Overclocked HTC Evo Runs Almost 30 Percent Faster

The HTC Evo’s 1-GHz processor is one of the fastest in smartphones today, but there’s always room for improvement.

An Android developer at the xda-developers forum has overclocked his Evo 4G phone to run at 1.267 GHz, nearly 30 percent faster than the standard issue. The developer Michael Huang, who posted the hack under the nickname ‘coolbho3000′, says he’ll try and push the processor to do even more.

“Right now, it’s a proof of concept,” Huang told Wired.com. “I built a version of the kernel that’s running on the phone to overclock it and found it worked fine.”

The hack is pretty technical but the idea is to let advanced Android users and programmers see the potential of the device.

HTC introduced the Evo earlier this month as the first 4G Android phone. 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.

The phone has become the bestselling device on the Sprint network and at Best Buy Mobile.

Overclocking the HTC Evo is not the first such attempt developers have made with an Android device. Earlier, Huang says he has 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.

The HTC Evo overclocking has resulted in speeds of a little more than 1.2 GHz for most users on the forum who have tried it.

But, a few words of warning for those who might attempt this at home: It isn’t a DIY project for just anyone. The files necessary to overclock the HTC Evo are posted online but you need to know what you are doing with it.

“If you have a rooted phone, you can get an update.zip file to apply to that phone,” explains Huang. “What I have done is packaged the special overclocked kernel into the file.” Huang used an Android app called SetCPU available in the Android Market to adjust the overclock.

Huang says he doesn’t have access to the full source code of the HTC Evo OS, which has limited some functions in the phone.

That means the sensors and camera on the phone do not currently work with the hack.

The overclocking also affects the phone’s battery life — despite Huang’s attempt to tweak the voltage piped to the processor.

“If you put less voltage on the processor, then the phone will use less battery, so my Evo kernel is running at a lower voltage than normal,” he says. “But because the processor is at a higher speed, the battery life is lower than usual.”

Once the overclocked device gets running, it also heats up a fair bit, say commenters on the forum.�So, try this one at your own peril.

If you don’t want to go through all that, just enjoy the video of the overclocked HTC Evo.