Thursday, April 28, 2011

Notion Ink Adam ROM Review: Cyanogen Mod 7 (Beta1)

     Cyanogen Mod is probably the most popular Android ROM of all time, and it is now making its way to the Adam. Also included is the Honeycomb mimicking Tablet Tweaks plugin (also beta). I say making its way because it is still in beta. I had a minimal amount of problems with stability, but I recommend waiting as this won't be your daily donut. Find out how the popular ROM runs on a not-so-standard tablet.
     If you hate everything about Eden, even the apps, then this is definitely the ROM for you. All traces of Notion Ink have been wiped clean. This could be a good thing for some users, but not this guy. Couldn't they at least give us the NI keyboard? The purpose of CM7 is to give a vanilla Gingerbread experience, but oddly the stock Android launcher is MIA, instead giving you ADW and VTL to pick from.

     As with a few other ROMs, you are given toggles for things like switching the SD cards or turning off cell standby. To do so, you are given the horrible  not very intuitive Adam toggles app. All the app is is a screen with four buttons for the four toggles. No visual indication that the toggle worked, no prompting to restart, just four buttons.

     Tablet Tweaks was suppose to give a Honeycomb-like feel to the overall experience. It doesn't. All you really get is a fat status bar with three navigation buttons that hardly ever goes away. Oh, and you can move it to the bottom of the screen if so desired. It's a nice idea, but it doesn't really add anything to the user experience.

     There you have it. A brief review of a very popular ROM that almost doesn't need a review. For a complete list of features that CM will give you, go to their website. Right now, it isn't ready for the Adam. One major problem I had was the lack of a lockscreen which would probably be fixed by a simple data wipe. This ROM gets a 3/10 in its current form. The reason? A complete lack of anything Notion Ink.

2 comments:

  1. wow, this reviewer gets a 3/10..the reason? A complete lack of understanding what a REPLACEMENT ROM is/does.

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  2. The reason it gets this rating is because CM isn't tablet ready, it's buggy, and it wasn't incredibly usable. Adding back the NI keyboard and mail app is common practice in every Adam ROM except this one. I like Cyanogem Mod, just not for the Adam.

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