Android: If you've rooted your Android phone and flashed a custom ROM, you're probably running the ever-popular CyanogenMod. Today, they released the Gingerbread-based CyanogenMod 7, complete with everything we love about Gingerbread, plus a few great extra features like canned SMS responses.


If you've been itching to get Gingerbread on your phone (since the Nexus S is still the only phone that has it), you can get all that good looking, new-keyboard, text selection goodness with the new version of CyanogenMod. Not only does it contain everything we've been looking forward to in Gingerbread, but it also adds even more small convenience tweaks, like being able to pause and play music with the camera button, customize the sound slider on your lock screen, browse incognito, and change up themes with the built-in theme engine. No doubt the coolest feature, though, are canned SMS responses, which let you create pre-determined SMS messages that you can send with a simple gesture, so when you're driving, busy, or just sending common phrases, you don't have to waste time typing.


As with all CyanogenMod experimental builds, don't expect 100% stability from these, even if they are labeled "release candidates". They should be stable enough for everyday use, but they won't be perfect. If you're getting impatient waiting for Gingerbread, you'll definitely want to check this out, but I'd recommend making a backup just in case there's a quirk or two you can't deal with. Also keep in mind that, while it's available for a good number of phones, they'll be rolling out the RC for more and more phones over the next day or two, so if you don't see it pop up in ROM Manager, don't worry. It'll be there soon.

CyanogenMod 7 is a free download for many Android devices. Check out the full changelog here.

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CyanogenMod 7 Release Candidates [CyanogenMod Blog]

You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.



