Hardware Acceleration on some aging Motorola devices has been a long time coming. My Motorola Defy is one of those aging devices. Last week, Quarx2k and Epsylon3, our wonderful Defy developers, released builds for the Defy and Defy+ with full HWA support. However, this wouldn’t have been possible without the work of Kabaldan, who discovered a method that could bring full HWA to any locked down Motorola device, such as my Defy and the Motorola Milestone.
Hardware acceleration for Android is (in the most basic of terms) the use of the GPU to aid in the drawing operations done by a given application or view. Aside from allowing the CPU and GPU to work simultaneously, this also allows the drawing operations to be done on much more specialized and efficient hardware for the task. This results in a better overall user experience.
Quarx2k released his first full HWA build on July 6. There’s since been another build for both Defy and Defy+. You can find all builds by Quarx2k here.
The best part of having HWA for me, is having a fully functioning Chrome in Android now. Something I’ve been waiting to have on my Defy for quite some time.
Quarx released a new build for Defy and Defy+ yesterday. I am now running on his Defy+ build because camera in it works with regular Motorola Defy’s with a red camera lens.
Now that everyone has a partially working camera, all Defy/Defy+ users should be quite happy.
If you’ve got a Red lens Defy, and want to run Ice Cream Sandwich and have a working camera, follow the steps below.
My post about making Cyanogenmod look like Ice Cream Sandwich has been pretty popular. There are a lot of folks out there wanting to make their Cyanogenmod 7 phone look like it’s running Ice Cream Sandwich, and for good reason. The Ice Cream Sandwich style is very nice to look at.
All of those are free and can be installed right from the Android Market. Sonny has a donate version available as well, if you like his work and would like to support him, buying that theme would probably make him a very happy dude.
If you’re looking for Ice Cream Sandwich themes for ADW or other launchers, you’ll definitely want to have a look at this post. That post contains a lot more than just Ice Cream Sandwich Cyanogenmod themes.
You can have a quick look at each of the new Ice Cream Sandwich theme colors in the gallery below (after the break). If I missed a theme from another developer, leave a comment and I’ll add it to this post. Read more
