New Home Screen

I just flashed the ROM on my HTC Touch HD to Duttys HD WM6.5 Leo R4, and it’s a huge improvement. Previously I had been running Duttys HD WM6.5 R14 Turbo, which was still a huge improvement over Orange’s bundled ROM, which was WM 6.1, which didn’t help.

The Leo ROM’s main improvement is the further reach of Manila (TouchFlo 3D). Nearly everything can be accessed via Manila’s own menu system, including nearly all settings. Even on my old phone, it runs smoothly, and at startup uses less than half of the available RAM.

There are a few major updates to the familiar Manila panes, most notably the Home screen and the Contacts screen. Bother feature large customizable buttons. On the Home screen these can be pointed to apps, contacts, widgets or links, for instant access. The old contacts rolodex has gone, and now there is a large customizable button pane instead.

Flashing was a breeze, this is the third time I’ve done it now, so the whole process takes less than an hour. I have my contacts and calendar synced with my Google, via the fantastic Nuevasync, and all my apps were installed automatically during flashing, so it was just a case of re-logging in to a few things and I was good to go again!

If you want to flash your HTC WM phone, check out xda developers’ fantastic guide, it really is quite simple.