Samsung Galaxy S2 – CM9

If you have been around the android community for a while, you most likely will have heard of CM or Cyanogen (Mod).

CyanogenMod is an aftermarket firmware for a number of cell phones based on the open-source Android operating system. It offers features not found in the official Android based firmwares of vendors of these cell phones. (more here) Currently CM officially support 55 devices, with more being added all the time. CM9 is the Ice Cream Sandwich iteration of CM

The benefit of using the CM roms is all the manufacturers ‘bloat ware’ is removed, think of it as a stripped back, faster version of android, the kind installed on the Nexus range of Google phones.

The problem with developing these roms for so many different devices requires a lot of coding, often without the correct driver etc., as a result, sometimes things don’t work quite how they should.

The Galaxy S2 was suffering from this…video recording didn’t work, video playback was hit and miss, GPS would only report 2 satelites to name but a few problems!

However, thanks to the hard work of teamHACKSUNG, recently, things are looking up.

1080p recording – check
Video playback with open source codecs – check
GPS satelites – check
 

There are still a couple of things missing, FM radio for example, but I have never used FM radio on any of my phones…and MTP file transfer is a little flaky.

If you consider yourself an ‘advanced’ android user, and fancy some more information, take a trip over to the thread on XDA-Developers

Neither I, or coolsmartphone.com will be held responsible for problems you may have with your phone as a result of installing any CM rom , this news item is for information only.