Well, well, well! The device that started Samsung’s Galaxy success story – the original Galaxy S I9000, continues to amaze us with its capabilities. The Galaxy S was Samsung’s flagship device released in 2010, and debuted with Android 2.1 Froyo on board, and subsequently got bumped up to Gingerbread 2.3.

When it was time for some Ice Cream Sandwich, Samsung announced that the Galaxy S would not make the list of devices to move up the Android version ladder, and after a few months of hide-and-seek, finally released a value pack firmware update for this awesome device which gave it some of the key features from Android 4.0.

But the popularity of this device among the developer community was so high, that fully working and stable Android 4.0 ICS based Custom ROMs started getting churned out, and at one point, the Galaxy S was running a working ICS ROM, when its successor, the much more capable Galaxy S2 did not have a stable Android 4.0 ROM out.

It would appear that the Samsung Galaxy S has not lost its standing in the developer community, with an AOSP based Alpha version of Android 4.2 has been developed for this resilient device. This is totally awesome, considering this would be the fifth iteration of the Android OS that the Galaxy S is seeing. That speaks a lot about this device, given the fact that most devices do not see on an average of two iterations of Android, either due to hardware getting outdated, or due to lack of developer community interest in the device.

Moving on to the actual ROM, developer DerTeufel1980 who also gave us the HellyBean for the I9000, has compiled this ROM from Android 4.2 AOSP source, using the CyanogenMod device tree. As I mentioned earlier, this is an early Alpha, and there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. However,the good news is that even in this nascent state, the ROM boots up fine on the SGS, audio and most apps seem to be working. Wifi works, but network connectivity seems to be broken at this point.

Personally, I would love to see Android 4.2 booting up on this phone, and I’m sure there are plenty of others who feel the same way. Practically, it might be a long shot to get a 100% working ROM, though it is likely that we could still see a reasonably stable ROM which just might qualify as a daily driver, albeit with some minor hiccups. On the other, strange miracles have been known to happen at the hands of the developer community, and we wish one happens for the Galaxy S.

The early Alpha is available for download too, and can be flashed through CWM. But we would advise against it if you do not have a secondary phone. Those who want to follow the progress of 4.2 development for the I9000, can drop in at the official source thread through the Via link below.