I'm happily using sawbones999's JB on ZTE Force from Freedompop. Thanks!
I'm most concerned about battery life. It seems that, except for wifi, most of the battery is not used by the screen brightness nor even supposedly resource hungry apps, but rather the sensors in "Android System".
Using the Google Play store app "Battery Monitor Widget", on the statistics tab it lists two sensors as using the overwhelming majority of battery (since previous charge):
30.67% out of 55.61% for Freescale MMA845X Accelerometer
18.39% out of 55.61% for Light Sensor TSL2771
At one point during my experiments I was able to get rid of the accelerometer power usage (I think I by disabling the auto screen rotate). I have tried to disable the automatic brightness detection, but that didn't seem to affect the light sensor battery usage. So at this point I'm most concerned about the light sensor.
I also tried using the "Hardware Disabler" app (I can't find it on the Google Play store now, & I can't recall where I found it), but none of the devices listed were the light sensor (I determined this by doing a web search for each of the listed device model numbers).
Running "lsmod" on the "Terminal Emulator" app only lists wlan.
I did a web search for "linux tsl2771" and found
http://lwn.net/Articles/439746/, which shows that this chip also provides the proximity sensor. While I'd like to just disable this chip (maybe there's a kernel boot parameter that can be used?), I'd also still like to use this device as a phone, which means that we need the proximity sensor, so disabling just the light sensor functionality may be what's required to reduce the battery drain. How can this be achieved?