Google finally hands over Android 4.1 to the AOSP (Android Open Source Project), currently though, the only proprietary binaries available for devs to feast on are the the ones meant for the Galaxy Nexus and Google’s newly-announced Nexus 7 Tablet.
The Nexus S and Motorola Xoom’s will follow shortly as announced by Google’s Jean-Baptiste Queru.
This is great news for us custom-rom users since the people over at Cyanogenmod and several other dev groups now have unrestricted access to the Android 4.1 source code. Surely it won’t take long for Jellybean-flavored ROMs to start flooding online forums, hopefully we may even be able to get our hands on a Jellybean ROM outfitted with the impressively efficient Linaro Kernel in the near future — even though it sort of competes with Project Butter — well, one can never have too much of a good thing right?
It’s worth noting that the highly popular CM9 and AOKP roms [rolled with the Linaro Kernel] for the Galaxy Nexus are said to be smoother than any other stock ICS Android experience currently available, this can be proven by numerous testimonials from our folks over at GN forums who have already test-driven the official firmwares. Both derivatives of the Android 4.0 ICS are still undergoing continuous improvement and some users have mentioned that while the Linaro-laden ROMs indeed ‘feels faster’, the improvement isn’t as jarring as they have expected.
The internet search giant has not given any hints regarding the availability of complete factory images for the Nexus devices we have mentioned above (including the Xoom), not to worry though, the official builds of Android 4.1 will surely be made available once Google starts rolling out OTA updates to the masses.
You can take your shot at trying out some Linaro ROMs by clicking here, just type ‘Linaro’ on the search box and you’ll pretty much know what to do from there.
{sources: google groups}
Linaro Forums: XDA developers, GN Forums, Android Central
