One of the world's fastest smart phones, the HTC EVO can be overclocked so it can go 30 per cent faster. Wired has been reporting how the HTC Evo’s 1-GHz processor has been overclocked by an Android developer at the xda-developers forum to run at 1.267 GHz.
Michael Huang, who posted the hack under the nickname ‘coolbho3000?, says he’ll try and push the processor to do even more. He told Wired that it required a bit of work on the kernel that ran the phone to overclock it so it is not for the faint hearted.
The Evo, available exclusively on Sprint, has a huge 4.3-inch touchscreen, a 1-GHz Snapdragon processor, a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video conferencing and a 8-megapixel camera for shooting photos and videos. It costs $200 with a two-year contract so this is not for the faint of heart.
Huang tried to overclock the Google Nexus One, which has the same 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor as the HTC, but that hack pushed the speed of the processor to only about 1.1 GHz and was not worth the effort.
The hack involves using a rooted phone. You get an update.zip file to apply to that phone. Huang packaged the special overclocked kernel into the file using an Android app called SetCPU available in the Android Market to adjust the overclock.
The downside is that the sensors and camera on the phone do not currently work with the hack and the phone’s battery life also suffers.