Samsung Galaxy SII and ICS 4.0.3

There is no denying that I am a pure geek, as such, I want to test everything even if it is alpha release. Google released Ice Cream Sandwich (4.x) in December and hackers have been working hard to provide ROMs. Samsung has leaked already a fair few testing versions and I got to say that it is running better everytime. I have been a long time Cyanogen user and mostly ran cm7 for the last 7 months. I have tried cm9 and it is looking very promising, problem is that until Samsung releases the ICS sources for the sgs2, there is little hope that most of the core functionalities will work as expected. However, this has nothing to do with cyanogen developers but mostly because of the way Samsung screws with multimedia codecs and the base framework (you can tell at this stage I am not an Android dev 🙂

So where does it leave us? Well, I have installed a custom version (read rooted/deodexed and customised in a few ways) from DarkyROM which gives me hope, as most things seem to behave as I expected. This ROM is based on the XXLPH leak. It seems that all is working as expected including the GPS (had to download gps fix and let it settle for 3mn) and now everything works.

This is going to be my daily driver for a while but that said, once Samsung releases the sources and Cyanogen is given the opportunity to fix the codecs, I will be making the switch back to my favourite ROM.

Before I forget, a nice article on how to restore your google authenticator keys to the new ROM the manual way: http://cadince.com/3-ways-to-move-google-authenticator/

That brings me to the last point, if you are using Cyanogen, they need your help.