More as an experiment than anything, I decided to play with CyanogenMod on my old Galaxy Nexus phone.

Recently the "KitKat" v4.4 release of Android was announced. As part of that announcement, the retirement of my Nexus phone was announced; it's two years old, and two newer Nexus devices have been released since, and that seems to be enough to let it age-out.

The folk at CyanogenMod (and others) take care of people with "old" or "underpowered" devices by working to continue to provide the updates to the software for those older devices. They take the source and carrier-provided (or other) binaries, and in some cases reverse engineer, and construct compatible installable distributions. Then they provide pretty good instructions for putting these software distributions on our devices.

I got the boot-loader working right away, but evidently there was something wrong with the first download I tried to install. After re-downloading the file and trying again, it worked like a charm. I also added the Google Apps, giving me the Play store, GMail, and some of the other things not included in the open-source project.

It's pretty slick. There are a few different configuration settings, and the desktop clock widget is different, and there aren't a ton of extra apps installed. There are some, like the Apollo music app and a terminal app, that I probably would not have added by default, especially since there are options on the Play store, but I don't know the details of what might happen if they're disabled or uninstalled. Still, the screen-and-a-half of default apps is better than the four screens the GS4 has, many/most of which I haven't found a way to uninstall or disable!

I'm not sure if I'm ready to dump the installation on my GS4 for CyanogenMod (or another), but the lack of bloated app install is enough to make me consider it.

Another thing that just rocks my world...the home screen rotates with the phone! It seems like such a dumb little thing. I know the OS can do it; my original Droid phone had a slide-out keyboard that would kick the home screen into rotating (the only time it would). CyanogenMod made it an option to allow it to rotate with the phone's sensor.

I've replaced the Nexus as my primary device; its SIM is no longer valid on my carrier. The old Nexus now works as a data device; I've turned on Airplane mode (turning off the cellular access) and then turned on the WiFi. Now it works as a WiFi-only device. I'll play with it a bit and see how the changes go. I might even try other Android alterantives and see if there's big differences (like default apps) that might drive me one way or another.

Oh, and after all of that, the real kicker for trying CyanogenMod--they've already got a KitKat-based build going. It's still under development, released as "unstable nigtlies," but it's available, and it appears that there are some who are using it and it works for them. There's a build for my Nexus phone, so maybe I'll give that a whirl, too.