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.