Cyanogenmod 6 Custom ROM Eval: Part 2, The Likening

Thing I like: my current home screen, Car Home, Contacts, and the Notifications Pane

For a month now I've been playing around with the CyanogenMod 6.1 ROM (CM6) installed on my aging HTC Hero (read part 1 here). In this post, I'm going to detail some of the things I like about it. Some items mentioned are part of Android 2.2, while some are unique to CyanogenMod. Regardless of the source, here are things I dig about CM6:

• Speed: though not as fast as the current crop of Android phones and not always as fast as I'd like, the phone is much more responsive overall and runs most things at a respectable speed.
• Stability: thus far, I’m not getting spontaneous reboots I did with the stock 2.1 ROM. (With once caveat, which I'll detail next time.) 
• Battery life: seems to be a bit better, but I'm not 100% sure. One complicating factor that makes it difficult to say: I have been using my phone a lot more, both because it's more responsive and for testing purposes. 
• Toggles on the notifications panel: No more clunky and unresponsive widgets needed to toggle commonly used things like ringer/vibrate, GPS and Wi-Fi on/off, etc. It's all in the panel.
• It's easier to play favorites: though the Sense UI also has Favorites, CM6's Favorites tab is easier to use and more intuitive. Star a person, and they show up in your favorites. The Contacts app in CM6 is easier to use overall, primarily because the phone is more responsive.
• More talk, more action(s): the Google Voice Actions app works surprisingly well. I tell my phone to navigate to a contact's house, and it does. It can also voice dial, send emails, text messages, and more -- with no typing.
  
• The Car Home app: a panel of large buttons puts the things you're most likely to need at your fingertips -- Navigation, Music, Phone, Contacts, and so on.
  
• Photo gallery improvements: the Gallery app can be set up to show photos in your Picasa web albums. It’s also easy to upload camera photos to Picasa. The Gallery app can also do basic photo cropping and rotation.
• Improved email/Gmail interface: no need to go back and forth from an email to the list of mail in your inbox -- arrow buttons allow you to easily work your way back and forth through your messages directly, message to message.
• My Hero now downloads whole emails/Gmails at once -- no more having to click to load the rest of a message.
• Easier snaps: the Camera app is quicker and more responsive than the one in the stock ROM, and it’s easier to make adjustments to exposure, zoom, resolution, etc. as you shoot.
• A smarter market: Android 2.2's Market remembers which apps you've installed and reinstalls them if you wipe your phone, which is handier than it sounds.
• Choose your unlock: in addition to the pattern-drawing security unlock, you can also use a pin number or a password.
• Cool apps that are available only on phones that are rooted, including ones that allow you to take screenshots on your phone (examples at the top), turn your phone into a free Wi-Fi hotspot, and apps that allow you to easily back up your phone.
• Album art just works now: all of my album covers now display in the Android music player. Whew.
• Facebook sync works!

Those are a few of the things I really enjoyed in my 'new' phone. There are a few other cool things that CM6 has that I didn't touch on because I haven't used them much -- like the built-in equalizer, for example. And note that I installed the free version of LauncherPro and Beautiful Widgets right off the bat, as you can see in the screenshots.

Next up: a few areas where the CyanogenMod ROM came up short, and some final thoughts. Now available here!