CyanogenMod 7 (CM7), a Gingerbread-based stock Android ROM, had been on my radar for a while. It’s currently available for 28 devices, old and new, tablets and phones, including the Nexus One, HTC Incredible, HTC Hero, LG Optimus 2x, Motorola Droid, Samsung Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy S, Nook Color, T-Mobile myTouch Slide, HTC Hero GSM, HTC Hero CDMA, HTC Magic, T-mobile G2, HTC myTouch4G, HTC myTouch3G and HTC Desire . Since my Desire Z was rooted, I decided to give it a shot. Lo and behold, a breath of fresh air swooped through my phone and it felt brand new without the clunky, RAM-hungry, processor-intensive Sense layer.

Download CyanogenMod 7

 10 Reasons To Try CyanogenMod 7

1. Themes

If you are big on personalization, then you must look at the color of the Android status bar icons, selection boxes, highlight texts, and wonder why cannot you change any of them. After all, a new wallpaper can only go so far in refreshing the look of your handset. With Theme Chooser baked into CM7, you can pick by default one of three available themes, or download any of the CM7 themes available in the Android Market. I like the work of UpwardSpiral, who provides several colored free themes. I can switch through them every week, and it’s almost like I have a brand new phone every time.

Theme Chooser and Cyanbread Theme

2. Lockscreen Gestures

CM7 comes with several tweaks for the lockscreen including music controls, several lock styles, unlocking with the trackball if your phone has one but the winning feature is the gesture support. Simply wake your phone and draw a gesture on your lockscreen, and a plethora of actions are accessible: opening an application, toggling the flashlight or sound, dialing or messaging a contact, getting maps directions… Its brilliantly simple and its a huge time saver.

For example, if I draw a C on my lockscreen, it opens the Camera. No longer do I need to unlock my phone, look for the Camera icon, and then tap to launch it. A G opens the Gallery, an S opens SoundHound, a circle toggles the flashlight… Basically, the sky is the limit, and I have set it to the actions that I do not necessarily use frequently, but that I usually need super quickly.

Lockscreen Gestures

3. Eye Candy

Other than themes, there are some cool animation effects in CM7. For example, you can set the screen to play the CRT animation available on the Nexus S when it’s switching off and on. You can also set the overscroll effect to glow or bounce, so when you scroll a bit too quickly and reach the end of a list, it signals that to you. Another neat trick is allowing you to rotate the screen 180 degrees, so you can even use your phone upside down.

4. Phone Goggles

Nothing to do with Google Goggles this is for those who know they get drunk at times, or would really like to avoid dialing someone’s number or messaging them by mistake. Goggles is for that. It’s like a second check on your outgoing calls and messages to prevent you from doing something you might regret later on.

5. Speed

I wouldn’t be a fan of CM7 if not for its speed. For all its tweaks and options, its amazing how fast it runs. Even with over 115 applications installed right now, and several of them running, I have 192MB free RAM, and my phone does not slow down, reboot or restart the home process when I open a new application. It sounds simple, but the Desire Z only has a 800MHz processor, and it crawled under Sense. For example, opening the Applications list under Settings used to take over a minute when I was running Sense; now it takes less than 5 seconds.

6. Input Tweaks

Other than haptic feedback personalization, you can set the behavior behind long-pressing the home button to either open an application, or show 8, 12 or 15 of your recent applications. You can also change the search key behavior to launch an application on a short press or a long press. I have personally left the search button intact on a short press as I use it way too often, but a long press launches Twitter, which is one of my most used applications that I’d often like to switch to quickly.

12 Recent Applications and Modified Search Key Behavior

7. Browse Incognito

CM7 brings several improvements to the Android browser, including instantly reflowing the text if you pinch to zoom; inverting the colors for less power usage on AMOLED screens; and selecting a user agent to open pages as if you are on a Mac, an iPhone, or even IE6. However, the stellar feature is the Incognito mode, which is like the feature of the same name on Chrome, or Private Browsing mode on Firefox. Simply said, it will not keep track of your browsing or downloading history or your cookies.

8. Notification Bar Power Widget

If you are as much of a control freak as me, you will want to keep tabs on how your phone acts at any given time. WiFi, bluetooth, data, brightness, and other toggles need to be readily accessible, and CM7 brings that to your notification bar. You can set how many toggles appear there, their color, order, and whether or not the notification screen closes after you toggle something. Its a power user dream come true.

Notification Bar Power Widget

9. Performance Improvements

Other than the obvious speed improvements that CM7 brings you out of the box, it also allows you to set the CPU usage and profiles on your phone, for either high performance or a more conservative usage, for example. You can also lock the home screen and the messaging application in the memory so they do not close if you ever run low on RAM.

10. Features For The Geeks

If the above does not sound geeky enough for you, try looking at what CM7 offers in terms of OpenVPN and DSP Equalizer. Unfortunately, I am not knowledgeable on either of these, but if you are interested in audio performance or tunneling and VPN tweaking, then this might be right up your alley.