Earlier this week, Paranoid Android showed off an awesome new feature for their custom ROM. It was called Halo. Well today, the team was nice enough to give us a test build of the custom ROM with the new features. Now before we move on, it’s important for us to note that this is a preview build and that the team still has some work to do on the build. And you know you don’t ask for ETA’s on custom ROMs, but I’m sure it’ll be out soon. As always, we’ll be sure to let you know when it’s available. And, before you ask, we cannot share the build with you.
To turn on Halo, you’ll notice there’s a new icon in your notification drawer. It’s shown above, but looks like a blue ring with a chat box coming out of it. Just tap that to turn them on or off. Right now, not everything is working, but it can mostly only get incoming notifications. In the video, below, I was able to get a notification from Twitter and in the screenshots through out this post I was able to get text messages in the halo.
Video is processing, should be up soon!
PA has also added their multi-windowing feature to this build which so far is working great, at least for me. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what else the team does with these two new features they’ve introduced. Hopefully Android 4.3 doesn’t make them have to start all over again.
Like we said, this is still a work in progress, and some things are broken. It’s also not completely functional yet. PA says it’s just a simple ticker, which it actually is. We’ll be taking a deeper look once it’s a bit more stable and everything is working. We may even do another Paranoid Android review. But Halo is like Chat Heads on steroids, and I can see it being very functional if we give the devs more time on it. I can’t wait to see how great it’ll be when it releases.
