Jelly Bean arrives for the Galaxy S III via CyanogenMod 10 Preview

Samsung may take their own sweet time in rolling out Jelly Bean for the Galaxy S III but the impatient folks over at XDA Developers are hard at work porting Google’s latest and greatest over to other phones, the latest being Samsung’s current flagship. Team CyanogenMod have released an early preview of CyanogenMod 10 ROM for Galaxy S III users. You can download it and give it a go by simply hitting this link. Do remember however, that this is just an early build and there are a lot of little bugs and glitches in the ROM so you might not want to use it as a daily ROM. All the instructions are posted in the link itself and if you’ve rooted or flashed a custom ROM in the past, it’s pretty straight forward. CyanogenMod 10 is currently supported by the international version of the S III as well as the US-based carrier locked ones, that feature Qualcomm’s Krait SoC, so make sure you download the right package for your phone.

Try out CM10 now!

While this early preview is a promising start, we don’t expect a stable version to come out any time soon, not until the team releases a stable CM 9 ROM. Earlier this month, the team posted an update on Google+ that outlines the progress of the build and when we should expect it. In a nutshell, they’ll begin work on CM10, once they are able to release a stable build of CM9. The team has also confirmed that porting ‘Project Butter’ over to other devices shouldn’t be much of an issue. While there might be some breakage in existing libs, there’s nothing that a small hack won’t fix. Also, building a CM10 ROM shouldn’t take as long as CM9, since Jelly Bean is just a tweaked version of Ice Cream Sandwich. One of the reasons, why it’s taking this long to build a stable CM9 ROM is that they started from scratch with CM9. Since ICS was a major overhaul over Gingerbread, the team decided to rewrite all the enhancements from the ground up. This prolonged the development cycle, but the end result should be worth waiting for. For CM10, they just have to incorporate the new code into CM9, which should be a painless process. 

Samsung is also very aware of the fact that many of their US-based clientele are demanding an unlocked Galaxy S III on certain networks, so the company recently launched a ‘Developers Edition’ which comes with a unlocked bootloader so users can easily install custom ROMs even though they may be locked into Verizon’s network. 

Here are some of the highlights of the S III once more:

• 4.8-inch capacity touchscreen display with a 1280 x 720 pixel resolution
• 3G, EDGE/GPRS and Wi-Fi capabilities for net access
• GPS with A-GPS support for Google Maps
• Bluetooth with A2DP and USB 2.0 (Micro)
• 8MP camera with LED flash and secondary camera up front
• FM radio
• 16GB internal + microSD card support for up to 32GB more memory