Posts Tagged ‘Android’

My first Android phone was the classic HTC Dream (or G1 as it is known in some countries). It was ugly as heck but it was the spark that started my adventures in Android-land and I still feel pretty attached to it, even if I’m not using it as a primary phone anymore. I passed the Dream to my brother as his first Android phone and he’s been pretty happy with it. Hopefully he’ll move on to better and faster Android phones one day.

The Dream’s shelf life has been extended time and again, thanks to the efforts of Steve Kondik and his cohort. Their CyanogenMod releases have time and again ensured that the Dream is kept relevant, despite the dozens of new Android models we see announced every week. As of July 11th, the Dream has been given yet another new lease on life with the release candidate announcement of CyanogenMod 6, the CyanogenMod community’s port of Android 2.2 (Froyo).

I was so eager to get my Dream updated to CM6 RC1 that I rushed over yesterday evening to his office and squatted outside the building doing the upgrade. At this time, my Dream was running CyanogenMod 5.0.7. I didn’t have a chance to upgrade it to 5.0.8 as I’d been too busy to meet my brother for a while. Turned out that this caused a fair amount of drama during my upgrading efforts.

I’ve been using ROM Manager for the past month or so and it really has been a time-saver for me. Naturally, the moment I laid hands on the Dream, I downloaded ROM Manager from Market and installed it. Using ROM Manager, I installed the ClockWorkMod recovery image, overwriting the AmonRA recovery image that was previously installed. I then proceeded to download CM6 RC1 and the bundled Google apps FRF91 using ROM Manager.

At this point of time, I was smugly smiling to myself at how cool this process was. There I was, literally squatting at the sidewalk, doing an OS upgrade on my phone over 3G with no need to hook it up to a laptop or PC. That’s why I’ve said before that one of the reasons I love Android is that it’s a full-fledged peer to a PC and not just a slave to it.

After downloading the necessary files, I was prompted to select whether a backup and/or wipe should be done or not. ROM Manager then rebooted the Dream into recovery mode to complete the upgrade. Or at least that was what it was supposed to do. 3 minutes after rebooting, I was staring in alarm at the Dream stuck at the bootloader splash image. It just would not go into recovery anymore. I rebooted the phone normally and found that it still could boot into CyanogenMod 5.0.7 with no apparent issues.

After some panicky checks on the Internet, I found that CyanogenMod 5.0.7 has problems writing a recovery image, as was warned in AmonRA’s release page. Suffice to say, if you’re running 5.0.7, you cannot use it to flash your recovery image. Meh to me for not reading up adequately before doing the upgrade.

I resolved the problem by re-flashing AmonRA using fastboot as documented here. Just boot the phone into fastboot mode by holding the camera and power button simultaneously, hook it up to a laptop (yes, this is where a PC or laptop is required) and run the command “fastboot flash recovery <path to recovery image>“. Huge sighs of relief all around when I saw the familiar recovery menu items upon rebooting.

So, I proceeded to manually flash CM6 RC1 and FRF91. At first, I did not do a wipe, hoping that the upgrade from CM5 to CM6 would no necessitate this. No dice. When I rebooted the phone, I found that the whole Google account sync module was not working and I could not even add a Google account! Oh well, didn’t really have high hopes for this anyway. So I wiped the phone and then everything worked fine. It’s definitely a pain to get the phone back into an operating condition you’re used to after a wipe so I really hope that something can be done about it in the final release. I have no idea whether it’s technically possible or not so I won’t complain, I’ll just hope.

My impressions on the Dream running CM6 / Froyo: it’s noticeably faster than Eclair, but really, don’t get your hopes up too high. The Dream’s problem is with its lack of RAM. It has only 96MB of available RAM compared to 386MB on my Nexus One. The moment you switch applications, the odds of it having to be loaded from internal memory or SD card is very high and that imposes an overhead on performance. This will happen no matter what kind of swap to SD card hacks are done and it’s really pointless to hope for more. I’m just glad that my Dream is able to run the latest and greatest software when the manufacturer has long lost any interest in keeping it updated.

Kudos to the CyanogenMod team for their great work. Given that Gingerbread seems to be designed for higher CPU speeds than ever, I’m not sure whether we’ll see a CM7 for the Dream but one can always dream, no?

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After almost a week on Buzz, I have to say it’s been a blast. I love peeking in on random buzzes from people living around me using Buzz’s mobile interface. Through this, I’ve been able to get to know a few other fellow Android users in the Klang Valley area. We’re now following each others’ Buzz streams.

Now perhaps, eventually, we’d get to know each other a little better and want to correspond with each other using emails. This is where I’ve stumbled upon a troublesome little catch.

When you follow a stranger’s Buzz stream, you don’t get to see his email address unless he opens it up to public view (improbable and not advisable). There doesn’t seem to be any Direct Message (ala Twitter) capabilities, so there’s no way for us to privately message each other to exchange non-public information such as email addresses. It’s rather dumb as well to ask for this information in a public Buzz message as everybody else can see it.

I can understand that Google folks may think that a DM feature may be redundant, as it duplicates what emails are supposed to achieve. But yet, this particular use case remains unfulfilled.

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I had an O2 WinMo phone once and I have to say there was one feature I really liked on it.

When I searched for a contact, all I needed to do was to hit my numpad once for each alphabet in my search string.

For example, to search for “Alan”, I’d type “2526″. It was really convenient and I missed that feature on the other phones I’ve had since then until I came across Wysie Soh’s NubDial for Android.

It’s only for Android 2.x phones right now and it’s still rather sluggish. But it’s perfectly usable and I’d recommend it to anyone.

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