My Motorola Atrix is running on Gingerbread which is a little outdated by now. The only way to get it updated at the current state of writing is an unofficial update to ICS/JB which is tempting because of the new functionality which I really miss here.

Motorola promises an update, but so far, the discussion is pretty hot and rumors appear. So what? Waiting?

A small search did lead to Jokersax and his fellows at the xda forum. So the first step was rooting the device and getting the Clockworx ROM manager installed. A fine tool I have to admit to install and backup ROMs. That way I am able to keep the stock rom in shape – just in case. In theory.

Downloading and flashing (+ emptying various caches) was really a breeze. The first boot into the system is pretty slow as caches and stuff are being built. A question of patience, honestly. But Patience was never my strength in such cases.

After doing a basic setup, the phone was ready for being used. But there’s something making me nervous: there are no drivers for the fingerprint sensor as I am using that instead of a PIN. Sure, it’s not the top security solution, but it prevents friends and co workers from peeking into the device. If you ask me, if someone really needs to steal data, that guy would extract that stuff from the memory. But regarding full device encryption, the device doesn’t offer enough power for my taste.

Another issue is the camera as it doesn’t work with proper speed. Taking snapshots was more or less pretty impossible. Nevertheless anything else did run pretty smooth and I didn’t see many crashes. Anyone who’s not depending on cam and fingerprint could really flash and make use of ICS. But that’s just my personal opinion.

My experience so far lasted for 3 weeks and it was a pretty pleasant ride, but due to the missing fingerprint and camera I had to revert things back to the stock rom. But honestly, I really miss the ICS features…