cyanogenmod Archives - The Silicon Underground

The ultimate budget smartphone: The Moto E

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:00:22 +0000

I wanted to like the Moto E, for sentimental reasons. The Motorola who made this phone isn’t the same Motorola who made the MC68000 CPU in my Amiga, and it’s not the same Motorola that built the hulking briefcase-sized bag

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Android Kit Kat lands on the Nook Color

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 03:35:36 +0000

I didn’t know if it would ever happen, but experimental nightly builds for Android 4.4 (Kit Kat) have arrived for the venerable Nook Color. I installed it tonight. Since I’ve previously run other versions of Cyanogenmod on the Nook Color,

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The Asus Memo Pad HD 7 review: It’s a nice inexpensive tablet

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 11:00:14 +0000

I’ve been messing with an Asus Memopad, the 7-inch version. I think it’s a well-built, good-performing tablet for $149, and when you can get it on sale for less than that–and this is the time of year for that–I think

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Android ROMs explained

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:00:50 +0000

To the uninitiated, the world of Android ROMs can be more than a little confusing. Since Android is based on Linux and therefore large portions of it are licensed under the GPL, enthusiasts are free to create and release their

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I have a new favorite Android ROM for the Nook Color: MROM

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 11:00:17 +0000

My Nook Color is my experimental Android rig. Since it’s aging fast, I don’t use it nearly as heavily as my other Android devices, so if I accidentally do something wrong, I can live without it much more easily than

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Smartphones and tablets… What’s the point?

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 11:00:57 +0000

A longtime reader who asked to be anonymous got his first tablet and smartphone a few weeks ago and was underwhelmed, to say the least. “What’s the point?” he asked me privately. To be honest, I understand. I got my

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Tweaking the Android I/O scheduler

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 11:00:50 +0000

On my Nook Color running Cyanogenmod, inside Settings, Performance, there’s a mysterious setting called I/O Scheduler. Storage performance (I guess I can’t call it disk performance anymore) is critical to overall system performance, but it’s also easy to get wrong.

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Saving money on a smartphone

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 20:53:45 +0000

I bit the bullet last week, and added a second smartphone to what’s now our family plan. I didn’t buy a new phone though. Instead, I bought a used Samsung Galaxy S 4G off Amazon (the Canadian version, which was

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Why there’s scarcely any aftermarket firmware for Hisense Sero tablets

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 11:00:20 +0000

Are you curious why there’s no Cyanogenmod for the Sero 7 or Sero 7 Pro tablets? Or why there’s only one aftermarket ROM for it, released way back in May, with no updates? I realized why this week. Hisense has

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How to disable wallpaper when you’re not running Cyanogenmod

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 11:00:15 +0000

Unfortunately I can’t run Cyanogenmod on all of my Android devices (more on that tomorrow), but if you want to save some memory and CPU cycles and, depending on your device’s display, perhaps even increase your battery life by a

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