Andromeda on Android
I love my Samsung Galaxy S. It’s a great piece of hardware with a great OS. However, I don’t love AT&T.
Us Captivate users have been waiting for the upgrade to Froyo (Android 2.2) for a while, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of progress in that area. Also, AT&T restricts installing non-market apps, they pre-install loads of software that I don’t use or even want, and their boot screen is just a big commercial for them. So I decided it was time to leave all that behind and get me a real taste of Android.
As many already know, Android is based on a Linux kernel, it’s open source and all that good stuff, so it allows for lots of customization. If you don’t like something about it, it can be changed. And thankfully, there are many developers already working of making things better, so there was no need for me to keep suffering about the same stuff that others have already fixed.
The ROM I chose was Andromeda. Their slogan is “insert awesome here,” giving me the first sign of what I was to expect. This version is built specifically for the Captivate of the Froyo OS, and lots of customizations have gone into it to make it awesome. Andromeda gets rid of all the crapware, it comes already rooted (jailbroken for iPhone users) and comes with a whole new orange theme and nice wallpaper. The boot screen is nicer, the default font is more stylish, screen and window animations are faster, and includes a couple widgets to make life easier.
But it’s not just bells and whistles. A GPS fix to the kernel makes GPS usable now. It formats the boot partition with ext4 for über-fast boot-times. It regularly performs backups of your system.Automatically blocks ads by not allowing ad servers to even be contacted. And it includes an app to keep the buttons backlight on, which may not seem like a big deal, but any Captivate user will agree that it was a major usability issue.
The only drawback is that it comes with a slim version of the TouchWiz UI, which is not my favorite, but that can be fixed in two minutes.
Something I found interesting is that while all of my apps got deleted, all my user data was saved, so there was no need to resync all my music and photos to it, it all got saved.
The end result is a faster, slimmer, oranger version of the OS that has all I had liked about it and nothing of what I loathed. The Andromeda guys did a great job with this ROM, and it helped me remember why I love Linux systems: if you get tired of it, you can always change it in a way that will feel new and exciting, without losing any of the features you love.
