[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] jonstrong:
Excellent ROM - thanks

I've been following along, reading all (well, many...) of the Jelly Bean threads for the VzW Galaxy Nexus and waiting to try flashing until I was pretty confident that I wouldn't be spending hours tweaking, looking for different bootloaders, patches, fixes, etc. Not that I don't enjoy tweaking (I've been in software for many many years, in pretty much every role) -- just that I use this Galaxy Nexus for work as well as play, I can't afford to have it out of commission very long, and I don't want to wind up staying up all night wiping, flashing and restoring apps repeatedly...

Anyway - as I read the threads, it's clear that pretty much everyone loves Jelly Bean, different ROM cooks add different features that fans have grown used to, etc. I didn't expect to find one that was exactly "better" than the others. But I've been very interested to see two things about this thread and Xenon HD -

- the thread grows, but is significantly smaller than a few of the other JB ROM threads

- I'm seeing incredibly few bug / problem reports here, yet I see a pretty steady stream of issues in every single other JB ROM thread

I suspect that these two are correlated, as it seems that much of the bulk in other threads has to do with bugs, fixes, work around and new version discussions. Again - I'm not bashing - I fully appreciate what kind of detective work, analysis, development and rigor goes into this kind of work. Just noticing that Xenon HD gives the impression of being far freer of issues than the others I'm reading about. Maybe my imagination or maybe I'm misinterpreting what I see. Just my impression...

Based on this, I backed everything up 3 ways last night - ROM Toolbox and Manager backups, Nandroid on phone (virtual SD) and copied to my PC, Apps backed up separately, APN and WiFi info backed up, media backed up (whole SD card), etc. Almost forgot - also did a full Titanium backup (my apps and data - not system).

Unregistered Google Wallet, wiped the phone (cache, Dalvik, system / factory reset) and installed Xenon HD v6. Up and running again FAST... restored my apps, and had a bit of tweaking to do. Found a copy of the new version of Wallet that uses any credit card and side-loaded it. I found that when I restored my Apex Pro on top of the built-in copy of Apex it kept force-closing - until I wiped data and cache for the APK and it started working just fine -- then I set the option to use the latest beta version of Apex Pro and installed it -- sweet! even silkier as it's built around JB code, and I have all the neat Apex features on top of JB.

Found my copy of the Google Ears APK (sound search), installed and dropped the widget on a screen... All 96 other apps are installed, and so far seem to be running very nicely indeed.

I've only run into a couple of hiccups so far:

- Although I had backed up Apex settings and Desktop data via Apex Pro prior to flashing Xenon HD, I was only able to restore the Apex settings file - the desktop data restore gave me an error message, and I'm questionning whether the restored Apex settings actually worked. Possible this is an app level issue, but I wound up having to pretty much recreate my Apex environment manually this time.

- I went back to beta.swype.com, logged in, and sent myself the swype installer again - and installed the latest version of the Swype beta, despite lots of grumbling I saw on their forum about JB. It does seem to have recovered my custom dictionary (app data, I assume), but it is not quite a perfect on JB as it had been on ICS. It seems, though, that something is still "learning", in that it's gotten better and better over the past few hours. Seems to work flawlessly in the email and calendar apps and in SMS, but gets a bit flakey in some web browser fields. Still better for me than the stock keyboard or any other 3rd party keyboard - but that's personal preference to a large extent.

- The only "error" that seems to actually be an issue with either JB itself or this build is the way that dictionary / spelling corrections are handled. When I'm entering a word, if it's not recognized it's highlighted as expected, I click on the option to add to my dictionary - I go through with the following dialog and confirm the spelling I want added. It all LOOKS good, but it seems that only about half of the dictionary additions actually happen, while others don't seem to be applied. I have to experiment a bit more, but this might be a real issue (although one that won't slow me down much!).

Overall - excellent work, excellent experience. I'm looking forward to continued development of this, and will be donating in the very near future. Thanks for all the attention to detail on this. Great ROM. This has made a really good phone into a spectacular phone.

EDIT: forgot one thing - I had to find a fix for the missing Verizon Login, but once I found and installed it, everything for VzW apps came together... Don't know WHY VzW has to make everything so difficult! All good now...