Custom Kernel for the HTC One Brings a Touch of Normality to its Button Layout

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Despite being an almost sickeningly desirable, ultra-specced, and feature laden beast of a device—so desirable in fact that this self confessed Samsung fanboy considered making it his next device—the HTC One isn’t without it’s little quirks. These are quirks that may just be enough to sway somebody from choosing it over a competitor. One of these is the somewhat baffling decision by HTC to offer only two capacitive buttons and opt for an on screen software menu button in the absence of the commonly seen, yet commonly missing, Android action bar overflow. This can result in an unfortunate amount of screen space being wasted in certain applications.

That however, is now avoidable thanks to a mod known as HTCLogoMenu, which has been incorporated into a custom kernel for the device by XDA Senior Member tbalden. The mod actually enables the HTC logo between the two capacitive buttons to act as a menu key and offer the user a much more familiar and intuitive hard key setup. The logo can also be assigned to other functions such as waking the device if that is something that you would prefer or even a combination of the two functions, all of which are selectable via the kernels AROMA installer.

This is well worth looking into if you’re finding yourself unable to adapt to the stock configuration of the device. You can find more in the original thread.