CyanogenMod 9 (ICS) for Nexus S | Hacker News Reader

CyanogenMod 9 (ICS) for Nexus S

extremetech.com

51 pointsDigiHound25 comments

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.

I was running the non-CM (Kwiboo?) build on my Nexus S, too -- but this build is even smoother. It really is quite impressive.

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

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

are you from the future?

18-month-old bleeding edge phone of that time running current firmware offering should be the expected norm, not something to be amazed of..

Looks like he is amazed at the performance improvements, not the just fact that it works.

I tried http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1364221 on my Nexus S 4G.

I'm finding it very slow compared to CM7, though this may just be a bad rom. The UI is a lot better in some apps (gmail, gallery, calendar), though I find in other places it is worse (new task switcher, still find that 2 column market is silly on a small screen, dislike large contact photos on favorites (see less at a time), don't like the swipe randomly to see url bar in browser. Love new widget previews, but wish it was accessible by long press on home screen still. Keyboard and text selection is far better (accurate).

Not sure how much I like installed apps auto adding to my home screen. Makes it a mess on initial setup.

And what the hell happened to text reflow in the browser? I can't even read HN anymore.

The killer is the slowness though. If the real thing for Nexus S is as slow as this ROM, I'm very disappointed.

Panorama is damn cool though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Do you have plans to attempt an ICS build for the Nexus One?

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.

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.

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.

For others who are curios: ICS is compiled for ARMv7, while the Blade is ARMv6. That's not a huge issue, though, now that the source has been released. It's already been re-compiled for ARMv6¹ and alpha ports with lots of things broken are up and running². So the effort to port it is well under way, although I wouldn't go as far as saying that a usable port is a certainty.

¹ http://android.modaco.com/topic/348898-ics-compiled-for-zte-... ² http://youtu.be/JDmcdPUVnbc http://youtu.be/kt8ZZLincUY

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.

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

I wish CyanogenMod supported the Droid X2 :(

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.

Thanks for the info. At this point I'm fairly certain I won't be getting another Android phone. It's very frustrating that I have no idea if Motorola intends to update the X2 to ICS and that I have no easy way of doing it myself.

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.

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