Yesterday, on Christmas Eve, I decided to check once again whether any update had appeared for the ROM I had on my phone, namely DoomNEXUS v3 running on the Android 2.6.x kernel, but none had been released; the phone kept telling me I had the latest version. Unfortunately, a lot of things didn’t work on this ROM. A quick list, which certainly isn’t complete, includes: the camera (and therefore video recording too), GPS, connecting to a PC via USB (I had to move everything through the memory card), and playback of any video at all, including the YouTube app.
Since I had also bought another phone, again running Android, and one I had always wanted, I had put my i9001 on the back burner. Now I’ll have to make up to it for all that suffering and loneliness! :). It’s now missing nothing, except perhaps the FM radio, which probably can’t be added in any way, but that doesn’t really matter, since I mostly listen to the radio on my “dumb” Nokia 101 or simply on my older MP3 player.
As for apps, I’m glad that, unlike the DoomNEXUS ROM, it doesn’t include the Apollo app, which I really didn’t like, and which also used that stupid mediaserver that eats an incredible amount of battery. I don’t like apps that rely on MediaServer because of the battery – for example, VLC media player, just like on Windows, uses its own codecs, but just like on the desktop, it practically doesn’t support scrobbling to Last.fm. Still, one Apollo app is nothing compared to the stock Samsung ROM, which came with loads of apps from Samsung itself, 99%, maybe 100% of which I never used, plus other apps that Samsung bundled from third-party companies (though that’s probably still nothing compared to the ROMs from SE, or rather Sony these days).
I originally wanted to write a similar article comparing which apps come in the stock ROM of the Samsung Galaxy GT-i9001, the Samsung Galaxy GT-S5363 and the DoomNEXUS v3 ROM. But in the end nothing good came of it (as I suspected), so I didn’t publish it :).
But back to the SmothieJB ROM. On this one, everything I listed above works. I’ve only had it for 1 day so far, so I can’t really judge the battery life yet, but I expect it to be lower than with DoomNEXUS, since, as the name suggests, this ROM is built around all sorts of eye candy. But who knows, I’ll wait and see. Here are a few screenshots of this ROM :).
Some Google apps are missing, because only the Google Play App Store got installed from the gapps package, but that’s fine, because all those apps like Gmail and YouTube are available on this market as usual, and it’s actually an advantage that I don’t have to keep them running on the phone all the time (or at least some of their services and processes), as I would if they were a built-in part of the system. And now you can finally take a look at the screenshots (there’s nothing all that interesting, though, and whatever was interesting, I’ve hidden):
👻 This link is now just a fossil from the days when people still trusted the internet.