Nils’ Business GingerSense 3.5

My favorite ROM for the HTC Incredible, Virtuous, has been suffering from stalled development. In fact the last release was version 3.2 in December of 2010. There is word that rmk40 is working on a new (and final) version of Virtuous for the Incredible, but it seems that Virtuous Unity is taking precedence. With the recent OTA update from Verizon, I’ve been finding more and more apps being listed as “not compatible” with my, now out-of-date, phone. For this reason I started testing Nils’ Business GingerSense 3.5 as a replacement ROM.

Like Virtuous, Nils’ Business GingerSense 3.5 is a “close to stock” ROM that looks to keep the user experience close to stock Sense (albeit Sense 3.5), improve stability and performance, while providing the user with many more options and tweaks. Business GingerSense is based on Gingerbread 2.3.5, runs Sense 3.5, a stock kernel, and supports the most recent, official Gingerbread radio, 2.15.10.07.07.

Incredible Tweaks

The Business GingerSense features are many, and it can be hard to tell which features are thanks to the major improvements to Sense 3.5 and which are thanks to Nils. Many of my favorite features, like the much-improved calendar, mail, messaging, and contact apps, are improvements to Sense. That said, Nils does make it easy to customize the look and feel of the phone, tweak the Sense UI, and make power-related changes quickly and easily from an Incredible Tweaks app in the System menu, and adds a powerful quick settings tool to the notifications menu.

My initial reaction to the Business GingerSense ROM is that it runs great, is very smooth, and looks fantastic. The downsides are that battery life has thus far been poor and that there are numerous bugs to be worked out. At this point, none of the bugs are deal breakers, but the battery life leaves much to be desired. There are a number of tweaks that can be made to improve battery life, and Nils even recommends some himself, but only time will tell whether the tweaks are effective.

Sense 3.5 Lock Screen
Sense 3.5 Lock Screen

Another downside to the ROM is that there are a number of applications included that cannot be removed without firing up adb. I’m not sure why Nils would want to include specific apps (like a barcode scanner and an EverNote note recorder) that cannot be removed without evoking adb.

Ultimately, Nils’ Business GingerSense 3.5 is a solid ROM that needs a bit more work. In my opinion it’s stable enough for use in mission critical environments, unless you depend on a long battery life. It operates smoothly and keeps the Incredible up-to-date with the latest software. It’s a good option for anyone looking for a solid, stable, Sense 3.5 based ROM for the HTC Incredible.