I downloaded the latest nightly and Gapps package onto my SD card, flashed them with CWM, did a full wipe/factory reset, and rebooted. CM9 is still only available as nightly builds, which scared me a great deal, but after sifting through the XDA forums it became clear to me that for all intents and purposes, the only thing not working was video recording (due to missing kernel sources). There was only one way to get there: CyanogenMod 9. All that beautiful blue ICS design that Google’s been dangling in front of my eyes was going to be mine. I mean, I won’t score a date with Heather Graham just because I’m wearing a Brad Pitt mask.įrustrated by this state of affairs, I decided to settle for nothing less but stock Ice Cream Sandwich. While some are trying very hard to make it all look like stock Ice Cream Sandwich as much as possible, they all basically just apply a blue theme to the same Gingerbread applications, and as we all know, a different theme colour does not a new interface make. So, I decided to try out the countless modified versions of the stock ROM that have sprung up. It lacks most of the stock ICS applications, replacing them with Samsung’s own crap, and, of course, it’s a given that it comes to laden with crapware. Worse yet, it has a Frankenstein-esque user interface that combines the beautiful Ice Cream Sandwich design with old Gingerbread bits and large swathes of TouchWiz crap, leading to a very schizophrenic back and forth between different styles.
It’s not a single bit faster or more responsive than the Gingerbread ROM, which, as far as I can tell, is an achievement in and of itself. Samsung’s Ice Cream Sandwich ROM is a total and utter disaster. If you have a Galaxy SII and even have only a modicum of technical knowledge or know someone that does (it’s insanely easy), there’s honestly not a single logical reason not to move to the nightly CM9 builds. It may surprise you, but a team of open source hackers who are at a severe disadvantage compared to Samsung’s own engineers produce a far superior user experience.
When it comes to Ice Cream Sandwich on the Galaxy SII there’s two general routes you can take: Samsung’s stock ICS ROM or modified versions thereof, or the nightly CyanogenMod 9 builds. While the answer to that question became clear quite quickly, this answer also gave rise to a whole bunch of other questions. After figuring out just how insanely great and awesome ClockWorkMod Recovery is, I set about to figure out what the best Ice Cream Sandwich ROM is for the Galaxy SII. This past week and this weekend I’ve finally found the time to enter into the colorful world of custom Android ROMs.
0 kommentar(er)
