They also have an option to add your calendar notifications to the lockscreen as well for daily events. I don't have them added there, but it's a nice touch to see what is on your literary next with a quick glance. Cyanogen is really the only ROM I trust and the most professional. I don't agree with all their decisions (though that's kind of typical of any project), but they're more professional than most other projects and have higher standards for gerrit commits they accept.

They have a built in updater for their ROMs since Cyanogen 9 (4.0) so no more having to download from a website. Delta updates may have been merged in recently, but have not had time to stay on top of their changes. Killer feature for me though has always been switching music tracks with the volume buttons (like how Blackberry would do it by hold pressing the volume button). I never knew how much I missed it until trying to run one day without it. It's a pretty trivial thing to add to the AOSP source though (add maybe 50 lines total to a few Java files in the framework base) and wished Google would do it. I can only assume there must be some sort of patent/licensing reason as to why they don't.

You're right about wasted space and stock devices have yet to really find a good way to use it. I don't really like how Google implemented lockscreen widgets in 4.2 if you tried them out yet. They're either full out maximized (by pulling them down and thus no easier than unlocking the device) or they're minimal. Someone will probably mod them to be more customized in the community I would guess. I'm still using 4.1.2 on my Galaxy Nexus just for stability since CM 10.1 (4.2.1) is still in early development.

Random question, but how is the post-jailbreak modding community for iphone? I mean I could look it up, but I'm guessing you have some first hand observations.

> but how is the post-jailbreak modding community for iphone? I mean I could look it up, but I'm guessing you have some first hand observations

Pretty good, you would be surprised. I've always been of the opinion that even the iPhone jailbreak community is better organized than anyone who hasn't tried it in person realizes. Via tweaks like DreamBoard you can customize anything and everything. Even total overhauls like turning it into an Android style or WP8 style device. It's pretty remarkable.

It's worth getting ahold of a 4S and jailbreaking to check it out firsthand if possible. The impression I get from Android users is that they feel iOS is completely impossible to customize in any real way. IMO installing total overhauls is actually easier assuming you're past the jailbreak process, which also tends to be simpler than rooting (although obviously that depends on the specific Android device you're trying to root).

Yeah, I'd love to try it out if I happen to find one cheap or one falls into my hands one day. Just as a device to hack around on and play with would be nice. I knew you could theme on iphone, but I didn't realize there was more in the modding community for it than that.

You're correct about the average Android user assuming that there's nothing you can really mod with an iOS device. The fact they assume that is sort of odd to a point, given how many in the Android community readily accept and mod phones without a complete source tree by Samsung, HTC and others in a similar fashion by reversing the dalvik byte code into Smali.

> I knew you could theme on iphone, but I didn't realize there was more in the modding community for it than that.

I definitely have to throw together a video demonstrating various jailbreak tweaks. If I still had my 4S I would do it right now, but I'm waiting on the iOS 6.1 release to jailbreak my iPhone 5. I'll be sure to send you a link if you're still interested.

> The fact they assume that is sort of odd to a point, given how many in the Android community readily accept and mod phones without a complete source tree by Samsung, HTC and others in a similar fashion by reversing the dalvik byte code into Smali.

No doubt, I was astounded at how much I had to figure out and how many attempts I had to make to root an EVO 3D for a friend. And this was after someone had already made a handy tool for the process and spent months developing it.

All that just to take it past the awful stock HTC ROM Rogers left it on and to peel out the crapware. Jailbreaking, by contrast couldn't be simpler. However you can get away with a fair bit more on an unrooted Android device than you can with stock iOS so in reality it's just a tradeoff.

It's nice to see the phone market becoming a Windows/OS X/Linux situation though, where the differences aren't so drastic and what you use basically comes down to personal preference instead of any blatant advantages. Every time I have a chance to play around with a more recent Android device the experience has become better.

Sure, send the video my way whenever you have time :). I'd like to see what is possible just out of hacker curiosity and I do like to enlighten some of the more diehard Android users whenever possible for assuming everything about iOS is bad, haha.

My first Android phone was an HTC, I know where you're coming from with that. Was not the easiest thing to deal with for rooting. Nexus devices are thankfully a bit easier since you don't have to deal with working an exploit to get the bootloader unlocked and root. I pretty much vowed to avoid anything Non-Nexus in the future for that reason and a few others.

I always felt like the lockscreen itself is a total waste. Most people don't use complex security mechanism on it but rather some slide stuff and why? It wasn't possible to disable the lockscreen for a while but at least now it's possible to disable. It never turns on by accident and i'm right in my homescreen, much better (imo)! :)

I've considered disabling mine, but I figured I may still turn it on by accident in my pocket. Risk is far reduced from say when I had a blackberry (and pocket dialed at times), but I figured it could still happen.