As of today, June 26, it has officially been 225 days since Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, has hit the Android Open Source Project repository. Manufacturers have been tweaking the update for their various devices, carriers have been hard at work adding apps and testing reliability for consumer handsets, and custom alternative software developers have been perfecting their own personal flavor of ICS with more ROMs than you can shake a stick at. Today marks a milestone for one of the more popular ROM developers, as team CyanogenMod has just announced the release of CM9, Release Candidate 1, for 37 different devices.
Yes, you read that right. CyanogenMod 9 RC1 has officially debuted on 37 devices including the Galaxy Nexus (GSM, Sprint and Verizon), Motorola Xoom, Galaxy S II, Galaxy Note, ASUS Transformer, Transformer Prime and Transformer Pad.
In case you aren't familiar with CyanogenMod ROMs, CyanogenMod is a totally clean, bloatware-free build of stock Android, with a handful of helpful tweaks and customization options. CyanogenMod is well known for being one of the fastest, stablest custom ROMs available. I've been using a CM9 Nightly (experimental test) build on my GSM Galaxy Nexus without any problems at all. With the white theme I have set up, along with the color adjustments and built-in notification shade settings shortcuts, I don't think I could switch back to stock Ice Cream Sandwich if I wanted to.
To see if you're device has made the release candidate list, head on over to Get.CM now. If you'd rather wait for the stable, official release of CyanogenMod 9, it should be available any time now.
