ROM: CM10.1 12/28/12 Nightly
Kernel: Franco kernel r 22
Homescreen:
Have to love the circle battery with the percentage.
I have been using this setup for over a day now and I feel quite confident I will not be returning to stock anytime soon. Stability is top notch. I didn't experience a single crash or bug during my time with Cyanogenmod. Without the CM boot animation and the extra settings/options you'd think this ROM was stock.
Battery life:
I ran multiple benchmarks, download/installed over 50 apps from the market, streamed a movie on Netflix, took a few pictures, browsed the web, browsed Facebook, talked on the phone for ~20 minutes, and did some texting. Through all this I achieved 3.5 hours screen on time with 12 hours on battery. I feel with fewer benchmarking runs and app installs 5 hours screen time would not be out of the question.
Antutu:
EDIT: Notice the 13% battery drop in 8 minutes of benchmarking. This really killed the battery...
The run on the left is with the CPU underclocked to 1.1Ghz and the GPU underclocked to 200Mhz. The run on the right is with the CPU at 1.5Ghz and the GPU at 487Mhz. During benchmarking the phone got slightly warm at best, but never hot. I can't believe how much less heat this phone generates thanks to Franco's kernel. I won't go into specifics, but it bypasses Qualcomm's proprietary code all together and implements much more efficient usage of the phone's resources. The phone did manage to get hot during GTA Vice City, but that's only to be expected. During normal usage this phone got a little warm, but nothing i'd describe as hot.
I've been constantly tweaking the phone and playing around with extras in Cyanogenmod. Running at only 1.1Ghz with the GPU underclocked I still can't see any noticeable lagg in the UI. Everything runs smooth and load times are great. I'm not sure when CM will reach a "stable" milestone, but in my opinion it's already there. One thing I like is the ability to open quick settings by pulling down the notification bar on the right, but open up notifications by pulling the bar down on the left.
To all the recovering flashoholics out there, let the sin begin!