On Wed, 15 Aug 2012, Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:
CyanogenMod's a huge improvement on factory-loaded Android where openness is concerned. Were I buying a smartphone, I would make sure CyanogenMod fully supports the hardware and plan on reflashing it immediately. In fact, 'don't trust preloads' seems like a good policy with pretty much any computing device, where feasible.
I agree. However one problem is that you often lose features when doing that. Last time I checked there was a replacement image for my Xperia X10 phones which had the down-side of lacking camera support! I expect that the nice camera features of the Galaxy S3 won't be available in CyanogenMod so there will be a real incentive to keep the Samsung image. http://f-droid.org/ Another thing to note is the F-Droid repository of free Android software. With F-Droid alone I could do everything I REALLY want to do on an Android phone. Sure there's lots of nice things that the Google Play Market gives you, but F-Droid covers all the basics and for the most geeky use covers them really well. An Android phone with a locked boot loader that's using F-Droid instead of Google Play will still be a lot more free than an iPhone. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/