[myTouch 3G, Magic Android Development] cicsme:
Quick ROM Review:

I downloaded this ROM two days ago but haven't got anytime to try it until today. It took me less than four minutes to Nadroid backup of old ROM and flash the new ROM.

A quick reboot and about one and half minutes later the HTC Magic showed the Lock Screen. I unlocked the screen and enter my SIM code. Here we go, new ROM ready to use. The usual walkthrough setup is there to bring you through the basic setup the phone, just like any other Hero phone.

When the setup was done it bring you the home screen… and it’s blank. Simply just an empty black screen. I read a lot has reported wrong timestamp on SMS and weather application doesn't detect correct location etc. My task now is to make some tests. But before I can do proper tests the phone needs further setup like making sure time zone is correct and making sure the correct APN is correctly detected. Sadly this ROM is missing the most common list of APN. We can’t require any ROM comes with a complete list, but at least the most common like Roger, Vodafone should be there. Not much I can do then re-enter my network APN and the tests can begin. After few SMS exchange with my wife, everything looks fine; timestamp is correct and the weather report is correct (found my current location as Drammen, Norway).

It took me few minutes to add few widgets for testing and downloaded few applications from the Market. I start noticing the background is missing for few HTC standard widgets, which make them almost impossible to read when you've colourful wallpaper. If you try to add a Folder to your desktop; the folder doesn’t have any background. Once the folder is open, all icons in that folder will overlap with icons on the desktop. If you have a lot of applications and want to organize them into folders on your desktop, forget it!

Another miss is the scrollbar is missing on all applications!

After 20 minutes the problems start….Touch Input got force closed fallowed by Google Maps, Gmail… and finally the process system stopped.

Oh dear, let reboot and try again. This time with "adb shell" from my desktop to monitor all the processes. The rest of this evening the phone works fine with 18 applications installed.

I know this ROM is just a port but still it should be enhanced before the port itself. Example, the ROM contains Tether Blue which will not work for 32A and should be removed. Missing background should be fixed etc.

Some claims this ROM is slightly faster than JacHeroski2.7.4r2-32A, something I haven't noticed. Playing music with TuneWiki, start a heavely loaded web page on the browser and then go to Google Map, play around with Latitude and then back to home screen. The TouchFlow is still smooth, but not faster than JacHeroski. I would say they are both as smooth thanks to Rosie Optimized pack found in both ROM.

If you want to go for an user-friendly and fast Hero ROM for your Magic; then JacHeroski2.7.4r2 32A port is a better choice.

Note: I unable to test a2sd, compcache and swap since I'm unable to make them to work on both JacHeroski and JACxHERO ROM. I'm sure compcache is'nt supported (easy to see the missing kernel modules for compcache) but a2sd started from init.rc doesn't mount /system/sd.

Edit: After few hardware and system check on my SDCard, it is now back on business and a2sd works fine.

Edit2: This ROM is now stable after the first crash. Overclocking (tested with all three; SetCPU, Open Overclocking and Overclock Widget) is also stable.

Edit3: After 5 days using ROM I've to revert back to JacHeroski ROM due to this ROM has to much small enoying issues and bugs. Making the whole user-experience less enjoyable than other Hero ROMs.