Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe at pocketnow.com now Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich hasn't been available for that long in fact it's been available in the AOSP that Android open source project for even shorter than that now the AOSP for those of you who don't know or those who want a reminder is the open source repository of where people developers you know you or me can go out and grab a copy of the source code of Android and cook on her own rom for whatever device we want we can put in our own bells and whistles and features take anything out that we don't want really kind of a cool idea one of the biggest rom makers out there is CyanogenMod now the CyanogenMod team puts together all kinds of different roms for all kinds of different hardware but the one that they don't have yet is Ice Cream Sandwich in a tweet from cyanogen himself he said that they had the code they were starting work and to check back in a couple months well it hasn't been a couple months yet but I'm interested to see what their progress is I think you would be too let's go take a look this is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus specifically the GSM variety which right now is running Android version 4.0 point 1 well for everybody else some people have gotten a four point zero point two update but that's about it 4:03 is available but the update for the Nexus X was pulled while Google works on some things with battery life and and whatnot so right now on this device I'm running android 4.0.3 and CyanogenMod 9 a very very early pre-release now a couple things to note officially the Galaxy Nexus is not a supported device not yet anyway it probably will be in fact it'll probably be the first device once cm9 is released but for now we just have someone in this case gyro skank what kind of a name is that who's put together a custom rom based on that and it's essentially just something that he compiled for the Galaxy Nexus now let's go ahead and take a look first of all you're gonna notice it looks just like everything else that you've seen before same launcher same everything it looks like what you'd expect same widget behavior same app behavior it's just the same thing you'll notice it a little bit of the lag that some of you mentioned before is gone now I run a widget heavy 5 screen device so that explains a little bit of the the delay that some of you have mentioned in previous videos but most of that is gone here it also folder heavy as well but let's go ahead and take a look we showed you the launch already now this launcher is not the stock launch or even though it looks like it it's based on the stock launcher but it's not let's go ahead and look at some settings if we come in here the first thing that you're gonna notice is I've got my really cool little quick power menu up here where I can turn on and off Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS and sound that's not there on stock Android it's something that the CyanogenMod team is cooked in let's go into settings open that up now everything here looks pretty much the same let's check down here really fast so you can see this is in fact Android 4.0.3 and we are running three points 0.8 CyanogenMod as our colonel our mod version is nine point zero point zero RC zero g and king all kinds of fun their build number for those of you who want to know is IML 74 k so go back really quick and look at some stuff that isn't the same so like I said everything else in here pretty much the same until we get into this let's go into trebuchet first and foremost trebuchet is CyanogenMod custom launcher it lets you do a bunch of stuff that you can't do in the regular launcher so kind of cool copyright to 2012 which is kind of cool because it was written in the future apparently but that was the launcher that we're running and it's also the launcher that's gonna come stock with cyanogen mod 9 go into homescreen here and we can set all kinds of cool things home screens how many do you want do you want one do you want seven I'm kind of happy with the stock 5 so we'll leave it there if you use less home screens set it to a lower number if you use more set it to a higher number you have that flexibility with the trebuchet launcher we'll cancel that now as a side note trebuchet is not available in the market you must have Android 4.0.3 to run it at least in the current iteration based on the research I've done so if you want to head to the market and just download and install this can't do that just yet maybe in the future but not just yet default home screen now since you can have lots of home screens which one do you want to be the home screen the default one that it goes back to when you hit the home button well you can set that from 1 to 5 because I've only got 5 right now you could go further up to 7 if you had 7 screens but right there in the middle is where I like it that way I have an equal number on both sides search bar you can get rid of that persistent search bar with just a checkbox very simple very nice you can resize any widget this is a carry over from older CyanogenMod which are really kind of cool you can resize any widget if you've got a widget that's taking up too much space it's taking up say 4 by 1 and it really only needs 3 by 1 now you can do that simply by enabling that it is turned off by default but head here check that you're done scroll wallpaper you can either scroll the wallpaper when scrolling home screens or not if you turn that off you're going to get a little bit better performance but you're not going to be able to have as much of a wide screen experience for your wallpapers some people like that some people don't it's up to you and now you can change that right there in the home treated settings for trebuchet the page indicator you can turn that on or off and you can have it fade out when you don't need it I'll go back and show you that in just a minute let's go back to some more settings the drawer has essentially the same types of settings regarding the the page indicator so you can know how many pages you have to look at and where you are in relation to the other pages you can also join the widgets with the apps which is the stock behavior of the default watcher where once you get to the end of your apps just swiping over to the left will give you your widgets and vice versa let's go and look at the dock dock does nothing yet icons does nothing yet and general you can tell it to auto rotate the screen so not an awful lot and go ahead and look at the copyright which does nothing yet so still very obviously a work in progress things that have not been wired up or are not complete yet but its progress and there's still a lot of cool stuff that you can do up here with the home screen and the drawer let's go back now out of the launcher and again it's called trebuchet and into the CyanogenMod settings open that up and the first thing that you're going to notice is this is restyled to look very Ice Cream Sandwich like complete with the tabs across the top that you can swipe between now you're going to notice here I've got a zero on application I'm going to have application settings in here eventually they don't have anything wired up yet but there's a placeholder there for you over on display we can tweak the automatic backlight I've got that set to on to help kind of level out the the backlighting based on the ambient light sensor you can go in and make custom changes to that and just really optimize that to however you want it I go with the default light enable it and then I hit this allow light decrease and that does everything that I need and I like it and it's great you might want something different and that's entirely up to you over on input another placeholder interface we can turn on and off the notification tower widget that's this guy up here very simply the lock screen no settings yet performance no settings yet sound system tablet no settings yet so that's that's pretty much where we are so it looks like there's not an awful lot done but let's look at what well let's look at one more thing first we're talking about one more thing recently on pocketnow.com we've told you about the new music app and I'll come over here to show you just there's music this is the market music app which is not to be confused with the Android music app they're both made by Google but this one lets you connect to Google music in the cloud and listen to your cloud music lets you do a lot of that kind of stuff the Android music app doesn't let you do that there's no public API out there yet for developers to hook into to enable third-party music players to do it but it's still that amber a music app that comes on all the devices that well it really hasn't been great in fact it's been one of my biggest complaints about Android is there's no good music app CyanogenMod is changing that they've taken the stock Android music app and they've added a whole bunch of cool stuff if you missed that article head back over to pocketnow.com and read it it's really cool I'd love to show that to you but it hasn't made it into a nightly build of the the source code for CyanogenMod yet so I can't show hands on to you but just know that it's coming and it's there and it's really kind of cool and hopefully Google will open up an API so that people can listen to their Google music from the cloud in their Android music player on their Android that's just kind of a hope so there we go now I told you that I was going to show you the the paging you can see down here at the bottom I've got this little bar separating my icons from my tray and you can see the little screen indicator here on the bottom that is just a nice Ice Cream Sandwich blue that fades in and then fades out so I know where I am so really kind of nice you know bike it quite a bit if you don't like it turn it off you've got that capability now so back to what I was saying I've just shown you everything that's not available in CyanogenMod yet or what's kind of stubbed out with placeholders and there's an awful lot that's not there what is there well this is my daily driver which is unusual for a pre-release non-official not even a nightly build it's just amazing this has speed in fact running quadrant this benchmarks about 1700 1750 which is about 200 points faster than stock so it's a faster rom second it's a little bit smoother of course it's Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.3 so I've got some newer things for example if you look at my talk icon down here you'll notice it's a little bit different it's square there's a little bit of different tweaks to the Google Apps or the gaps as they're sometimes called Bluetooth works Wi-Fi works HSPA+ works the screen works streaming works sound works the phone works everything on this that I have been able to check works which is unusual like I was saying for a pre-release not ready not fully cooked ROM most of the time you're going to have stuff that doesn't you know your GPS which does work by the way might not work or Bluetooth might not or maybe even the phone which is really kind of frustrating for people who want to try out these these new roms but not everything is ready to go well in this one it is you can take this flash it on your device and should be thoroughly pleased with it except for the stuff that's not done yet like I was mentioning this is my daily driver I am happy and running this very early release of CyanogenMod 9 even though it's not officially supported or not even an official build for it I love it it's great and I think you will too if you want to get this on your phone you're going to need to om unlock your device you're going to need to root your device install a custom recovery ROM wipe everything by the way when you om unlock that'll wipe your whole device just FYI you're warned go ahead and wipe and then flash this rom and that's pretty much it you're done you do need to get the google apps the gapps package as well it does not come with the rom which is traditional for CyanogenMod roms so just keep that in mind all those links are going to be available over at pocketnow.com and the article associated with this first look at CyanogenMod 9 for the google nexus or the Galaxy Nexus rather so if you want to see how to do that head on over there if you like seeing this kind of stuff and give the video a big thumbs up so you and all of your friends know about that if you have any comments or questions leave those down at the bottom and of course make sure you subscribe to our video channel so you don't miss out on cool stuff like this in the future and of course the progress of CyanogenMod as it gets closer and closer to release for pocket now showing off CyanogenMod 9 Ice Cream Sandwich for the Galaxy Nexus GSM I'm Jill Levi