Time for another installment of my investigation into the N7 ROM scene here at RootzWiki. This time around, we have Team EOS running on my Nexus 7. The team promises high performance and high stability with their ROM, but can they deliver?

Right now, the Team EOS ROM is in nightly status, so keep that in mind as I you read this review. If you aren't sure what "nightly" means, it means that there are releases built (almost) nightly from what the team has currently merged into their source. This means that there could be bugs, but it also means that it is on the bleeding edge of features that the team has added.

In any event, the latest nightly as of the time of this writing features the following:

Terrific Toggles

As a staple of many ROMs since I can remember (and now even stock Android), notification shade toggles are present in this ROM. The options they give you include WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, Auto Rotate, Silent, Airplane, and Notification.

I appreciated the ability to set the location of the toggles on the notification shade in this ROM. It allows me to place the toggles on the bottom of the shade, which effectively places them in the middle of the Nexus 7's screen in portrait mode when the shade is unfurled. If I ran this on my Galaxy Nexus, I would probably have it back on the top, but the ability to set this to your own liking is a useful feature of this ROM.

While many ROMs allow you to set your preferences as to where you want your notification toggles to appear, EOS includes another, much more unique feature in its notification shade. Instead of having the TouchWiz-like feature that allows you to adjust the brightness by gliding your finger across the top of the screen (which never really works well), EOS lets you swipe across gesture in the notification shade to bring up both brightness and sound bars right where the date, time, and settings button are. This is one feature I especially liked about this ROM.

One problem with the EOS notification shade is that it is often rather quick to automatically close once it has been opened. This didn't happen every time I expanded the notification shade, but when it did it would get annoying.

Copious Customization

As we are all aware, customization is one of the great selling points of Android for all users, and some of us power users want to customize "all the things" to the extent that the ROM allows. Team EOS lets you do that with extensive notification bar and navigation bar customizations. For example, if you wanted to colorize your tablet for the holidays, you could make your navigation bar bright green and pair that with a red notification bar. One thing I would like to see is a functional transparency alpha setting for the two bars. While the control is there, I could never get it to work.

Like many ROMs, EOS gives you the option to customize the icons in the notification bar. You can toggle the battery indicator to show an icon or a percent symbol, and you can change the color. You can also change the color of the clock, show a small or normal AM/PM, or get rid of the clock altogether.

EOS houses all of their settings inside of the settings menu, as expected, but they also give you the option to open the settings from the app drawer by clicking the EOS Interface app.




Upsized UI

Is the 7-inch tablet UI of the Nexus 7 not your style? Have no fear, because with this ROM, you can "upsize" it to the 10-inch tablet UI. I like to change up the look of my Nexus 7 sometimes, and Team EOS conveniently lets you invoke 10-inch tablet mode with a simple UI reboot rather than having to reboot the whole device.

You can also add 3 custom targets to your quick launch swipe ring. While many of you will no doubt find this useful, I found it a bit awkward to have to swipe on an angle. It also would lag sometimes, and taking screenshots by using the quick launch targets was flawed because the circle and icon would still be visible in the screenshot.

If the navigation bar is too large for your taste, you can choose to toggle the low profile navigation bar, which makes it about half height. I actually just found this feature this morning when I started to write this up, and I wish I had seen it earlier because I really like having a shorter navigation bar.

Team EOS also adds a couple useful features into the recent apps view. You can set it to display a RAM indication bar so that you know how much of your RAM is being taken up by your apps, and you can also get a kill all button, as in AOKP.



Premium Performance

Team EOS' ROM includes a system menu where you can set performance preferences for your kernel, among other useful controls. One option that I enjoyed was the ability to reorder the volume keys when in landscape mode. Normally the volume rocker increases volume when rocked to the left and decreases when rocked to the right while the tablet is held in landscape mode, which is counter-intuitive to me, as it likely is to many of you. Team EOS, however, allows you to reverse this order when in landscape mode, which I find rather useful. It takes some getting used to, but I find to be more intuitive. You can also change the default volume control to either media or notifications.

The system menu also lets you set the minimum and maximum clock speeds for your processor, as well as which governor to use. I don't usually mess around with these too much because I am content with how my Nexus 7 runs, but some like to crank as much power out of their devices as possible.

The battery life with this ROM was acceptable, though not outstanding. The best battery I've ever gotten on my Nexus 7 was when it was stock. I would charge it once every couple of days and use it heavily. With this ROM, I was often looking for the charger whenever I used it for an extended period of time. There was no significant drop in battery percentage available while on standby, but the battery seemed to drain rather quickly under active use.

Final Thoughts

I like what Team EOS has done with this ROM, and I am sure they will continue to do great things. However, it is not my cup of tea. I'm not entirely sure what exactly I didn't like, but it just wasn't what I wanted. It gives the user many options and most work pretty well. If you're the type of Android user who flashes everything that comes your way, then this is another ROM to add to your list; even though it wasn't a great fit for me, it might be something that fits your digital lifestyle. If you have tried it, let us know about your experience in the comments below.