A thread at the XDA Developers forum has been discussing progress on Cyanogenmod 9 (CM9) for the Motorola Defy. The first post includes a video of a Motorola Bravo running Cyanogenmod 9 with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). The Motorola Bravo is running Cyanogenmod 9 for the Defy, but it seems to work. You can see the video here at the end of this post.
I’m not even going to install it, it probably has a lot of the issues the ROM from Epsylon3 has. It’s still encouraging to see nightly CM9 builds for the Defy popping up though.
I was a little worried about Cyanongemod 9 even being released for the Defy, but the Defy is one of the most popular devices for the Cyanogenmod team, according to the Cyanogenmod stats site anyway.
According to the Cyanogenmod stats site, there’s nearly 50,000 Defy’s running Cyanogenmod. The Motorola Defy is the umts_jordan device.
If you’ve got a Motorola Defy and are really, really anxious to run Ice Cream Sandwich, you now have two options. The AOSP ROM from Epsylon3, or a Cyanogenmod 9 nightly from http://defy-cm.net/ics-test0/.
I’ll be holding off on Ice Cream Sandwich for at least another month, probably more. I need to have a very stable phone, and can’t afford to run bleeding edge software on it.
If you’ve tried Ice Cream Sandwich in AOSP or Cyanongemod form, let me know, I’d love to hear what you think of it. You can see the video of Cyanogenmod 9 on the Defy after the break! Read more
Meant to post about this a bit sooner, lots of folks have written about it already, like Tony at OMG!Droid. Originally, this Ice Cream Sandwich Keyboard was available as an apk from mediafire or some other file sharing site.
Now though, the Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard is available in the Android Market. Looks pretty nifty, but not nifty enough for me to ditch SwiftkeyX. On a somewhat related note, I’m disappointed SwiftkeyX hasn’t been updated with an Ice Cream Sandwich theme.
Some features, from the Android Market page:
Multitouch keyboard
User dictionary, built-in dictionary
Configurable auto correction
Redesigned and optimized keyboard layout and style
Speech to text (select languages only)
Custom vibration intensity (haptic feedback)
Long press “Enter” key to bring up smiley alternatives (Only on Im mode, for example in Gtalk)
Long press on “/” key in URL mode to bring up domains
This was built by AstronautMillionaire and is in a beta status, but seems to work fine for most folks. This is in no way an official, Google build of the Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard, but it’s the best choice most of us have now.
Not too many phones have Ice Cream Sandwich ROMs available yet. Defy has an Ice Cream Sandwich ROM, but it needs quite a bit of work before I’ll try it out.
Epsylon3 also released the first test ROM for Motorola Defy phones. The download link has been shutdown due to “copyright abuse”. The test ROM was made available at http://defy-cm7.tk//ics-test0/. I doubt it will come back online, so keep an eye on the original thread at XDA for a new download link.
Things that work in the test ROM:
Startup, bootmenu and recovery
Touchscreen and keypad (multitouch too)
Usb
New Network (netfilter) kernel modules (quota2, and fake qtaguid)
wifi
Things that need work:
Fix egl configuration : Cause the force close on many apps including default launcher, settings and gapps setup wizard
Fix colors (almost fixed)
Fix sound
Fix phone / 3G
Fix orientation sensor
Fix egl hw acceleration for omap3 (can be hard) : gralloc.omap3.so
Fix camera (will be hard)
UPDATE 11/29/2011: See this post for links to some Cyanogenmod 9 test builds for the Defy.
Sounds like we’ll start seeing the first Cyanogenmod 9 builds in the next couple months! Exciting news for everyone who has been abandoned by their handset manufacturer. I highly doubt my Motorola Defy will ever see an official upgrade, even to Gingerbread. Ice Cream Sandwich should run quite well on the Defy’s hardware.
This is exciting news for everyone in the Android community really, not just those who’ve been abandoned. The more choices you have the better, and Cyanogenmod is available for a multitude of devices.
Can’t wait until the nightly builds start popping up, it’s gonna be a fun next couple of months! If I had to guess, I’d say we’ll see an alpha or the first nightly builds of Cyanogenmod 9 within a month, or a little more. Hopefully by Christmas (and this is just me wishing) we’ll have something!
Steve also mentioned on Twitter that work will progress on Cyanogenmod 7.2 until it’s ready to be released, while simultaneously working on Cyanogenmod 9.
We're still going to get CM7.2 out the door while CM9 is being worked on.
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