPC. That’s all I got.

JT: Thanks for your words of wisdom. Viewers should visit www.blownfuze.org for more insights, advice, and just plain common sense (with a little bit of snarkiness thrown in for entertainment value) on the Fuze.