[Galaxy Tab 8.9 SGH-i957 Android Development] nrvate:
NOTE: Due to the fact that the Jellybean build went smoother and we all want the latest candy anyway, I've scrapped this effort. Get your candy at: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1867579

DISCLAIMER: This is a test build. It works for me, and I spent a good bit of time cleaning up the rough edges and fixing a few silly things, but for all I know it will make zombie worms run out of your tab resulting in your untimely death without warning. If you're not comfortable hacking a Galaxy-series android, probably best to wait for the official update from Samsung and be a good compliant end user and update with Kies... If the death star ever lets the ICS update out, that is.

As Cyanogen likes to say on his work in progress repos: MAY EAT YOUR CAT

ALSO: This is wholly unsupported and I have no affiliation with the Cyanogenmod team. If you bug them for help with this, they will send a laser-equipped triangle-shaped monolith of a hovercraft to your location and decimate anything in your general vicinity with insane force and completely reckless abandon. Well, maybe not, but you get the idea. Don't piss off superman.

First, the bad.. I'm going to start a list of what seems broken:

- Camera. Tablet reboots on snapping photo, preview is 90 degrees off.. weird.

- Google Talk: Looks related to the camera problem. All seems to center around some camera effects issue. Talk.apk from the original honeycomb image does work, so if you need google talk, just swap it out.

Taking what I learned from building CM10 for this device, I grabbed the CM9 tree, which is supposedly final now, and built that too. This time, I'm dropping a flashable .zip, since CM9 is "solid" and won't be updated any more. That doesn't mean this is perfect, as Cyanogenmod is only the android framwork -- The dirty low level bits still come from the OEM, and samsung hasn't released those yet, but.. It's good enough for me, so... Maybe it is for you too!

Since AT&T is still jerking around with the official ICS update, worried about their pathetic "value added" software instead of dropping a clean build, there's no official, fully regression tested radio/RIL combo... So I've yanked the RIL from the Note, a very similar device. It seems to work, but may or may not get LTE at first -- Might stick in HSPA mode a bit, might get LTE, it's a little flaky. May work better in your area, may also depend on network conditions. I'm not completely up to speed on cellular tech so the cryptic debug output doesn't say much to me. However, unlike my work with Jellybean, at least the stock radio works on ICS... For me. If you flash this, please share your 3G/4G experience, and be sure to indicate which carrier and area you are in, if you don't mind.

In Settings, Wireless/Network, More..., Mobile Networks... There is a network mode option. Be sure that is set to LTE/GSM, not GSM. In ICS, this setting actually seems to work - In Jellybean, it does nothing.

WiFi should work without any effort, bluetooth too, and it has the phone app, so you can voice call. Video playback works, audio works, GPS works, and I didn't run into troubles with about 10-15 of the more popular apps from the market.

Tether works, and I changed the tether service to hand out the google DNS server (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4) to clients, because AT&T's DNS tends to be annoyingly slow.

I also noticed stagefright (a video rendering library, among other things) refused to play anything besides the base-quality x264 videos, so I commented out the retarded bailout (return with unspecified error) in stagefright.so, because all the better-quality youtube videos just refused to play with no reason, just a generic error (what a POS) - So have fun watching HD videos on youtube, although some of the top-quality ones (1080) are a bit on the tough side for the GPU to render. Ah well, beats a non-sensical error.

Samsung did already release the 3.0.8 ICS kernel, for the SHV-140, which is the same hardware with a different radio.. That kernel, in it's .config, has an option for the SGH-i957, so I built that and stuffed resulting kernel binary into boot.img, and packed that into the zip. boot.img also enables early ADB, so you can adb shell into it even if the framework completely shats itself, which it sure did before I got the proper production-level Adreno 220 drivers straight from qualcomm into the build. So the main advantage of this build over jellybean right now is an official Samsung kernel built from their unmodified source code and official release Qualcomm GPU driver binaries.

I also changed apns-conf.xml to use the proper "Broadband" APN for AT&T LTE data-only, as is usually sold with these tablets.

To get this going, start with TWRP recovery -- if you don't have it already, visit that thread in this forum and get yourself hooked up, drop the zip in /sdcard, boot into recovery and..

1) Make a complete TWRP backup before you do anything further! (of course)

2) Wipe -> Factory Reset

3) Wipe -> System

4) Install the .zip I'm about to link you to

5) Reboot, receive bacon.

http://d-h.st/W3X

I've not tested everything and anything, and some things may not be fixable until we get the binary bits from Samsung when they drop ICS officially for this device. However, please report any problems you have here. If I can find time to reproduce and fix, you might get lucky ;)

Enjoy! Honeycomb got boring long ago!