This one goes out to the more adventurous among our readers. CyanogenMod has announced the availability of CyanogenMod 9 Nightlies for the Bell Optimus LTE and AT&T Nitro HD. In case you hadn’t heard, CM9 Nightlies have also been available for a few days now for AT&T’s Galaxy S II. So, first the fun stuff, then the obligatory disclaimers.

CyanogenMod 9 offers all the benefits of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) and then some to any enterprising users who care to root their phones and install it. Most certainly a faster offer than waiting for your carrier to get around to it and you can remove all that carrier bloatware from your phone—no, I don’t want the Amazon music app, thank you very much Verizon!

Now, I promised warnings, and I don’t aim to disappoint! This build is called a Nightly because it will be updated, out of necessity, nearly nightly. While CyanogenMod is top-rate, and I have no problem endorsing any of its final builds, this is not a final build. Something will go wrong with your device on a Nightly, possibly something permanent, aka “bricking.” So, only install this on a device that you can do without for at least a few days, and only if you—like me—thoroughly enjoy troubleshooting and tinkering.

For those who would love some of ICS’ features but don’t care to ‘root’ anything other than your rosebush, I would highly recommend Go Launcher EX. It provides many awesome UI tweaks, and while it doesn’t provide direct performance increases like ICS, I find using my phone to be significantly faster while using it.

[CyanogenMod+ | 2 | Download | S II Download via pocketnow]