JKeene Reviews ICSourcery ROM For Galaxy Nexus LTE!!
I have reviewed alot of ROMs for the GNex in the short time I have had one. Some ROMs are all about flash, some ROMs bring you speed, and some ROMs well they have neither. The Galaxy Nexus ROM world has become dominated by a few names, Liquid, Codename, AOKP are used by alot of people. However in the search for something new I stumbled across this awesome ROM over on Rootzwiki. Team Sorcery has been hard at work on this ROM and it really shows.
The ROM is not in final form so there are a few bugs but take my word for it, the bacon in this ROM makes it worth it! The first thing I noticed upon flashing was the awesome theming on the ROM. From the pull down notification screen featuring a wizard with a spilling globe to the warrior woman on the background of my messaging app the fantasy theme abounds on this ROM. Sourcery features Apex Launcher and a stock kernel however do not let that dissuade you, I haven’t gotten to the good stuff yet. Under ICSourcery Settings are all of the usual status bar, lockscreen, softkey and notification settings. At the bottom of this page is the “Magic” setting that lets you calibrate your altimeter as well as barometer. You can also find a setting that I have been looking for a while, finally you can set “quiet time” where you phone will set off its alarm but not notify you of SMS, Email, etc. That feature has been missing from my life since Blackberry days. The real awesome stuff can be found under Sourcery Tools however. If you like to mod out your phone this is the place to be! Do you like to try different kernels? How about your choice of 16, yes 16 to flash? There are 15 different screen transition animations to choose from as well and if that is not enough how about 120 different boot animations to download!!!! There are dozens of Fonts to choose from, currently I am using Bender but there are some many to choose from I had a hard time picking just one. Oh wait I forgot about the soft key mods, there are almost 20 to download from Army of Darkness font (eat your heart out Bruce Campbell) to Batman as well! All you need to do is download the mod allow it to install and then reboot twice. I have not even gotten to the device manager which features an app manager, a Magic Mods section which allows you to mod alot of the theming done to the ROM or change the BitRate on your camera. There is even a Theme manager to download more themes on the ROM as well as return it to the stock look if the wizard is not to your liking. For a guy that likes to change and set up everything to his liking this is so much stuff I have had the ROM for a week and am still changing things, not because I don’t like the ROM but just because I can!
1. App Test
I used Modern Combat and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit for game testing, both great games if you are looking. They worked very well with not issues or stuttering. Google Plus and Facebook worked just fine with Plus notifications working like a charm and even Messenger behaving for once. Tweetdeck kept me up to date in the Twitter verse just fine and the stock YouTube app behaved as well.
5 out of 5
2. Launcher Responsiveness
The ROM comes with Apex Launcher which I mainly used but I gave Nova a couple of days as well. Apex worked just fine and as usual gave me alot of options to set up the launcher just the way I wanted to. Nova played well with ICSourcery as well so fans of either launcher will feel right at home on this ROM. I did find that the baked in screen transition mods on the ROM worked better on Apex than Nova which seemed to bog down a bit but nothing crazy.
5 out of 5
3. Battery Life
As with other ICS ROMs ICSourcery was pretty darn good as far as battery life is concerned. I only had a chance in 1 week to use the stock kernel as well as Franco’s and battery life as solid with both. On 4G with average use I got about 8 hours of use and on WiFi at least 12-17 hours.
5 out of 5
4. Sound Quality
This ROM features its own notification sound that is a bird of prey calling and the first time it went off after I flashed the ROM, it scared the hell out of me so I can honestly say that the external speaker sound is great. Music and gaming through headphones was just fine as well although for some reason YouTube videos were slightly muffled.
4 out of 5
5. Browser Testing
Here I used the stock browser as well as Chrome. Both worked just as you would want them too and gave me no trouble at all. Just to push it I tried out Dolphin as well but it also behaved so this ROM will give you no headaches in the browser department as well.
5 out of 5
I didn’t include any benchmarks in this review since the ROM itself provides you with so many kernel options it seemed kind of pointless. I did encounter a couple of random reboots and once when flashing a softkey mod it did not work at all but since this ROM is not completed this is kind of expected. There are a few issues that may or may not impact your experience listed on the download page over at Rootzwiki below so defintly read up before flashing. However to me this issues are minor and in no way affected my day-to-day use of the ROM. I absolutely love this ROM, I know that alot of you will have a hard time being tempted away from Liquid or AOKP but trust me if you like to mod out everything this ROM is worth flashing! The mods are so many it will take you a while to work through them, so hit up the link below and give this one a shot!
Source-Rootzwiki
JKeene, AndroREV Editor
We Are AndroREV, WE ARE!!!!
