NexusHD2 Android Forum

Hi all!

As this is my first post in this forum, first of all, thanks tytung for the great work with the HD2 (not only the recent KitKat ROMs, I have been using tytung kernels for ages on other ROMs as well). Also thanks to all the other LEO devs, it is really wonderful to see for how long Leo stuff has been actively developed and seeing that still somebody is releasing ROMs today, four years and a half after its release!

On xda this thread would be locked in no time, I hope I can have better luck here!

So, the scenario is the following: I bought a One M8 and I am switching to it in a couple of days. I am really heartbroken for abandoning my Leo , but sooner or later this time had to come. BUT... I will be giving it to my dad, which is still stuck on a Polaris which he can't stand anymore (poor Polaris!), so this glorious Leo can do his duty for at least one more year. Now, Polaris means he is still using Windows Mobile 6.0 (or 6.1?), and he would like to try out Android. I would like to leave him with a ROM which is stable (top priority), and possibly not too laggy and not too old (secondary priority). It mustn't scare him away from Android, this is very important, or he will want to switch back to WinMo. Being up-to-date would be nice, but is not as important.

The current KitKat ROM I am using is fairly stable, but is a bit laggy and has problems with hardware acceleration, which make Google Maps navigation work horribly, and he uses the phone a lot as a Navigator.
The best ROMs I have ever run were MIUI Gingerbread ROMs (I still miss them a lot - yes, those were with tytung's kernel), and in general all Gingerbread ROMs were super-fast and super-stable, but Gingerbread is a bit dated now.
Jelly Bean sounds like a good compromise, but I have no recent experience with Jelly Bean ROMs.

So the questions are...

• Do you guys believe Jelly Bean is actually a good compromise?
• If so, which ROMs do you recommend?
• If not, do you have better ideas? Should I go back to Gingerbread?

Thank you in advance!

I strongly recommend a GB ROM. It's very fast. I used tytung's GB SD builds and they're quite fast. When I switched to tytung's ICS SD builds, they're very slow to the point that I was forced to use NAND. I'm using a KitKat ROM now, but I sometimes consider to go back to a GB ROM. I just miss some new features. You can try NexusHD2-Gingerbread V3.3a.

Honestly, apart from a few new features, I don't really think GB/ICS/JB/KK ROMs are any different. They're just the version numbers and names to me. If you want a more up-to-date ROM, I recommend NexusHD2-JellyBean-CM10.1.3 V2.7. It's fast and stable and almost feature complete.

Thank you very much for the recommendation! It sounds perfectly sensible.

Some ICS+ features, like built-in Wi-fi and Bluetooth tethering, are nice to have, but an Android newbie should not even know that those features are available in later versions.

Besides features, there is another thing which makes me concerned: are there many apps around which require ICS or greater? I have basically always been on the latest version of Android, so I have never really paid attention to the application minimum version requirement. Can anybody tell me more about this?

I still have untill next Tuesday for picking a ROM. More opinions?

i agree with soren's suggestion of 10.1.3 v2.7, you could use NativeSD booted from wm6.5. That way your dad can fall back to wm at any time and still be upgraded

Thank you Robbie! Uhm... interesting, can NativeSD ROMs be booted from WinMo with Haret.exe?

Black Antitoon wrote:Thank you Robbie! Uhm... interesting, can NativeSD ROMs be booted from WinMo with Haret.exe?

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthr ... ?t=1986437 explains how

Black Antitoon wrote:Besides features, there is another thing which makes me concerned: are there many apps around which require ICS or greater?

Chrome requires ICS+.

soren wrote:Chrome requires ICS+.

Chrome and a number of newer apps do. A number of devs are reducing support for older ROMs slowly to reduce code size and complexity.

BTW, I always had issues with chrome on the HD2 because of memory restrictions. ;(

Sent from my Nexus 4

NYLimited wrote:
Chrome and a number of newer apps do. A number of devs are reducing support for older ROMs slowly to reduce code size and complexity.

BTW, I always had issues with chrome on the HD2 because of memory restrictions. ;(

Sent from my Nexus 4

Yeah, Chrome always lagged for me too on my HD2, plus for some reason it and Firefox seam to have issues rendering web forums such as this correctly. Instead of all of the sections in the lobby having the same font size, some are real tiny and others are huge. I like the stock JellyBean browser best. It's lightweight relatively fast, renders pages correctly and fully supports Flash with it properly installed.

As to the OP. I killed my HD2 while CM-10.2 was still relatively unstable, but my experience on my Amaze leads me to believe that your Dad will probably have his most enjoyable experience with the JB version soren mentioned, CM-10.1.3-v2.7. The CM-10.1.x series was and is my favorites of all of the Jelly Beans. It's fully functional, stable, but smoother than the versions that came afterwards, IMHO. That's why I chose that version when I compiled my own for my Amaze. It may not have the speed or smoothness of GB, but everything else makes up for it, including its more polished look. Plus it's a new enough version of Android that you wont have to worry about developers abandoning it any time soon.

I hope this helps.

Good luck to you and your Dad

So guys!

Thank you for your help and recommendations! In the end we decided to go with Gingerbread, as it was incredibly smooth and my Dad will probably not miss most of the feature of newer versions, which he has never seen so far. Once he gets acquainted with that, I now have good recommendations of what ROM he should switch to.

Thank you all again! Have a nice weekend!
Paolo

EDIT - forgot to mention: yes, I am also very surprised at how Firefox renders phpBB boards, I get exactly the same thing you mentioned on other boards as well!