Vastly improved CyanogenMod for Verizon (and others) Galaxy Tab 10.1

I’ve posted before about installing CyanogenMod on a Galaxy Tab 10.1. Some things have changed since that time. I read that Cyanogen has received funding to hire developers full-time.

The “unoffical” CyanogenMod releases that were at droidbasement.com, which I mentioned in previous posts, are still there but now if you go the actual cyanogenmod.com site you can find what are called “nightly” builds of CM10.1 for the Verizon Galaxy Tab 10.1 (and others as well I’m sure since they’re all built by the same developer).

I’ve just installed cm-10.1-20131103-NIGHTLY-p4vzw.zip which is the very latest as of this writing, along with the lastest gapps for CM10.1 which, as of this writing, is “20130812”. For the longest time using the droidbasement.com ROMs the only version of gapps which worked was the old “gapps-jb-20121011-signed.zip” version. That has now fortunately changed.

Gapps, for those who don’t know, is a packaged version of core Google apps for Android, most notably the Play Store. I personally don’t use the Gmail nor Contacts apps but they are included. I’m also close to jettisoning the Calendar app as well. Maps and Voice have to be downloaded from the store. Maps will also give you Navigation.

One new feature is that the setup will prompt to login or create a CyanogenMod account. Beyond that, the default launcher, called Trebuchet, is slightly improved but most will still probably want to install their favorite launcher right away.

So far this is appearing to be the best ROM ever to run on a Galaxy Tab 10.1.

I really love where this is going. CyanogenMod is much, much closer to what operating systems on mobile devices should be about. All people should care about from carriers is to provide inexpensive bandwidth and the ability to run our own hardware. They offer such crappy service and are always trying to gouge people that they really should just be eliminated from the game and forced to provide open service available to whatever device(s) a person chooses.

Another big thing coming will be Ubuntu’s mobile OS and mobile devices. But I would like to see the playing field totally open and the ultimate will be running Debian on all my devices and systems.