Have a Vibrant? Want some ROMS?

I got a T-mobile Vibrant a few months ago. That is Samsung's Galaxy S smartphone. I can tell you that I did not stay with the stock ROM for long. At first I had no way to access the phone through a computer as I hadn't received the USB cable connection. As soon as I bought a new one, I was on the hunt for the right ROM. At first I updated to Samsung's other official ROM, which was the new FROYO 2.2. The phone had come with Android OS 2.1. Not being satisfied, and looking for as much awesome as possible, I went over to xda-developers.com They have a section specifically for the Samsung Vibrant, here. Over in the Android Development section you will find ROMS, Kernels etc for your perusal. Below is a recall of the ROMS I tested. I will cover how to install each in a future post.

 First:

Bionix 1.3.1 found here

 I originally found this ROM through XDA but it is easier to find on the ROMS official site. It was a decent experience, and I thought it would be the best ROM I could try, especially after my attempt at using the next ROM in this list. A review of the ROM is provided below along with pics and some features.

 

The battery life was excellent. I would get beyond a day with regular usage. Wifi with no 3g or 3g with no wifi, music playback, browsing etc. The interface was responsive and the added features were welcome. I used it with the Overstock kernel here.


Second:

The newly released   CyanogenMod 7 for the Samsung Vibrant , found here.

Unfortunately this ROM is no longer supported. The official statement from the team is as follows

We are no longer supporting the Vibrant due to the inability to dial 911. We consider the issues related to this unresolvable without source code from Samsung related to the Radio interface layer and its interactions with the Audio layers and have taken the decision to no longer support this. We apologize for the inconvenience and strongly suggest that Vibrant users use a Samsung ROM due to the 911 issues with any ROMs based on open source code.

 -SGS Team/Team Hacksung/Teamdouche

The ROM was attractive and responsive. Possibly the smoothest of the ROMS and it had some decent features. The really bad thing about it and the reason I had to get rid of it, was the battery life. It was horrible compared to the other 2 ROMs. I got 6-11 hours while using it about the same as the rest.  A review follows.

It was and is a very nice ROM.

Finally:

MIUI

There are a lot of MIUI based ROMs floating around. I settled with  MIUI Prime 360 Vr 3.1 FFC. I believe I had installed another one prior to this and did not have that great an experience with it. I cannot recall which it was at this time. I installed this after returning to Bionix for a while. The MIUI I had before gave me battery life about as poor as the CM7 MOD did so I went back to what I knew would give me great battery. I decided to give MIUI another go but with a different, more standard version. I was not disappointed. You can check it out in the video below

I get roughly the same battery life as the Bionix ROM but with something of a better feeling interface. One thing I liked about the CM MOD was that it would let you mount storage to the computer without the hassle that came with the stock rom and Bionix. There is a simple toggle that comes up when the cable is connected and that lets you manage that function. MIUI also has this feature. For me, this has been the best ROM though I am always keeping an eye out. Looking forward to what the community can produce in terms of ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich) Ports/MODS. It is very unlikely that Samsung will provide an official ICS version for Galaxy S users.