After 3 months and 3 days, I’ve finally gotten around to unlocking my HTC One X, rooting it, and installing a custom ROM. My Google Nexus One lasted maybe a little over 3 hours before it was unlocked, and my Samsung Galaxy S II lasted about 3 days. The stock ROM that comes with the device has gotten better, so much so that I feel less need to switch to a custom ROM.
But as a techie, I’ll eventually want to break out of the stock ROM provided by the device manufacturer and get a taste of something more cutting-edge. In the current case of my HTC One X, while I’ve been largely quite happy with the stock HTC software, I’ve been drawn by the availability of Jelly Bean.
Not that there was anything really neat with Jelly Bean that I wanted. But saw a video demonstration of how Jelly Bean performed on the HTC One X. It was so buttery smooth, even when compared against the Samsung Galaxy S III (which I later realized was actually still running the sock Ice Cream Sandwich ROM from Samsung), so I was quite enticed.
I had checked the state of custom ROM developments on the HTC One X and I hadn’t been impressed, in particular with the list of things that were not working. I was more interested in pure Android builds such as the CyanogenMod project, rather than modders that simply hacked on HTC’s ROM.
Once I started thinking about Project Butter on Jelly Bean, I was more willing to be a little more forgiving on that list of not working items. Wifi Direct was not working, but I don’t use that. There was no FM Radio app, but I don’t use that either. There was an issue with MHL display orientation, and I don’t even have an MHL adapter to use MHL. So, in reality, these issues were not going to affect me.
So, I finally got started on unlocking my HTC One X. I decided to go with Eternity Project’s CyanogenMod 10. I didn’t stay there long, because I noticed a problem with the Camera app. It would quit when I tried to switch to Video or Panorama mode, with a strange error “Unfortunately, the Gallery has stopped.” Well, bummer. I decided to stick with the stock CyanogenMod 10. It worked great.
And so, that’s how I’m now already running a sleek Jelly Bean ROM on my HTC One X. There’s yet to be any announcement from HTC about when, and if, there will be an official Jelly Bean update for the One X. It doesn’t really matter now, I suppose.
I would really loved to have a working install from Eternity Project, as their ROM is said to be built with better compile-time optimizations, by way of a custom toolchain instead of the default Android toolchain.
Well, eventually I might get around to producing nightly builds myself. I was doing this when I had my Nexus One.
Such is the beauty of Open Source.
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