CyanogenMod - I miss you.

I've had my Samsung Galaxy S2 for a month now, it replaced my beloved HTC Magic as my daily phone. I am suffering buyers remorse.

When I first saw the HTC Magic available in the UK I decided it was the android device I had to have, I told my dad about the phone and Android, he managed to get one before I did. When I took deliver of mine, three of my friends were so impressed the ordered the exact same device. All well and good. Then came CyanogenMod, a replacement Android build which can be flashed (installed) to many devices (current devices list).

Cyanogen kicked my phone up a notch, it was faster than the Android build Vodafone (boo!) had installed, it didn't have any bundled apps which couldn't be removed (spunkware), I could tweak more settings, use features which the Vodafone build would never support (USB tethering, apps2sd etc).

Over the years the device naturally started to show it's age. My friends who had also bought an HTC Magic moved on to other devices (mostly the Galaxy S2). In November 2011 I was close to buying a replacement, Cyanogen had stopped supporting the old war horse, then I found Ginger Yoshi 1.5. Installing this gave my HTC Magic another, albeit not as hard, kick of life.  At this point my friends fancy Galaxy S2s were rocking Android 2.3.3, my trusty HTC Magic was running 2.3.5. 

Ginger Yoshi 1.5 - Squeezing as much into the HTC Magic as possible

For a while I struggled on, last month I took delivery of my Samsung Galaxy S2. As a long time user of 'after market' firmwares I'm less than impressed with the software. The hardware is great, don't get me wrong, O2 (my provider) have installed a lot of spunkware, ditto Samsung.

I'm currently holding off resolving the software stupidity until CyanogenMod 9 is released. I urge you to investigate CyanogenMod as an alternative to the Android build (and software) supplied by your vendor. It's cost free, though donations do go to a fund the ongoing development.

I still use the HTC Magic occasionally when the Samsung UI pissed me off.

I leave you with "The telephone call" From Electric Cafe by Kraftwerk