CyanogenMod 10.1 Running on the Nexus 4 (Video)

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By Joe Levi | December 4, 2012 12:51 PM

If you’ve been following Pocketnow for any length of time, you know that one of our favorite custom ROMs for Android-powered phones and tablets is CyanogenMod ROM. It’s fast, it’s lightweight, and for the most part it’s pure Android. CyanogenMod has some advantages over other ROMs, specifically the way its built allows one set of developers to maintain and improve the core ROM, and another set to maintain the many, many devices they support.

The reasons to flash a custom ROM are many and varied. Top reasons include performance improvements, increased features, and being able to run the “pure” Android experience on a phone or tablet that would otherwise have had another theme and launcher on it (TouchWiz, Sense, etc.).

Performance

One of the advantages of running CyanogenMod over a stock ROM is speed. CM ROMs are tweaked to make things go faster. These optimizations really shine when you’re running CM on a smartphone or tablet that’s came with the manufacturer’s own launcher and skin. Since the Nexus 4 comes with the pure Android experience, speed improvements aren’t going to be that remarkable — and since the version we’re talking about is a nightly (not a final, stable version), speed isn’t a priority — yet.

Here are the rundowns when running CM10.1 versus stock Android 4.2 (in parenthesis). For good measure, the benchmark scores after having applied the tweaks shown in the video are noted in square brackets.

Quadrant: 4269 [4908] (4722)

Geekbench 2: 1823 [2137] (1856)

Features not in stock

CyanogenMod comes with its usual collection of goodies: Trebuchet launcher, Profiles, Performance tweaks, and Themes. It also comes with a really powerful way to customize your notification LED.

For a fairly complete rundown, hit play and see what we’ve found so far.

Where to get the goods

If you haven’t unlocked your bootloader, rooted, installed SuperSU, and Clockwork Mod Recovery, we’ve got instructions on how to do it here: Unlocking, Rooting, and More with Nexus 4 Toolkit (Video).

From there, you’ll want to download the following: