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Samsung has sent a shiny new Galaxy S 2 to Atin, a prominent Cyanogen hacker, so his team can work on porting the alternative CyanogenMod firmware to the Android device, Know Your Mobile reports.
CyanogenMod offers a range of features not found in the official builds of Android including a DSP audio equaliser, themes, incognito mode, lockscreen gestures, an open virtual private network service and control over outgoing calls and SMS texts, and is currently available on over 25 Android handsets.
Atin initially tweeted: “W00t! Just received the SGS 2 from Samsung so we can work on CyanogenMod for it! You will not hear me bad-mouth Samsung again. :)”
This confirmation of the effectiveness of this piece of marketing was followed by other positive comments, such as “Nice phone! Looking forward to working on this seriously starting tonight,” and, “It looks cleaner, and therefore less problems we hope.”
He confirmed they hadn’t abandoned work on the original Galaxy S, and noted Samsung had been unable to share some hardware details because they were under NDA to other equipment manufacturers.
Hackers are prominent, opinion-forming figures across most mobile operating system flavours, particularly Android and iOS. Whatever a company’s public stance on hacked phones and tablets is, it does seem as if they’re quite happy to see what these unofficial communities come up with.
After all, these talented coders are often the biggest fans of mobile hardware and they’re quite happy to work for free. Samsung may not be ready to hire a hacker like Apple has with MobileNotifier’s developer, but it may still get some interesting ideas for future Android skins. In the end, that benefits ordinary users who don’t hack open their phones.
HTC is following a similar line after U-turning the decision to lock its bootloaders.
Hackers usually have to rely on sourcing their own equipment in order to test out alternative software. Though the iPhone Dev Team has cracked open the current developer version of iOS 5, you’re not likely to find Apple sending them a shiny new iPhone 5 or iPad 3 to work on.
