The CyanogenMod developers have published two video previews of version 7.0 of their modified Android firmware, the project's next major release. The CyanogenMod project offers free, community-built custom ROMs that don't include Google's custom closed source applications, such as GMail, Google Maps and YouTube, for a variety of Android phones. The custom ROMs are popular as they are often more up-to-date than the official model-specific Android releases and typically will extend a phones capabilities.

CyanogenMod 7.0 is based on the source code for Android 2.3, code named "Gingerbread", and features a brand new boot animation and updated CyanogenMod settings with options that allow users to, for example, move all of their applications to external storage (e.g. MicroSD) or adjust device

CyanogenMod 7.0 booting on a Nexus S. performance by over-clocking the CPU. Other updates include improvements to the status bar and notification icons, as well as the latest version of the Android Market. Plans are reportedly in the works to change / modify the built-in music application included with Gingerbread – work on this, however, has not yet started. The developers also note that, to date, they are "approaching 100,000 users" running CyanogenMod.

The first of the two videos shows the new boot animation for the upcoming CM7 release running on a Google Nexus S smartphone, while the second video provides a walk-through of the latest changes on a T-Mobile myTouch 4G. Both videos are available on YouTube: CyanogenMod 7 Boot Animation, Official CyanogenMod 7 Preview.

The latest stable release of the CyanogenMod modified Android firmware is version 6.1.1, a bug fix update for the 6.1 release from early December of last year. The H reminds users that, as with all custom firmware, inexperienced users are not advised to flash their devices as they could unintentionally brick them resulting in a complete loss of functionality.

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(crve)