Since I'm not going to use the blackstone as a phone, I can say that I'll be sticking with the ROM.
I had the chance to play with it for a while, and yes, it has its bugs, but it also amazed me. The ROM is pretty fluent even on this aging hardware, and you can run most apps (apart from games). I was surprised that it ran TuneIn Radio without stuttering (though the UI often freezed, the music played back without issues).
What I've tested and doesn't work:
* battery reporting is flaky at best. The battery gauge can jump up and down without apparent reason, and the phone can power off even when the gauge shows it still has 50%. So, battery reporting is unreliable. In terms of battery life - in airplane mode it can go for a day without issues (mostly sleeping). Anyway, battery is not important, since I'll be using it tethered to the power adapter
* SD Card is corrupted often. I'm not sure what causes it, but I seem to get frequent corruption on my SD card. Maybe because of the frequent reboots I perform. A fsck/scandisk should clear away the problems anyway.
* front camera doesn't work (I was planning on using it)
* Video playback doesn't work. I've tested quite a few video players - mxplayer, bsplayer, qqplayer, mobo video player, gallery, quickpic. The symptoms are as follows: the video starts to play, but only displays a black frame and audio can be heard in the background. I've managed to get image with qqplayer, but I have only about 1fps and audio gets out of sync with video. Can be barely useful for low-animation cartoons...
* frequent hangs in sleep mode. The phone would sometimes not turn on after sleep. Need to pull battery to restart it.
* play store works only with a SD card plugged in (the play store needs to cache some files to the SD card)
* time drifts pretty quickly (30m/day) if not connected to a data network.
What works:
* Successfuly installed Tasker, Titanium Backup, Rocket Player, TuneIn Radio, ES File Explorer and Elixir widgets. I have about 90-70MB of free RAM (out of 134M) on startup. You'll need a task killer to free up RAM, otherwise you'll get a lot of "Out of memory errors". Also, removing some apps from startup increased the available RAM.
Troubleshooting: if you get problems, apps force-closing, etc, it really helps to have a logcat running through ADB. That's how I managed to solve my playstore issues and other crashes. For me playstore only worked immediately after first install and I lost it after first reboot. I installed some apps without rebooting first, and "it stuck" ever since.
Regarding the video playback problems, I suppose most players don't work (even with arm v6 codecs) because 3d acceleration is disabled in the ROM. Once that would work, I expect it could be used as a low-end video player (for 360p content anyway).
I do hope that fagyi will return to this ROM and iron out the final bugs, but since the hardware is old, I'm not holding my breath... Unfortunately I have no kernel development knowledge, so I can't poke around, but who knows what the future will bring?
All in all I think this is a good ROM if you're planning on giving the device a dedicated purpose (I plan on using it as a baby monitor camera - snapping pictures every 5 minutes and uploading them via Wifi to my NAS - it can be easily done through tasker. Also, another purpose can be an online radio player through tunein for the kitchen... or mp3 player). It will give a new life for your old hardware and allow you to use some Android apps that you couldn't use on Windows Mobile.
Things I still need to sort out:
* testing some more video playback methods for mp4 media
* finding a program to remap my keys - specifically to wake the device up with a volume key instead of the power button (since my power button is pretty hard to press)
* finding a way to keep the device always on while on power (I'm guessing it can be done through Development options - need to check it out).
* since the front camera doesn't work, need to find a way to snap pictures with the back camera to monitor a room and have the front part still user accesible (a mirror perhaps?)
Many thanks to fagyi for developing this ROM (otherwise the blackstone would have ended up in a drawer) and to chan.sk for his help (without whom the blackstone would have ended in the garbage bin). :good: