In an update on the CyanogenMod blog today, Cyanogen gave us our first details on device support for the forthcoming Ice Cream Sandwich-based CyanogenMod 9: the first SoCs supported will be TI's OMAP 4, Qualcomm's MSM8660 and MSM7x30, and Samsung's Exynos. Support for NVIDIA's Tegra 2 tablets should also come early. As we reported previously, we should begin to see builds of CM9 for some devices as early as January.

While these newer chips will get early attention, Cyanogen said that support for most of the devices compatible with the Gingerbread-based CyanogenMod 7 would be forthcoming - he singled out Qualcomm's QSD8250 and the Google Nexus One as examples of what the team would be targeting on the low-end. Unfortunately for some, he also singled out the original Motorola Droid (which uses an older TI OMAP3430 and just 256MB of RAM) as a device which definitely wouldn't be supported, advising Droid owners that it is "time to upgrade."

He went on to detail some of the changes and challenges in development - while Google added features in Ice Cream Sandwich that obviate the need for some of CM7's customizations, the team still plans to improve the process for users who build CyanogenMod from source code manually, and also to introduce a new music app, file manager, and app launcher. Ice Cream Sandwich has also broken a number of proprietary graphics and camera drivers, but Cyanogen is confident that these obstacles can be overcome.

Source: CyanogenMod Blog