From Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich

I'm starting to have serious doubts that Samsung will ever release Ice Cream Sandwich for the Galaxy S. I've installed a few Gingerbread ROMs. They're all good, but provide only incremental improvements and features, like Face Unlock. I think I have to take the next step with Ice Cream Sandwich.

I've trawled the XDA Developer forums for a few days now, and I've decided to use Slim ICS ROM and Semaphone Kernel. Upgrade time is probably 15 minutes - much less than the time I took to research the process. Before anything else, download a CM9 ROM, the Slim Base, the Slim Essentials, and copy them all to your device's internal storage. Coming from a GB ROM, you'll need to reboot into recovery, then Wipe data, Format system (found under Mounts and Storage). Flash the CM9 ROM. Again, reboot into recovery, then flash Base, then flash Essentials. If the Base flash is too quick, then something has gone wrong. Just flash the Base again. Finally, Reboot to system, and that's it.

In my case, I got bootloops after flashing the CM9 ROM. Had to replace the battery, then boot into recovery via Volume Up, Home, and the Power button. Reflashed CM9, and everything is fine afterwards. First impression:

• default 182 dpi
• clean Roboto font
• very responsive and very slick
• way too many configuration options via ASS, Device Settings, and NSTools

Reinstalled all of my favourite apps. Everything worked except for Dropsync 1.65. Upgraded to 1.68, downgraded to 1.65, then 1.61. Only time it worked again was when I upgraded to the latest 2.0.4.