Tehknospace

If you’re big on personalization, then you must look at the color of the Android status bar icons, selection boxes, highlight texts, and wonder why can’t you change any of them. After all, a new wallpaper can only go so far in refreshing the look of your handset. With Theme Chooser baked into CM7, you can pick by default one of three available themes, or download any of the CM7 themes available in the Android Market. I’m personally a fan of the work of UpwardSpiral, who provides several colored free themes. I can switch through them every week, and it’s almost like I have a brand new phone every time.

CM7 comes with several tweaks for the lockscreen — including music controls, several lock styles, unlocking with the trackball if your phone has one — but the winning feature is the gesture support. Simply wake your phone and draw a gesture on your lockscreen, and a plethora of actions are accessible: opening an application, toggling the flashlight or sound, dialing or messaging a contact, getting maps directions… It’s brilliantly simple and it’s a huge time saver.

For example, if I draw a C on my lockscreen, it opens the Camera. No longer do I need to unlock my phone, look for the Camera icon, and then tap to launch it. A “G” opens the Gallery, an “S” opens SoundHound, a circle toggles the flashlight… Basically, the sky is the limit, and I have set it to the actions that I don’t necessarily use frequently (the homescreen is for that), but that I usually need super quickly.

Other than themes, there are some cool animation effects in CM7. For example, you can set the screen to play the CRT animation available on the Nexus S when it’s switching off and on. You can also set the overscroll effect to glow or bounce, so when you scroll a bit too quickly and reach the end of a list, it signals that to you. Another neat trick is allowing you to rotate the screen 180 degrees, so you can even use your phone upside down.

Nothing to do with Google Goggles; this is for those who know they get drunk at times, or would really like to avoid dialing someone’s number or messaging them by mistake. Goggles is for that. It’s like a second check on your outgoing calls and messages to prevent you from doing something you might regret later on.

I wouldn’t be a fan of CM7 if not for its speed. For all its tweaks and options, it’s amazing how fast it runs. Even with over 115 applications installed right now, and several of them running, I have 192MB free RAM, and my phone doesn’t slow down, reboot or restart the home process when I open a new application. It sounds simple, but the Desire Z only has a 800MHz processor, and it crawled under Sense. For example, opening the Applications list under Settings used to take over a minute when I was running Sense; now it takes less than 5 seconds.