[Sprint HTC EVO 4G LTE] ITman496:
So my girlfriend's EVO 4G LTE is a bit of.. well, I'm gonna say bastard. I'm not new when it comes to rooting devices but I've never had to deal with one that fought me so much.

I've been through this adventure many times with it, and it gets more complicated each time. Here is what's happened with it so far.

It was stock, and it was terrible. It lagged so much, despite factory resets, that apps like google maps were completely unusable. It got no battery life AT ALL, and was generally freeze-happy and miserable.

So then I s-off'd it and after learning all its quirks, installed recovery and CM 11.2 (I think? It's been a year)

This worked great! For.. a few days. The phone worked, we went on vacation to a roaming area where Sprint had no coverage. We come back, and only the data works, texts and calls do not, and the phone acts like it's not activated. Yay. All attempts to get it activated are met with failure, much to the confusion of the poor sprint person on the line. The phone just will not take, at all. (damn lack of real sim cards..) We tried recovering back to a backup from twrp of the stock firmware but that won't work either? It wouldn't register with sprint even on the backed up version of stock sense. The phone seemed dead at this point. Bricked radio?

So we give up. We bring it to the sprint store, and they do some magic to it, and its back to stock, slow and terrible, but functional. We don't touch it until about three weeks ago.

But, my girlfriend is tired, again, of the terribleness, and asks me to try again. Okay, sure.

I install TWRP again, so far so good. The phone is still S-OFF from last time, which is nice. I go to install CM11.2 from the files used from last time (the MD5 does check out correct) But, the phone complains about not having a new enough bootloader. ???? (So I assume sprint downgraded the bootloader in the process of fixing it. somehow)

I forget the exact numbers, but we can't install CM11.2, only 10. or 10.whatever. the newest 10. Okay, fine. I gather a new set of cyanogen files, gapps, whatever, and flash all of that, so far so good.

This time it works, and stays working! Yay! So I thought.

As it turns out, its on a very old version of android (so old that it goes into a special usb file host mode when usb is plugged in) and more importantly, the camera is TERRIBLE. I've read that the evo 4g lte uses a special ImageSense chip to boost camera performance, and that cyanogen 10 does not support it. I can tell, because the camera is absolutely terrible. The battery life also is terrible, presumably because it lacks optimizations. It had way better battery life on CM11.2 when it worked. Other then that, its working just fine, but the camera is just unacceptable.

So, I want to know what to do from here. I see a few paths.

plan A:

update HBOOT to a newer version to allow the install of CM11.2

(how do I do that? I heard you have to use an RUU, but which RUU? I read that there is some touchscreen driver that is an issue depending on what version you run)

(Once I install the ruu is it business as usual, install twrp and then flash cyanogen like normal? Will it do the crazy not activation thing again? was that a fluke??)

plan B:

update HBOOT, but to a much newer one that allows the install of CM12 or whatever the newer ones are. Presumably updating past the touch screen driver issue and not allowing us to go back to an old version.

(once again, what do I need to do that? Is this advisable? I quite prefer the idea of running a newer version. So if this is the better idea, I will do it.)

I thank you greatly for your help. I'm not used to it being this complicated. I've read a lot of things about this phone and it seems very conflicting at times. I just want to get straightened out.