Steve Kondik, aka Cyanogen, took to the CM Blog yesterday to drop the world a status update on the progress of the CyanogenMod 9 project. His post contained mostly good news, though it did have a sour note for OG Motorola DROID owners, as the team has officially dropped support for the device. On a more positive note, he hinted towards support for some pretty stellar devices, including the ASUS Transformer and Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Here’s what Steve had to say:

We’ve been hard at work on CM9 since Google released Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) into the wild last month, and things are slowly starting to come together. Google did a great job with ICS and added some really awesome features which in some cases replace or deprecate functionality that we had in CM7, so we are reevaluating all of our customizations. A number of devices are already up and running with CM9, and the focus is currently on getting as many devices ready as we can. The first devices (besides the Nexus S, which you can already get from Koush’s section on ROM Manager) that we’ll have ready will mostly likely be devices based on OMAP4, MSM8660/7X30, and Exynos. We also have some Tegra2 tablets in the pipeline such as the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Asus Transformer. Our goal is to provide continued support to all CM7 devices back to the QSD8250 series of devices such as the Nexus One. I don’t want to make any promises at this time, but that is the plan. And sorry Droid1 owners, we’re dropping support for you. Time to upgrade.

There are a number of challenges that we are up against. Google has made some pretty major changes to the Android framework that break compatibility with older proprietary camera and graphics drivers in order to achieve some pretty insane performance, but I am confident that the team will be able to overcome these issues like we have in the past.

For those of you who like to build CM from source yourself, you probably know that the spin-up time when starting a CM7 build is absurdly long due to the high number of devices in our repository. Koush and Arcee have put together a solution to this problem that adds new devices on-demand to your local repository, saving on both bandwidth and the long startup time. Some other great enhancements are coming too, like a completely overhauled music app, a new file manager, and a new launcher based on stock 4.0.

If you have a Nexus S, you can check out the code and build for yourself today. More devices are on the way, and I’ll send out these status updates as we make more progress.

As a longtime fan of the CyanogenMod project, I’m tickled pink to see the ongoing progress the team has made. The ROM has become available for over 60 different devices — heck, it even popped up on the HTC Univeral recently, a phone that launched way back in 2005 and originally came sporting Windows Mobile 5.0. The way I see it, the more devices the merrier. CyanogenMod is pure awesomeness. After all, it didn’t gain a following of this size for nothing.

Source: CyanogenMod Blog