It was funny when Google dropped their source code for Ice Cream Sandwich, Stormy and Simon told me that my phone, the lovely HTC G2, was having it’s very own ICS ROM developed for it before their phones. Naturally, I gave Stormy my “HAHA’s” and “my phone is better than yours” stabs, but was quickly left in my own despair when his Vibrant got a stable AOSP ROM before I did. Fair enough, the Galaxy S phones are high quality phones. They do rank better than my phone, even though I think the G2 is highly under-rated. With that though, my G2 brothers and sisters, our not so AOSP, but delectable Ice Cream Sandwich port ROM has been delivered.

An XDA member by the name of xT4Z1N4TRx, has been working super hard on trying to get us the awesomeness we all have been craving. I will tell you this, this ROM is still very much in its beta stage, but he has been exterminating those dreaded bugs the ROM has been plagued with. I have been playing with the ROM for the past 3 hours and indeed the “WOW” factor is there. The ROM has came along way from when he “claimed” the ROM was stable with one of his first releases. The virtual keyboard did not work, you could not access the numbers on the physical keyboard so you basically could not sign into your Google account if you have numbers in your screen name or password, and the GAPPS were not all in working order. So yeah, I guess it was pretty “stable” but you really could not do a thing but stare at, move your finger back and forth, and open and close the launcher. That was fun for about 47 seconds. It was like expecting that top of the line remote-controlled toy car Christmas morning, and instead getting a crappy thrift store remote controlled car that could only turn left. Alas, he worked his butt off and has now got a pretty stable ROM that I think I will use in my daily adventures.

After downloading the ROM, you will have to download the ICS GAPPS which generally will be flashed after you flash the ROM. I did not flash any kernels, just stuck with the one on the ROM itself. One of the bugs I quickly ran into, was he has the Nexus live wallpaper already running, and it caused my screen to flicker and jump. My launcher would not show up unless I touched the screen where the app drawer button was supposed to be. So of course I quickly put a non-live wallpaper on, and that all that went bye-bye. In the forums, I was noticing quite a few people having WiFi problems, and problems with the market downloading apps. I had no issues connecting to my WiFi and he has a pretty simple fix for the market issue. Also bluetooth, GPS, and video playback work. Camera, just like always with the beginning stages, is not working but all the GAPPS work except for GTalk. It opens then quickly force closes. This is due to the fact that this ROM has “partial” hardware acceleration according to xT4Z1N4TRx. When someone asked if the ROM has hardware acceleration, he simply said “yes and no” and that is what is causing GTalk to not open. So once he gets that going, this ROM is going to pop more than it already does. Another little bug I came across, was when I went to set up a wallpaper from my gallery. Cropping the picture caused that screen to scramble and show me a lot of pretty colors. After that I began to load up my screens with my favorite widgets, and the only thing that I could not do is resize the widgets even though I went into the settings and checked the setting for that. After setting some of my homescreens up, as well as the new style widgets that ICS has to offer. I did suffer with a couple reboots. xT4Z1N4TRx has ROM Toolbox installed, where you can adjust overclock settings, but for some reason when I would set my Maximum and Minimum settings, it would stay on the max even though I had it set for conservative. Once I went back to good ole’ SetCPU with my profiles set, no more reboots. Well, so far no more reboots. If it does happen tomorrow I might weep just a little bit. If you were wondering, you can overclock the phone to 1.6 GHZ, but I keep mine just under 1.5. Don’t want it to blow up just yet.

So G2 brother and sisters, I suggest you get a taste of this ICS ROM. It is a good start for what is to come when CM9 arrives, and as soon as he gets some more bugs out of it, I will post video. Check out his video below for his latest update. Click the link below that to see his thread with all the downloads and instructions you need.

XDA Thread: ICS for Desire Z/G2

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About the Author

David Pena

Been an Android nerd since the G1 days. I believe I hacked and flashed that phone into dust. Since then I jumped onto the G2 and now rocking the totally awesome HTC One S. I also host and produce The ManDroid Show every week and love talking Android to whoever wants to talk about it. Long Live Android!

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