Most of you should might have heard about Cyanogen Inc. and their Android custom rom CyanogenMod (CM). Earlier this year Cyanogen partnered with a new Chinese Phone Manufacturer named OnePlus to bring "OnePlus One" Android phone to the market. OnePlus One came pre-loaded with a custom-built firmware from Cyanogen called CM11S. New features and apps remained exclusive to OnePlus One phones until now. XDA member ScardracS has ported CM 11S rom to Samsung Galaxy Nexus (maguro) for many users to try out.
I have been using this rom for over a day now. The phone is running smoothly and I haven't experienced any lag so far. The phone boots up quicker than on any other custom roms.
The CM launcher looks similar to the AOSP launcher but has a few more customization options. The launcher performs well and you won't experience any lag when you have lots of apps. It can certainly replace the Google Now Launcher.
The extra set of apps that come with CM 11S are Apollo, AudioFX, CM Camera, CM GalleryAOSP messaging app, CM File Manager, Screencast and Themes showcase.
AudioFX is a well designed equaliser app that has few good options. Unless you are an audiophile the functionality AudioFX provides will be sufficient for you.
The lockscreen looks a little bit different from the ones you have seen before. The upper part of the lockscreen is for the music widget and the lower part is for showing time,date, battery % and weather information. Swiping in from the right lets you quickly access the camera. When you play some music in Apollo, Play Music or any other apps, the upper part of the lockscreen shows the song title, artist, album art and the music controls. The lower part of the lockscreen shows a cool equalizer animation.
The new camera app by Cyanogen Inc, CameraNext, is an intuitive app that is easy to use and very user friendly when switching from one profile to another. There are a multitude of scene settings: auto, HDR, Smart scene, Beauty mode, slow shutter, Action, Backlight, Beach, Candlelight, Fireworks, Flowers, Landscape, Night, Night Portrait, Party, Portrait, Snow, Sports, Steady Photo, Sunset, Theatre, Mono, Sepia, Negative, Solarize, Posterize, Aqua, Emboss, Sketch, and Neon.
CM Gallery app shows a preview of your albums in bigger thumbnails which look great. It has a Moments option where your photos are grouped in albums according to the date taken.
Next up is the Themes. There is an option to apply an entire theme pack which can include the style, wallpapers, lock wallpapers, fonts, icons, boot animation, ringtones, notifications and alarms. Cyanogen Inc and OnePlus have included a stock standard AOSP Halo theme as well as their own theme, Hexo. To help users find new themes, it included a Themes Showcase app where users can browse themes and purchase any they wish to.
Other usual customization options for Status bar, Notification drawer, navigation buttons, animations, color calibration and many more are also available.
Torch app and a sound recorder apps are good too. Sound recorder app also lets you to choose the file type before recording.
Screencast, a screen recording app doesnot work well. It can also record the audio from the microphone. Unfortunately i couldnot record for more than 20 seconds. If you record for more than 20 seconds then you will not be able to stop the recording and you have to force close the app.
CM File Manager is a clean, basic file manager that gets the job done. It can also show the system partition if the option is selected from its settings.
This rom comes with Fancy Kernel which prolongs the battery life and minimize the battery drain during sleep. I had 64% battery left when i slept last night and when i woke up 8 hours later it had 63% battery left which is freakin awesome.
Download CM11S Rom :
Ext4
F2FS
Download Gapps :
CyanogenMod Gapps
CyanogenMod Gapps from Torrent
Banks Gapps
I am using Ext4 version of this ROM and CyanogenMod Gapps. You can use any version of ROM and the Gapps. Flash the ROM and Gapps, play with it for a while and let me know your thoughts on performance, battery life and bugs if you find any.
Stay High on Android. Peace !!!
Good Review!
ReplyDeleteNow this needs to come to my ta B2. Devs Hear me out!