Well known for thinking outside of the box, the ParanoidAndroid team has been hard at work building ParanoidAndroid 3.0. Now, after many months, the team has started building release candidates for various devices. Builds for the Nexus devices are rolling out right now. And if you haven't seen the new PIE launcher system, prepare to be amazed.

ParanoidAndroid has been know to provide a very well made ROM with options for different UI settings. The PA customization system allows you to choose from a phone, tablet, or phablet UI for your device while at the same time selecting a DPI setting that can be unique to each app on your phone. It's a pretty cool feature combination that I have yet to see any other ROM implement to this degree.

The team also added PIE navigation to the ROM, which is a wonderful and creative launcher that replaces the navigation bar and notification shade and allows you to be in an expanded desktop mode. To activate PIE, just swipe from one of the sides and the launcher appears. It has navigation panels, notifications, and system information. The PIE is fully customizable as well, with your choice of buttons, colors, color per button, and much, much more. And if you've invested in themes, they'll still work with PIE; the button icons will change based on your installed theme.

ParanoidAndroid has also made some other changes specific to the Mako (Nexus 4) in an attempt to address some of the constant complaints about the IPS screen's lack of depth. Rather than going all-in with calibrated color settings, ParanoidAndroid combines two of the most common attempts to improve the viewing quality (the aforementioned RGB adjustments and modified gamma settings).

If you have been following ParanoidAndroid for a while, here is what they have changed since 2.99:

• Pie panels are centered and glide right under your thumb, don't stretch in landscape
  
• New pie default colors (holo) for disabled per-app-color
  
• Screenshot option
  
• New statusbar icons (dont look "washed out" anymore
  
• New bootanimation
  
• Unlockpattern cut off is gone
  
• IME is themable
  
• MMS black on black fix
  
• Pie without search agent should be fixed
  
• PAPrefs has been polished for easier use (still much to do)
  
• PAC support for bluetooth icon
  
• (Mako) Perfect kernel calibration, made one extra for PA
  
• (Mako) Autobrightness is adjusted for it
  
• (Mako) Fart vibration for on-touch is gone
  
• Tons of optimizations under the hood

If you haven't tried ParanoidAndroid, now is the perfect time. I tried the ROM last week on my Nexus 7, but due to a couple of bugs, I decided now wasn't the time. With these release candidates, however, I may find myself doing the old flashing game pretty soon. The team has said that more devices will be getting builds soon. Let us know what your thoughts are on the ROM!

GSM Galaxy Nexus
Nexus 4