Continuing our Android custom ROM review series, we have the MOD from the Carbon team who mainly focus on feature-rich Android operating system simply called Carbon. The latest version, Carbon 4.3 is based on the same version number of Android main branch and includes brand new eye-catching features. Wait, the experienced user might say now. Latest dynamic automation features always have an impact on overall system performance. Let’s take a deeper look into this Droid Custom ROM from the creators of Carbon Android.

Feature-rich with top performance

The development team manages to include all latest features in their nightly builds (available for Nexus 7, Samsung Galaxy S4,..) and keep the performance as high as needed to ensure perfect user experience on Android phones. The Linux Kernel of Carbon Android is slim and capable of high performance from its host device. While other MODs like Cyanogen and Paranoid all provide their own look and feel, this ROM combines the carbonized surface with standard Android elements to create a solid looking user interface for your smartphone. Through its original roots of AOSP, this custom ROM also integrates features of other Android customization projects.

ROM Installation

First thing to do is to download the latest binary source files to your computer of directly to your phone memory. When security and personal data is top priority, always perform a system and data backup of your files. With that you can test various custom ROMs to find your favorite system. If you do not like a ROM after testing all features and design concepts, then you can simply restore a backup snapshot and all system data and configuration goes back to the point of return.

/ root / …

/ system / …

After backup of your current system data and download of the carbon files, you can start now with the main ROM installation process. The following steps will help you:

1. Backup your system, if not already done
2. Browse the app market to install ROM Manager app to your phone
3. Open the ROM manager and choose the carbon zip archive to install
4. Follow the installation setup closely and do not turn off your phone
5. Once completed, the newly installed ROM will restart and boot the system
6. Complete the initial user configuration and welcome guide
7. Adjust local settings to your personal preferences in control panel

An issue of older Android phones is their limited internal memory capacity, which often makes it necessary to format the complete system before flashing the new ROM files to memory. The size of zip files is 150 MB compressed, so please check your hardware specification whether your Android phone can sufficient disk space available.

Look & Feel

The layout and design of this ROM is pretty known by followers of Team Carbon. The user inface is straight forward to focus the many features coming with nightly builds. All screens contain basically low-light to create this darker atmosphere on the phone.

Development Process

Similar to other Android custom ROM projects, primary source of information of a project is the Google+ page. This social presentation pages provide multiple daily updates on nightly builds, deployments as well as tweaking the configuration and system.

The basis of all up-to-date ROMs is Android 4.3 latest developer version. Most of the great features make it into the main branch for rollout in next version. The team is busy fixing bugs and handling user feedback. We will let you know as soon as the official release version is available for system stability and overall performance reasons.

How do you like this custom ROM? Is Carbon perfect for you or do you prefer one of the other MODs for Android?