The saga of continually improving user firmware for the Samsung i8910 HD continues with the release a few minutes ago of the impressive HX8, rolling in, among other things, intelligent virtual keyboard/keypad rotation, portrait qwerty added, Music player now has full kinetic scrolling and is skinnable, plus more dynamic 'on the fly' interface customisation options, including changing camera codecs and browser user agents. And those are just the changes since HX7... 8-)  Links, changelogs, videos and screens below.

Here's the HyperX Custom ROMs home page and here's the blog entry announcing HX8's release, along with Andy (Hyper X)'s video. Credit goes to his whole team, of course, he'd be the first to acknowledge that he's had some help, notably from Panagiotis and Szakalit.

There was hope that the Qt libraries would also be built-in, but they turned out to be a target that's still moving too fast - Qt will have to be added via a separate SIS file etc.

Here's the specific HX7 to HX8 changelog, paraphrased from Andy:

• open to all apps from all sources 8-)
• added mini-qwerty keyboard on ALL input modes, and for ALL available languages
• added autorotate of keypad from portrait to landscape fullscreen-qwerty keyboard
• fixed Music player – now has smooth kinetic-scroll and full Theme customization
  
• New full-screen keylock/time/appointments function NB: this now proved to be very buggy, uninstall this and use the old keylock instead!
• New better, faster brighter optional Homescreen slide the icons to start the app etc.!
• Messaging-app customization with the SMS app you prefer (several threaded options)!
  
• Firmware is now fully compatible with Ovi Maps (see the 'Goodies' section), including sign-in
  
• HXPatcher now can change the BrowserID on the fly, ditto JPEG codecs
• “Orientation-mode” forces the application to use portrait/landscape or a hardware-specified setting ! Now you can listen to music without the anoying album rotate and so on…..
  

HX8 also includes, of course, the changes and improvements from previous firmwares, including:

• microphone sensitivity and kinetic scrolling customisation
• new 'tsunami' homescreen
• power consumption improvements
• optional pre-focus in HD video capture
• five times more free disk space on disk C
• PhoneTorch built-in

To support the HX firmwares, a new forum has been started. Go join in the discussion!

Disclaimers apply on all this. Don't attempt to flash your device unless you're fully confident and don't blame us (or HyperX's team) if something goes horribly wrong!!

Steve Litchfield, AAS, 7th August 2010

PS. To whet your appetite, here are some screens from HX8 in action: