I've been waiting for ages for version 7 of the incredibly brilliant CyanogenMod (a community built version of Android mobile platform with plenty of extra bells and whistles that you love your phone to have).
Around 3 weeks ago I started to download the nightly version of CM7 just so that I could have a feel of what gingerbread (version 2.3 of Android) would be like. I really like it, but the stability of the builds were not great in specific areas. Generally it was sound and was immediately using is as part of my daily mobile phone, but the dialer and few other parts would be problematic. The thing is, it wasn't really the fault of CM7 (ish). They were trying to get gingerbread out very early using the same Android build that the Nexus S (first phone to officially support gingerbread, made by samsung) and fit that on older devices.
Every update I'd be hoping that someone would have figured out the issues, but it wasn't the case, and there was even an application called Dewonkificator that was created by someone in the community to continually restart a service to patch the issue. That worked, but its certianly no final fixture.
Well a few days ago Google finally released Andoird 2.3.3 which had Nexus One support which the CM team promptly included in their Release Candidate build. I installed that today and what a difference it has made. Completely stable, super fast, tons of options and the phone once again feels like a brand new device.
I think the Nexus One has been the best investment in mobile technology I've ever made. Over the last 2 years I've had it, it feels like I've recieved about 5 new devices. And this is all down to the strong community side of Android, and especially the CyanogenMod team!
Now I have to start to contemplate whether I should invest in a Xoom tablet. It's still not a tablet like I have as my PC tablet, but I'll certianly be looking closely at the device. The IPad 2 does look and sound good, but I don't have any Apple technologies and it simply couldn't fit into the way I work... totally untethered. I've noticed that Apple are trying to defend their ground with the only real strength the ipad has, which is how many apps they have for the iPad than the totally new honeycomb has, but look how that has quickly gone ahush with the mobile phone versions of each platform. I doubt I'm the only one seeing that this will be a short lived fact, and these devices are large longer term investments. Whats most to note here is that the fact that Apple are trying to highlight these things means their are very concerned.