With the recent release of the Jelly Bean SDK, teams have been working tirelessly to reincorporate their tweaks and customizations. One team has made some incredible progress on a few devices including the Galaxy S III, the Motorola Xoom, and the Transformer series (TF201, and the TF101). While the ROMs are still obviously a work in progress, you can tell just how much Project Butter effects the performance of the device and get a feel for the new OS and features along with it. Today, we’re going to be putting some of these to the test up against the stock Nexus 7.
How did Project Butter effect the device?
With the recently introduced Project Butter promising to essentially redefine the Android OS as a whole, how well did it work? Very well. Opening menus, switching between applications, and browsing the internet have all been vastly improved. Although still a test build, you can see the full performance increase when doing pretty much anything throughout the device. Comparing the Prime to the newly released brother tablet, the Nexus 7, is similar to comparing two of the same device. Using similar hardware, the Nexus 7 and Prime were loading webpages, magazines, applications, and various menus just as quick as the other: neither significantly outperforming the other. While the custom ROM world will only get better as time passes, the ROMs available now show just how much of an improvement the newest version of Android brings to the table, and how well it can revive what seemed like a hopeless device.
Is web browsing still a shoddy experience on the Prime?
Web browsing has been one of the Prime’s worst experiences. Though, I can confidently say that the experience has been improved dramatically. Although only browsing through the Chrome for Android instead of the default browser, I have yet to experience any force closes on the browser. Loading websites and scrolling through them allowed for full speed access to reading and zooming with very minimal lag; the only lag coming from the text re-rendering while zooming in and out which is to be expected. I believe that with the usual update schedule and timing of Cyanogenmod that the tablet’s performance will only be improved. While the ROM is still in preview state, what will the full release bring to other devices that have hardware fast enough to run it? We could see the Android OS becoming fluid and stable on nearly every device.
What’s broken?
Though many things are still unfinished, including the custom toggles among other CM9 tweaks, the ROM is completely usable in it’s current state. Benchmarks show it “performing” less than the ICS counterpart, but many of the ROMs have had plenty of to implement overclocking and scheduling changes. While damn near everything works, we do have an early list of issues that have yet to been ironed out: auto brightness has some issues doing its job, GPS is reported as not working (did it ever on this tablet?), and the external MicroSD card slot on the side of the tablet is inaccessible as of now. If you can live without those few features, I would most certainly jump on top of the preview. It’s amazing how much of an increase in performance that Jelly Bean and CyanogenMod 10 has brought us.
Here are the links to XDA so you can thank the original author and grab the download for yourself: XDA Developers Transformer Prime thread
Have any other questions about the ROM before flashing? Drop a comment and we’ll test it out for you, to ensure that you can use your device fully before switching over!
