14 DAY TRIAL // Soon after the release of Ice Cream Sandwich’s source code, CyanogenMod, one of the most popular modders out there, announced plans to come out with a new flavor of its custom ROM for Android devices, and it seems that things are moving forth nicely.
In a recent post, he notes that they already managed to get the new CyanogenMod 9 (CM9) up and running on a series of devices, but that there is still a lot of work to be done.
“Google did a great job with ICS and added some really awesome features which in some cases replace or deprecate functionality that we had in CM7, so we are reevaluating all of our customizations,” the blog post explains.
The team is currently working on having CM9 loaded on a large number of devices, though it seems that not all those who were previously supported will get a taste of the new ROM.
“The first devices (besides the Nexus S, which you can already get from Koush’s section on ROM Manager) that we’ll have ready will mostly likely be devices based on OMAP4, MSM8660/7X30, and Exynos,” CyanogenMod explains.
“We also have some Tegra2 tablets in the pipeline such as the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Asus Transformer. Our goal is to provide continued support to all CM7 devices back to the QSD8250 series of devices such as the Nexus One.”
He also notes that the team is dropping support for the original Motorola DROID handset.
Due to a series of major changes that Google brought to the Android framework in Ice Cream Sandwich, compatibility with older proprietary camera and graphics drivers is broken.
While this results in better performance on Android 4.0 devices, it also means that the CM team will have to come up with its own drivers to make sure that things work as they should.
The team also has news for those who like to build CM from source on their own, mainly aimed at the spin-up time when starting a CM7 build, which is very long at the time.
“Koush and Arcee have put together a solution to this problem that adds new devices on-demand to your local repository, saving on both bandwidth and the long startup time,” CyanogenMod notes.
“Some other great enhancements are coming too, like a completely overhauled music app, a new file manager, and a new launcher based on stock 4.0.”
Nexus S owners can already get a taste of the new CM9 code, yet others will have to wait a bit longer before that happens. Unfortunately, no specific details on the general availability of CM9 have been unveiled.