If you were an early adopter and now have an aging Android tablet which is not being supported by the manufacturer, or at least they are very slow at releasing updates, you can always try flashing it with a custom ROM. The Tech Report tried this out on a Galaxy Nexus using a ROM from CyanogenMod, a fairly well known provider of such things. While it certainly improved the performance of the OS, there were several issues including the failure of GPS which prompted them to try out other ROMs. Head on over to read up on the most current images you can flash to, their providers and the difference between the two types of ROMs currently available.
"In his latest blog post, TR's Geoff Gasior recounts his experience trying to revitalize an aging Android tablet with custom Jelly Bean ROMs."
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It is a shame that groups
It is a shame that groups such as cyanogenmod who have very limited access to driver source code and other low level hardware info are able to release a better implementation of android than the companies that made the actual device and thus have 100% access to everything.
Sadly cyanogenmod has been slipping in their support cycles in such a way that they no longer extend device support by much, eg A device that originally came with android 2.3 with no plans for 4.0 from the manufacture, is unlikely to get CM9 or 10
while in the past, cyanogenmod would extend support by providing OS updates for upwards of 2 years after the manufacture stopped supporting the device (eg taking a deve that lost support at android 1.6, and moving it to 2.3.4 over the years.
I currently have a HTC mytouch 3g slide and it runs android 2.3.4 and cyanogenmod has no plans to port over CM9 though another user did his own alpha port of CM9 (unstable) it did make the OS more responsive and also improved the CPU score in antutu and quadrant (though GPU test failed due to lack of drivers)
In the past, cyanogenmod dropped support when the device fell below the minimum requirements of the latest OS, but now they drop support as soon as the manufacture drops support (this sadly is making them less relevant as you gain little more than root access and overclocking)
PS loving CM9 on my HP touchpad, With both cores overclocked to 1.89GHz, and the GPU overclocked from 266MHz to 320MHz, the device is performing extremely good (eg I can use stickit (multi window app) to run 4 720p videos smoothly at the same time, or game while watching a video.
It isn’t just for old devices
It isn’t just for old devices either. I have a galaxy nexus which, although a year old, still had the most current 4.2.1 android install. It was laggy though and felt unoptimized and I had some issues/bugs (such as data disconnects) that I wanted to see if were fixed in a ROM. Last night I installed CM10 which has 4.1.2 as the OS version but it seems much quicker. Customizations like the shade widgets are super appreciated also. I need more time to test, but I think I have taken my nexus phone off the google release cycle.