Folks, we may be a couple days behind but don’t worry, were here to share the news and review of this ROM from one of our very own PPCGeek moderators, Orangekid. He is here to share his own experience with the new Windows Phone 7 ROM ported to the HD2 now that he’s used it for a couple of days. You can’t give a great review until you try it out a while right? Now’s the time!
If you aren’t sure what were speaking of, recently over at XDA the new WP7 operating system was ported onto an HTC Leo, aka HD2 by their elite team of developers. Shortly after, several HD2 users dug in and figured out how it was done. One of those users happened to be our very own, Orangekid, when he got word of the news. So far, he’s loving being able to rock WP7 on his HD2!
You may have already seen reviews on the ROM but don’t you think it takes some time to really get to know how well the device works, or doesn’t work. It’s been long enough now and here is what we can learn from Orangekid who’s been using this ROM himself.
Installation:
The installation of this ROM was insanely easy. Anyone who has installed Android on NAND is familiar with Cotulla’s custom bootloader. All you do is flash the bootloader over HSPL (which Cotulla also wrote) using the regular RUU, then using the new bootloader put it in USB Flasher mode, and he has a custom flasher that’s just a couple of clicks and you’re in business.
First Impression:
I was amazed that a “first port” could be t his stable, this complete, and this fluid. it honestly felt I had just turned on an HD7. Boot time from pressing power button until seeing the homescreen was about 35 seconds. Everything was fast and fluid, no lags. Very impressed.
UI navigation/look/homescreen:
I really liked the home screen. I changed my theme to dark and red. I hate that light theme with the white backdrop personally. Metro UI is so different. I love that it’s so fluid and slick and flows to each screen, but I don’t like the lack of customization. I want to create a folder for my apps instead of having them float around in the menu, and I’d love it if MS would let HTC do a Sense overlay on the UI.
Overall I was impressed.
Internet Connections:
input my APN settings in about 20 seconds and I was good to go. Fast, stable Edge, 3G, and HSDPA with no drops. Radio worked well, calls came in clearly. Everything was perfect. WiFi worked out of the box with no issues.
Hubs:
Everything worked fine. I installed the HTC Hub and it was fast and fluid, and very nice. The people hub is really nice as well.
Battery Life:
Much better than expected. About the same as stock WM6.5 on this phone. I had WiFi on and was playing games, messing with settings, and doing all sorts of things and got a good 24 hours of battery life on it.
Social Networking:
I love the facebook integration into contacts and “what’s new” and the pictures. The facebook app is very disappointing though, makes me want to launch Android just to use a decent app. MS and/or HTC really need to fix this app. besides this though I like the fact that it shows status updates in the people hub and that you can like and comment on posts.
Xbox Live:
Once I got Live Services going (see my tutorial in the HD2 forums) Xbox Live was nice. They had games and you could control everything on your Live account from the phone, very well integrated.
Camera:
The green phone button is a dedicated camera button. It responded well, took great 5MP pictures, and had great 720p recording. No problems.
Settings:
I liked the simplicity of the settings. I wish there were more settings though like for battery percentage and ability to turn off camera shutter sounds even with the rest of the sounds on.
Office:
Office is very nice. I can type easily and modify Word and Excel files. Very integrated and fluid. It really needs Copy and Paste for my needs though, hopefully they update the OS with this.
Zune:
Zune is nice because it incorporates everything and you can get your movies, music, podcasts all in one place. My beef is the same as iOS. I want more choices and I want to be able to modify things without Zune if I wish. I personally prefer MediaMonkey (which you can use with iOS) and I don’t like the Zune PC app. It’s a nice WP7 app though. Worked fine syncing with my phone.
Sounds:
I love the keyboard sound. All sounds came in loud and clear on my HD2 with no issues. Music played well. Podcasts streamed well. No complaints.
Overall you get the full WP7 experience on your HD2. It really is like owning an HD7. Depending on the SD card you use, it may lag or not, since it combines the SD with NAND in a raid zero type configuration. Apps loaded fine on my 16gb class 2 that came with my HD2. I have it partitioned for 4 gigs for WP7 and the rest I am going to use to launch Android from SD when I want.
I can and will use this ROM as a daily driver. Many thanks for DFT for making this possible. They are now working on a MeeGo port as well, so the HD2 will be an amazing phone for a long while until the QSD chip really is obsolete. And with the T-Mobile versions of the HD2 having 1GB of ROM, you really do get more options.
Be sure to hop into our HD2 section and check out the official post and information on this new development.
Source: XDA