The grumpy editor answers a call from CyanogenMod 7

The initial experience says that there is little need to worry; this release candidate seems to be stable indeed on the Nexus One. Your editor's careful Nandroid backup, it seems, will not be needed; there is no evident reason to go back to the older code. That said, there are reports of a "wonkiness issue" which affects phone calls in rc2; your editor has not yet seen this behavior but others certainly have. Smarter CyanogenMod users may want to wait for the official 7.0 release before updating.

Naturally, CyanogenMod 7 brings all of the enhancements that Google put into the Gingerbread release. The new color scheme is nice - though some applications (WeatherBug, for example) have not yet caught up to a world where writing black text into the (now black) notification bar fails to yield the desired results. The improved on-screen keyboard is most welcome; it seems easier to avoid typing mistakes and the number of needed mode-shifts is reduced. Most welcome are the ability to apply the spelling corrector anywhere in a message and a comma key which does not require a mode shift to reach.

Some other 2.3 features look nice, but your editor has not, yet, had the ability to try them out. Near-field communications are not supported by the Nexus One, and there is no nearby place to use that capability yet in any case. For the time being, perhaps, being unable to spend money directly with the handset is not an entirely bad thing. This release also supports Internet telephony via an outside SIP provider, a feature which certainly merits exploration at some point.

Nexus One users wanting the features found in the 2.3 release can, of course, just use the stock firmware which is nicely delivered via an over-the-air update. Owners of other handsets may not get any such service. One of the most valuable features of CyanogenMod is the large number of handsets supported; for many, it may be about the only way to get a current Android distribution on their phones.

But, naturally, there is more to CyanogenMod than ports; it also brings a number of features of its own. At the top of the list must be simple configurability. There is (once again) an apparent trend in parts of the free software community to remove configurability from systems in the name of "user friendliness"; sometimes distributions like Android are held out as examples of successful application of this approach. The CyanogenMod developers have not bought into that idea.

With CyanogenMod, one can set the color of the notification LED based on which application is trying to communicate something - email updates can be pink, missed calls yellow, and text messages a deep blue. There are three variants on the basic lock screen, with options for music player controls and access to a user-chosen application without unlocking the screen. The home screen/application launcher application has options controlling screen layout, whether the wallpaper scrolls, various gesture actions, where the trash can sits, and a vast number of other things. There is also a theme mechanism and, happily, a means to back up and restore all those settings. Other options control what happens when the search button is pressed, how hard the phone vibrates in response to various types of key events, which hours of the day the phone should be silent, and more. If you truly want to change which CPU frequency governor is used, or if you want to render the home screen in green only, CyanogenMod makes it possible.

The "power control" widget follows the same theme. The contents of this widget are under user control, with far more options (WiFi hotspot, mobile data, 2G/3G, etc.) than stock Android provides. One can even control the all-important flashlight capability through the power widget. An especially nice feature is the ability to make connections between some of the settings; for example, application synchronization can be enabled only when WiFi is enabled. That allows the cautious use of data in international-roaming environments without the danger of being bankrupted by a surprise application update.

All told, CyanogenMod's configuration options can seem a bit overwhelming, especially since their effect is not always obvious. But for somebody who makes a lot of use of their handset, a half-hour or so spent doing a depth-first traversal of the settings menus can go a long way toward optimizing the device's behavior.

Other CyanogenMod features include an "incognito" mode for the web browser, support for FLAC files in the music player (which has been "restyled" in a number of ways), SMS templates available via gestures, "phone goggles" (an outgoing call blocking mechanism), openVPN support, a dynamic equalizer for audio output, various hardware enablement and performance improvements, and much more.

Perhaps the real value of CyanogenMod, though, is that it turns Android into something resembling a real open source project. They take Google's code dumps and turn them into a working system which can be built and enhanced by anybody. The community around the distribution appears to be growing, and it is slowly developing the sort of infrastructure that a community-oriented project should have (even if they still insist on using obnoxious forums for their communications). Many people repackage Android binaries; CyanogenMod seems nearly alone in working at the source level. The result is a phone which works better for its users and which improves over time. It's hard to be grumpy about that.