So, I’ve tried many ROMs for my HTC Desire but the latest, Oxygen, has to be the best. If you have a HTC Desire and are looking to give it a new lease of life then I would highly recommend it. Also rooting your phone is easier than ever thanks to Unrevoked.
I formerly used AOSP which is a fairly vanilla Froyo ROM but very stable. I used this ROM for pretty much the last year. However with my upgrade date for my contract due later this year, and the release of quad-core phones throughout 2012, I started to look at custom ROMs again rather than feel jealous about the shiny new models. And to be honest with you – all I use my phone for is to get at GMail, Calender, Remember-the-Milk, Reddit and WhatsApp – no gaming (like I have the time), no video playback (I like battery life for communicating with people), no music playback (I have the excellent Sansa Clip+ thanks). So I figured I can save some cash by keeping the phone and going to a SIM-only contract when it expires. Yeah, new phones have promising stuff like NFC but AFAICT there is no commonplace infrastructure for that yet – hopefully in 2014 when I am ready to upgrade 🙂
So back to selecting a ROM: I first tried CyanogenMod 7.1 (probably the custom ROM most people know about) which installed smoothly. However two problems became apparent – a shockingly fast battery drain and unreliable screen auto-rotate (I think the latter might be due to accelerometer driver problems). Thankfully trackball-wake worked otherwise it would not have lasted the two weeks I ran it for. Both of those problems cannot be sustained so I looked around with the words “stable”, “bug free” with “HTC Desire ROM” and found Oxygen which is based on Gingerbread.
I now have what is almost like a new phone – it’s fast, stable and looks smart. For me there are just two small issues – no trackball wake and no way to disable the photo shutter sound – everything else is cool. If you want to install via Clockwork ROM then it will not work, there is currently a broken link to Oxygen. Instead follow this guide and grab version 2.3.2.
Thank you very, very much Oxygen developers/maintainers – enjoy!
2 replies on “What is the best Android ROM for HTC Desire?”
Wow man, you still have the plastic on!
Anyway, thanks for this tip, my girlfriend want an upgrade to her phone, so I guess this will be a nice route to try. I’m loving my Nokia N9 until it breaks or is horribly outdated myself. Still get envious looks for it :]
Your welcome Odin, the “plastic” is actually a screen cover – I just failed to get all the air bubbles out of it. I have a HTC Desire HD now running ICS and the screencover on that I have put down 99.9% perfect – very proud of that 😀
Know what you mean about the N9 – keep rocking retro tech! A few years back when my HTC G1 battery failed, I reverted to my Nokia 6810i for a week and got soooo many comments and nostalgia feels from everyone.
Where did I put my Minidisc…?