[Droid X General] JrzDroid:
Liberty 1.5 by Kejar & Jrummy vs. Apex 1.4 by Fabulous

For the past 28 or so hours I've had two droid Xs in my possession and decided that I wanted to test the two latest and greatest ROMS for the X. Liberty 1.5 and Apex 1.4. I started out by SBFing both to stock 2.3.340 before doing anything and loading fresh installs of both.

1st thoughts - Without loading any accounts or applications, both are very quick roms, tool boxes on both are loaded full of options. for the sake of comparison I didn't load any toolbox options on either. Both phones were charged to 100% and then taken off.

Setup- I added my google account to both and let the application restore process commence. At the end of the process both were at 90% Battery. I don't have any task killers(bleck) and only have around 20 applications. I then went through the twitter and facebook account process and set up both phones with my GOLauncher setup w/ widgets and wallpaper. So both phones are still 100% mirrors of eachother(beside rom)[no themes]

Playtime- Recently my girlfriend and I have become addicted to the game Dropwords so we both took an X and played for an hour, playing one game after another. Everything was timed with an egg timer lol. After an hours of game play both were at a respectable 70%.

Toolbox- Like mentioned earlier, both have toolboxes with great features. Both make these ROMs a tier above the rest. Functionality and ease I would give to Liberty with the Liberty Toolbox. With the ability to simply click a button to add themes, blur apps, overclocking etc its much easier then reading font on the Emulator. The apex tool box also has great commands and isn't hard to use at all. Fabulous did a great job with the ApexBox.

Battery Life- There is a "patch" for Liberty that seems to improve the battery greatly, but it was not used in this test as it was not part of the original 1.5 release. I did the same things I both phones from the time I set both up to the time I went to sleep that nite. Didn't post anything on twitter or facebook, searched the same sites on both (gizmodo, phandroid, yahoo, d-life) In the time I started searching sites on both phones to the time I finished, Apex was 10% ahead of Liberty 60% - 50%. After another hour of dropword on both phones, we had Apex on 50% and Liberty on 40%.

ROMs- In terms of sheer performance, before I loaded GoLauncher and applications, Liberty it seemed held a speed advantage in terms of Applications opening and Boot time. Apex seemed to be faster in opening the settings menus and the market seemed to open faster too. After launchers and applications were loaded Liberty still held a slight advantage in applications. Apex however, didn't seem to like GoLauncher at first but got better after I reinstalled it.

The Final word- Both Roms are excellent, both are fast, both are loaded with customization options. Both are ahead of the rest IMO and thoroughly put Motorola's stock software to shame. Personally I can't really find a weakness in either, and both really give the user plenty of options. Battery life seems to be a bit better on Apex as people have discovered but with the tweak made by Kejar it might level the playing field. With all roms theres bound to be bugs and both seem to have been really streamlined into the smooth creatures we see now. Throughout the entire testing process I only had one hiccup that recurred twice. Both instances were with Apex and a strange keyboard action. I tried typing things on both and twice on apex letters did not process when hit.

hope you enjoyed my comparison =] If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

note: There was a rumor of malicious code in Liberty 1.5 which was causing several people restoring backups of Liberty 1.5 to have issues. Jrummy and Kejar have both cleared this up and it was not malicious, it was more of a show and tell that wasn't cleaned up properly.