With MIUI recently hitting the first ARMv6 device ever last week with the ROM MIUISkater for the ZTE Skate, the question in the air was how long until the Skate’s brother, the Blade, got a try at MIUI. Well your prayers have been answered and MIUIBlader has been released thanks to the wonderful efforts from MoDaCo user tilal6991 and a second update has also been released which I talk about in greater detail after the first chunk.
Alpha 1
Installation
Installing the ROM was not the least complex task in the world, as it involved me having to repartition my Blade’s internal storage for MIUI to fit. The system partition needs to be at the very least above 190mb, so I used the app TPT Helper to change it.
I then flashed the ROM in recovery and flashed the gapps on the thread. Job was a guddun, supposedly.
Experiences
Upon booting up the ROM, the Setup screen FC’d and then loaded up again so I had to pass that using the trick of pressing all four corners starting at the top left going clockwise.
During my testing of the ROM I could not get Google Apps or services to work at all using this ROM. I tried various methods and times of flashing them in recovery, but I just couldn’t get them to work. Whether this was an issue with me or the ROM I am unsure about. Whatever I did get to work though, I was very impressed about. The browser, which appears to be the stock ICS one with a bit of orange chucked in, works great. The Music player looked nice, but I couldn’t test it due to my lack of music on my SD card. The gallery wouldn’t load for me, but does for others, but from what I’ve heard it’s just the ICS one. The theme chooser doesn’t appear to work at the moment. All of the hardware works, with the UI
even taking advantage of H/W acceleration. Even the camera works.
Being a first alpha of the ROM, I did not expect it to be at all stable and to be perfectly honest it isn’t. At times it can be smoothly running and then just lock up, leaving you to pull the battery. Lots of apps force close randomly. Sometimes my Blade went into a sleep of death and wouldn’t wake up upon pressing the lock button. I would wait for the next update to flash this.
27/02/12
Alpha 2:
Yesterday the second build of MIUIBlader came out and has completely changed my opinion of the ROM. Installation was a lot smoother with the Google Apps being built in, so the Market and other services worked great from the box! The changelog of the update mentioned increased stability and less lag. This was not a lie. The ROM has not crashed, frozen or blown up on me once since flashing 2 hours ago. I am going to give this a go at being my full time driver. As I talk I’m downloading Google Music to test out. There is a fix for themes on MoDaCo for those who want to mess around in /system, but I’m waiting for it to come up in the next update.
I personally would recommend this to my friends to flash, and the ROM can only get better and faster as time goes on, so what are you waiting for?
- Jamie Luckett (JimJam707)
