[HTC Desire X] vogonpoetlaureate:
EDIT: MaartenXDA has issued an OTA Update that addresses most of the few problems that were mentioned in this review.

EDIT 2: A 1.2 OTA update has now been released that is compatible with the atis112 kernel and addresses some of the bugs that users have reported.

Following on from my short Elegancia review, I thought I'd do a similar review of other ROMs, starting with the SkyDragon ROM.

MaartenXDA has been one of the most prolific developers on the Desire X forums and his Half-Sense ROMs have provided users with a great AOSP experience with many tweaks and mods to boot. Recently he joined the SkyDragon team who, among other things, produce a popular ROM for the One X device. Now MaartenXDA together with the SkyDragon team are bringing the SkyDragon ROM to the Desire X, with the initial release announced today.

The install

Users familiar with the Half-Sense ROM will be right at home with the install process. The boot.img required for the install is actually located within the SkyDragon zip file. Eventually I anticipate MaartenXDA will provide a separate bootinstall.zip as with his Half-Sense ROM with a .bat file that you can execute on a Windows computer to automate the flashing process (Mac/Unix/Linux users can just use ADB & Fastboot commands instead of using the .bat file). You can grab the boot.img file here if you don't want to unzip the skydragon.zip. Once the boot.img is flashed, you enter recovery and flash the zip and this launches the Aroma installer. The installer was simple to use and worked well, with many of the options familar to Half-Sense users. Maarten bundled a few alternative music players, several choices for launchers, a choice of lock screens, and some useful apps such as the Performance Control app, Script Manager, and a few others. I had no crashes or bugs (eg. Aroma apps and options I selected did actually get installed).

Initial boot and setup

The bootup takes a short while with a SkyDragon splash screen to keep you company. After the initial boot you're taken straight to the setup process. The setup process is the familiar HTC routine. There appear to be less things stripped out than some of the other ROMs available. You get, for example, the Tell HTC dialog box as part of the setup process, which I haven't seen since I first bought my DX. Some of the bloatware apps are gone, as are things like ShowMe and the Automotive app. There were no crashes due to missing apks or other oddities.

Look and Feel

Once you're all setup, the UI is stock ROM. You get the SkyDragon wallpapers, but otherwise everything is untouched. This will no doubt change in time as the ROM matures, and MaartenXDA has already put up a link to a theme thread for the ROM. The system as a whole feels very responsive, without any noticeable lag or glitches.

Under the Hood

The Software Information indicates "Skydragon" and the Software Update feature is enabled, though it's not clear whether this is checking HTC's servers or SkyDragon's. The ROM is provided with an OTA utility app to enable future software updates. Running the utility generated an error "Error fetching update info: Invalid ROM (SkyDragonDX) & device (protou) combo!". I suspect that SkyDragon's OTA server is not setup to handle requests from this ROM just yet.

It's still early days. The mods for quick settings and APM are not included in this release, but we should see that offered as a separate flashable package soon.

Root user appears to be working well, managed with ChainsDD's Superuser app. Also the init.d support appears to be working, though oddly busybox wasn't installed (only the directory for toolbox-stericson).

You can also see the various init.d scripts correctly installed under /system/etc/init.d and there are loads of them – the most I've seen so far in a DesireX ROM. Here's a full list of all the init.d tweaks you get with this ROM:

00remount
03systweak
06removecache
07vaccum_sqlite
10zipalign
11sysctltweaks
64misckernel
69force
69removelogger
71extreme
77Tweaks
81GPU_rendering
85sqlite
89volwake
90initdtest
96tweaks
98permissions
99complete
Battery
LoopySmoothness
MPEngine12
MountSystemRW
MramLlag
Netweaks
S01defrag
S02minfree
S03ondemand
S06netspeed
S07kernel
S10vm
S13bind
S41dvm2cache
S51normsleep
S52gentlefair
S53newfair
S70darky_zipalign
S70zipalign
S82logger
S83extsd
S84ext4
S86battery
S89touch
S98CFS
S98TCPbuffers
S98system_tweak
S99smoothness
Speedy
Zipalign
Zram
boost_initd
net_buffer
ram_optimize
remount_fullext4
sqlite_optimize
sysctl_tweaks

Sound and Vision

Audio on this ROM is great. Awesome Beats is installed which allows you to fine tune the Beats Audio-enhanced sound. At install time you get to choose various audio players including the Apollo player, Android and the Walkman player. These all sound good without jitter or lag. The Bravia and MPengine patches are applied but I find it hard to tell much difference between Stock and Bravia. Games play just fine and I've noticed no graphic glitches or drawing errors. For some reason, there is no Gallery app installed. So people will need to download an alternative Gallery app from the Play Store.

Final Thoughts

It's always good to have more ROMs and developers working in the Desire X (protou) ecosystem. The SkyDragon ROM promises to be an interesting addition to the pack, offering a lot under the hood in terms of tweaks and refinements. As it's a 1.0 release, it is expected for there to be a few bugs (such as the BusyBox and OTA problems mentioned above), but overall the release is solid. Keep an eye on the SkyDragon Desire X thread for mods and updates over the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading, please let me know if you found this review helpful by hitting the thanks button! :cowboy: