

CyanogenMod 9 (ICS) for Nexus S - DigiHound
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/106809-cyanogenmod-9-ice-cream-sandwich-for-nexus-s

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JoelSutherland
I'm running the non-CM AOSP build of ICS on my Nexus S and frankly it's
amazing. The phone got FASTER with it.

The biggest difference seems to be that scrolling is now GPU accelerated
everywhere, which is particularly noticeable in the browser. The browser
itself also seems much faster. It's no problem to load 5/6 tabs in the
background quickly and let them render while continuing to browse in the
current tab stutter-free. It makes browsing on the phone much more like a
laptop/desktop.

This is all on 18-month-old hardware.

They've also made sure that the rest of the OS is much more polished. I still
think the widget desktop/app panel division makes the whole OS seem more
complicated than necessary, but Android has come a long way. It's finally an
iOS competitor on user experience.

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refulgentis
18 month old? I picked mine up the day it came out, in early December 2011.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_S>

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jsnell
The specs of the Nexus S don't differ significantly from the Galaxy S, which
came out half a year earlier.

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jc4p
I'm running the modified version of this on my Nexus S 4G, the modification is
based off of Koush's CM9 build which is shown in the video. Overall, it's
pretty amazing. I had to update my kernel manually to bring back BLN support
(keeping the soft-buttons turned on when I get a notification with the screen
off) but other than that everything worked right out of the box.

I am seeing large numbers of small bugs everywhere though but I'm not quite
sure if they're due to the build I'm running or they exist in AOSP's code.

For example: When playing music on Google Music, if the screen is turned off
the volume buttons control the systems ringer volume not the media volume.

Another on in the same vein: If you are playing music on Google Music and are
in the Google Music application, the volume buttons work as expected, if you
are on the home screen or any other application, the volume buttons control
the ringer volume.

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steve-howard
I broke my Nexus S 4G a few weeks ago (or, rather, it broke itself, and in the
fixing I repaired the power problem and destroyed the speaker). I'm not sure
if it's just the phone, or if Cyanogen contributed (I installed it almost
immediately upon getting the phone), but that thing had awful reception on
pretty much every kind of network, and the battery lasted less than half the
day. Kind of a let-down for a flagship Android phone. Now I just wish that
half the stuff you can do with a Nexus was available for something like the
Photon, which has fantastic reception and battery life, but no CM.

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there
i've had all kinds of stability problems with cyanogenmod on various phones,
which is why i created <http://blandroid.org/>.

though if you are getting poor reception all day, it may be making the radio
work harder to find a signal, which reduces the battery. i never used my nexus
s 4g for anything other than testing blandroid builds for it, but on my gsm
nexus s, the battery would last nearly 2 days with light usage.

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steve-howard
I would use mine for maybe two phone calls and 15 minutes playing a game and
I'd need to charge. My Photon is a workhorse, I just wish I could customize it
more without destabilizing it.

I like your project, though! The feature I miss the most from CM the
notification pane power widget, though in general it's more fun to be able to
tweak all kinds of things. I've been thinking about getting into some android
dev work (especially aiding the efforts to port CM to whatever device I'm
using at the time!), but I have no experience in reverse engineering/low-level
mobile work.

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there
_The feature I miss the most from CM the notification pane power widget_

yeah, that seems to be the most commonly asked-for feature from users of my
rom. from what i've seen in other projects, integrating it can lead to bugs,
so i've avoided merging it. also, from what i've seen in screenshots, android
4 seems to have some of that functionality integrated into the pull-down
notification window.

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bdonlan
It's not in the CM9 alpha builds at least.

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morsch
Does anyone know if I can expect a CM port for my ZTE Blade? It's a supported
platform for CM7 (Android 2.3.5). I read that all phones that support 2.3.5
ought to be able to support 3.0, but a) I'm not sure that's actually true and
b) I'm not sure if they're going to bother. Though a) is more important than
b) -- if it can work on the phone, hardware-wise, someone is bound to do the
port, even if it's not an official one.

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karolist
My uneducated guess after playing with this model - not a chance! It's super
laggy with CM7 as it is, can't imagine anyone putting the effort to port ICS.

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morsch
I've never tried anything except CM7 on this device, but supposedly it's
faster with 2.3 than it was with 2.2, which was itself faster than 2.1, the
version it originally shipped with. _If_ the hardware (GPU, primarily) support
is there, I would assume ICS would be an improvement.

But yeah, I guess it's a bit much to hope for.

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daleharvey
I cant wait to try out ICS, but seeing as an official update from google has
been said to be released (by around about now) I have been holding off, also
waiting for baited breath for cyanogenmod 9 for the galaxy tab 10.1 since
thats just gonna take ages to get an official update.

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freshrap6
Will this build run on the Nexus S 4G as well?

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jshen
I wish CyanogenMod supported the Droid X2 :(

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jc4p
All (maybe most?) Motorola devices have locked bootloaders, meaning that even
though you are rootable you can not install a custom ROM on them since the
hardware does signature verifications. There's currently a close to $1000
bounty for whoever unlocks the Droid X2 bootloader but the only way to do that
is to find a hash intersection with the key Motorola uses to sign their own
builds.

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there
just a minor nit: all phones have locked bootloaders. it's a critical feature
for securing the contents of the phone and it increases the security for the
end-user by not allowing anyone that steals the phone to read its contents or
flash a fake rom.

what you're talking about is the ability to unlock and relock the bootloader
at will. my nexus s came with a locked bootloader, but i was able to easily
unlock it, flash my own rom, and then relock it. if the phone is stolen,
someone can easily unlock the bootloader but the phone's data will be erased
in the process.

