So this weekend I decided to look at CyanogenMod, the replacement Android operating system for smartphones. I had tried installing it a couple phones ago, which would have been at least 3 or 4 years back, but now it's definitely improved, at least in ease of installation.
So this week I'll be trying out the system on my Samsung Galaxy S4 and seeing if it's something that I would consider using after this trial period. My impressions so far:
Good points:
- Extremely easy to install. Just point your phone browser to http://get.cm/ and follow the instructions.
- Offers root access out of the box, so you can install BusyBox and all the other Linux utilities you want to run on your phone.
- No bloatware, obviously.
Bad points:
- Doesn't appear to be fully multitasking; I've had several instances where two programs were running and the phone just locks up for about 15 seconds.
- The screen is glitchy in Feedly, and also when pulling down the standard notification bar. Not sure if this is a by-product of my using Nova Launcher, but I doubt it.
- The Samsung keyboard is just miles better than the stock Android or Google keyboards.
- Same for the Samsung video player. I've tried VLC, and that appears to work on most video, but some things it just won't play, which played fine on stock Samsung OS.
- Google Play store sometimes has trouble when downloading items. It will simply never finish the installation task, and then you have to kill the process to get it out of the loop.
- No way to edit the system font in stock CM! You have to download a helper program to get that installed.
- No sign of an Android 5.1 (Lollipop) update yet, though they do have a distinct advantage over Samsung in that their developers are actually talking about the upgrades and making early builds available for the adventurous (and if you're a CyanogenMod user already, you've definitely got an adventurous streak).
More bad points than good, but I need to figure out which of these points matters most to me. So I will have to continue to test and see if I can adapt to the new OS.