Just been sent a link to this interesting open source news – that I have an option to replace my current Android OS on my T-Mobile G1 with a firmware alternative called CyanogenMod. That doesn’t happen every morning! Note that the controversy about including Google apps, which appears to have been resolved..

CyanogenMod is an aftermarket firmware for four families of cell phones—HTC Dream (marketed as T-Mobile G1 in Europe and the US, and Era G1 in Poland) and HTC Magic (T-Mobile myTouch 3G in the US, DoCoMo HT-03A in Japan and Vodafone Magic in the UK, Germany among some other states.), the Motorola Droid^[2], and the Google Nexus One.^[3]

CyanogenMod is a community-based distribution of the open-source Android operating system. It offers features not found in the official Android-based firmwares of vendors of these cell phones, including support for FLAC Lossless Audio, multi-touch, the ability to store and run downloaded applications from the microSD card, compressed cache (compcache), a large APN list, a reboot menu, support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB tethering, as well as other enhancements. CyanogenMod was also the first mobile OS to incorporate BFS as the task scheduler, a change that has been merged into experimental branches in the official Android source tree.^[4] CyanogenMod claims to increase performance and reliability over official firmware releases.