CyanogenMod 7 on the Galaxy S I9000

Over the last month I have been going back and forth between the CyanogenMod 7 custom ROM and the stock Samsung ROM.  I get full of enthusiasm towards a ROM that promises fast speeds and wonderful customisations only to be bitterly disappointed.

The first time installing CM7 onto my phone I was completely confused as everything looked and felt different.  So I rolled back to the stock ROM.  Sometime later I had another attempt at installing CM7.  I was able to understand more about CM7 and what things were called.  I was reasonably impressed, until I went to take a photo.  The Camera application in CM7 is very basic and has none of the features that the Samsung camera does.  So I rolled back once again.

So I used the Samsung stock ROM for some time until I decided I had to install CM7 once again. So I did.  Everything was great.  Things worked really fast, I understood the camera was not going to function as the Samsung version but I wanted speed and full customisation of the user interface.

I was happy for about 12 hours until I tried to play some videos.  The videos froze and force closure windows appeared.  I tried downloading different players but nothing succeeded. I’m heading to New Zealand soon and I need some entertainment during the flight and not been able to watch some movies or TV shows that I have downloaded was just not going to sit very well with me.

So I rolled back to the stock ROM and here I am going to stay, no matter what; having said that I may try it again once the product has matured.  CM7 has released RC1 so I think I’ll wait until it has release the final product to market.

The major problems I see with CM7 are:

• Limited camera functionality
• No video calls
• Unable to play common video formats.
• SMS conversation views are not very nice and I found hard to view

The last version of CM7 that I tried was build 76, 2011-08-03

What I don’t understand is how custom ROM’s like CM7 and others can make the phone operate very responsively but the companies that release their phones can’t or won’t.