CyanogenMod 7.1 - an even quicker eval

The CyanogenMod team recently released the final version of their 7.1, which is based on Android 2.37.

There's not a lot of differences between 7.03 and 7.1 that is immediately obvious. I did notice a new lockscreen, which is nice. And there are a lot of smaller or under-the-hood changes which you can read about on the full changelog here. One thing I have noticed is that it seems to have fixed some of the most annoying bugs I noticed in 7.03, namely:

• The email app refusing to fetch new email. Quite often on 7.03, it would not retrieve new email when I hit refresh, and I'd have to either force stop the app or reboot to get it working again. I haven't noticed this problem with 7.1 in a week or so of testing.
• Google Navigation slowness/force closes/reboots. Google Nav in 7.03 was unreliable for me (though others with the same phone reported no problems). Sometimes it would work fine. Sometimes it would close without any kind of notification. Sometimes, it would cause my phone to spontaneously reboot. In limited testing (on a train home, which forced it to constantly reroute and was reminiscent of driving off the track and into the grass in '80s video games), it seemed to work well.

 To sum up: So far, 7.1 looks to be a great release for my HTC Hero. Thanks to the CyanogenMod team for not only keeping my aging phone up to date but making the phone run better, faster, longer and with far more stability than it had originally.

Unfortunate update: though Google Nav seemed to work find in my early tests, I did have a problem earlier today, where it became unresponsive. Switching to it brought up a black screen, and it no longer was voicing directions. So it seems that Navigation is still a little flaky on my Hero -- perhaps it's a hardware issue?

CyanogenMod 7.03 - A Quick Eval

I've been using CM7 for a few weeks now on my HTC Hero, and am love love loving it. It is as much of an improvement on CM6 as CM6 was on the stock HTC ROM. Some highlights:

• It's fast and silky smooth -- much more so than CM6. For the first time since I've had it, my Hero doesn't feel underpowered and struggling to keep up with tasks I throw at it.
• It's more stable. I get very few errors or crashes. (For example, the camera doesn't crash like it often did in CM6.)
• More core apps update through the market: I've received updates to Gmail and to the Market itself automatically -- no fussing with apk files.
• Battery life seems to be better (though I haven't thoroughly tested this.)

About the only problem I've encountered is with Google Navigation. If often freezes or causes the phone to reboot. This was an issue in CM6 for me as well, though, and I've read that the problem may be fixed in the release candidate for CM7.1, but haven't tried that yet.

All-in-all I'd recommend that anyone using CM6 (or the stock Sense ROM) to upgrade to 7. It's a big improvement!