SS 4.6 and 4.7 ROM Reviews
*Note* I decided to combine my reviews for SS 4.6 and 4.7 since they're both very similar and I directly went from one to the other. The differences are not that drastic.
Initial Setup and Boot
There's not much to say here. Boot and setup went as expected. No problems in my flash of either 4.6 or 4.7. I did (per Chevy's own suggestion) try installing the ROM without wiping my previous ROM, and tried it again later after a wipe. I must say that I experienced no significant difference performance or bug wise whether I wiped my previous (Lithium) ROM or not.
Appearance and Performance
The stock theme is pretty nice. Nothing groundbreaking, just your typical black with blue highlights and icons. Some transparency is in there and it does look purty enough that I chose not to install any third party themes. Personally I preferred the black leaning styling of 4.6 to the blue leaning styling of 4.7, but it's probably personal preference and not a big deal either way.
Performance wise, 4.6 was amazing. Chevy's kernels have always been good to me. Stock or overclocked, it didn't matter. Everything was smooth as butter. I did have the occasional redraw of the home screen, but I have basically come to expect this with every ROM I've used. Upon upgrading to 4.7, some of the smoothness seemed to go down the tubes. I definitely would give 4.6 a higher score for fluidity and general usage performance.
Battery life was as good or better than previous ROMs with 4.6, but once I went to 4.7 (see the trend here?) my battery life suffered as well with the same phone usage. I haven't been able to determine what the culprit is. Same apps, same usage, same kernel, but much lower battery life. I'm talking 20% after my shift at work when I was used to getting 60-70 depending on how much I used it.
Features and Bugs
Chevy's tools are always very useful. The inclusion of volume/camera button music controls was nice, but I found it to be too finicky for general use. Sometimes they would work, sometimes they wouldn't. Other times, with the phone in my pocket, songs would stop or change on a whim. The ability to change/remove objects such as the clock from the notification bar is of course always welcome. I didn't experience any bugs at all with 4.6, but with 4.7 I did have a weird recurring issue where the phone would just stop receiving data all together. No texts would come in, phone calls wouldn't go out, data connection wouldn't work, but it showed that my signal was fine. A restart fixed this, but it happened a few times and the only way I realized it was when I tried to make a call and it didn't work, then rebooted the phone to several old text messages.
Conclusion
Setup 5/5 - No problems here, and it worked like a charm without a wipe.
Appearance 3/5 - The themes are nice, but nothing spectacular. Most people will probably prefer their favorite custom theme over the ROM.
Performance 4/5 - The 4.5 is a combined score. On SS 4.6, performance was juicy and easily scored a 5/5 with all of the kernels and speeds I tried. With 4.7, that degraded a bit, and so did the battery life, so I would give this release a 3.5.
Features and Bugs 4/5 - As always, Chevy's ROMs include a lot of useful and expected features. Bugs are certainly rare, but the one that I did experience a few times was fairly annoying.
Overall (Not an average) 4.5/5 - I would have easily given SS 4.6 a 5/5 here. Since it's a combined review though, a 4.5 seems appropriate. After a lot of use, I was not entirely happy with my choice to upgrade to 4.7. Performance seemed to suffer a bit, bugs were introduced where there were none apparent before, and the theme was a little bit less pleasing to the eyes.
I would definitely recommend giving Chevy's ROMs a try. He's a spectacular developer and releases sweet ROMs as well as sweet kernels. There's not much to dislike here, but from my experience I would stick with 4.6 for now if you are considering going to one of Chevy's newer ROMs.
