…well there you go
Android
My Adventures In Rooting My Android Phone: Part 4
Aug 16th
Don’t network operators just really mess things up all the time? If it wasn’t for them, your phone would be exactly as the manufacturer intended it to be. So far we’ve seen very few companies get away with forcing carriers to sell their phones without the obligatory bloatware that they like to put on there. Those companies are Apple and Google.
Google made a half hearted attempt at it with the Nexus One. Basically an HTC Desire with slightly different buttons, the Nexus One promised to give users the full “Google Experience” which it turned out, a lot of people wanted. They promised that as soon as they released OS updates, they would be made available for the Nexus. They were mostly telling the truth. If you bought an unlocked, open, from Google, Nexus One then that’s what you got. However if you bought it from Vodafone, you still got all the bother of waiting for them to release updates.
The same is true for most phones. If you buy them sim free and unlocked, then you’ll probably get software updates as soon as they’re released. Buy from a carrier and you’ll wait for the O2 screen saver to be added to it.
Without a doubt Apple are the best at doing this. It’s fair to say that they can be the way they are with carriers because it’s the iPhone and presently the hottest phone around, still. With their touch devices they announce a time and date for the updates to be available and we all get it on that day. No matter which country or carrier.
The network operators don’t give themselves an easy ride either. Perhaps we’d understand a bit more if they did things to our phones that actually make them better in some way. Instead they want to just put their branding all over the device in the hope that I’m such an O2 fanboy I’ll just need to tell everyone that I’m using them. Recently Vodafone’s Nexus One owners have revolted against their recent Froyo update that came with lots of Vodafone’s own pointless software.
The reason I’m saying all this today is that O2, the network I use, have announced that their Froyo update for the HTC Desire will take at least another six to eight weeks to be available. Being that there’s an O2 HTC Desire sat on the desk in front of me I can tell you precisely what O2 did to it before they let me have it. First of all, when I turn the phone on there’s an image of the O2 logo. Second, there’s an O2 wallpaper in the wallpaper menu. Third…well there is no third. HTC released their official update for the Desire about two weeks ago, that’s when O2 got their hands on it (probably). Are they seriously saying that it’s going to take them ten weeks to add a launch screen and a wallpaper? It certainly does to me. It doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence does it? I mean, I reckon I could learn how to add those things to a ROM and make it in less time than that.
So where does all this end? I’d love to see a marketing report from one of the operators that explains exactly what they gain by having a wallpaper added to a phone. Do they think that I’ll use the O2 wallpaper, other people will see it and then go buy an O2 phone? Clearly they aren’t going to stop it any time soon. As it goes they’re all making enough money so they’ve not really got an incentive to change.
To give a better answer, this ends with rooting your phone. I’ve been using Froyo for weeks so I’m not really bothered when O2 release their version of it. There’s really no reason to stick with the official versions of things any more. Phones are becoming more like PCs in a lot of ways. Not just in the functionality provided by the availability of apps, but in the way that you can choose what OS your PC runs. Windows? Linux? OS X? You’ve got a choice and really you have that same choice with your phone, it’s just that the networks don’t want you to know that.
My Adventures In Rooting My Android Phone: Part 3
Jul 26th
To Sense or not to Sense, that is something you’ve really got to think about. I’ll go over things briefly so new people can catch up. Android has a user interface, obviously. The problem with it is (or can be) that it’s a bit like an interface designed by Google. Very functional and not much else, although in all honesty Android is the nicest UI on any Google product. However some phone makers like to put their own stamp on their devices and alter the stock Android UI. Motorola have one called Motoblur and HTC have one called Sense. Sony have one too but I don’t know what it’s called.
The first time I heard that phone makers could do this I expected to see a whole range of absolutely useless UIs, however it didn’t work out like that. Motoblur is actually quite good from what I hear, and Sony’s offering isn’t too bad either. But it is HTC Sense UI that seems to be by far the most popular.
Of all the ROMs I have tried so far, none of them had Sense, instead opting for the stock Android fare. Like I say, it isn’t too bad, just functional. That’s all well and good but there’s a whole world of ROMs that are based around the Sense UI that offer features that you just don’t get anywhere else.
Don’t get me wrong, Sense isn’t perfect. There are a few problems. First of all if you don’t like bloatware (that’s pre-installed software that you wouldn’t ever consider installing yourself) then you’re going to be upset, Sense is absolutely loaded with it. To be fair HTC seem to have done this with the most honorable intentions. The HTC interface is there to help people who might not be as tech savvy as the rest of us. For somebody with relatively little technical knowledge, everything is there already. Twitter, Facebook and Flickr integration is damn near perfect in the current 2.1 version. A new user doesn’t have to worry about finding a Twitter app or suffer the hell that is the Android Facebook app, it’s all there when your phone starts up for the first time. Unfortunately HTC assumes we do other things besides social networking and insists on giving us apps to handle it. They assume, like Apple does, that we all have a stock portfolio that we need to constantly monitor. At least with the iPhone you can put the Stocks app in a folder and forget about it. The HTC Stocks app runs constantly whether you use it or not, and you can’t get rid of it.
The as yet unreleased 2.2 version adds to the bloatware with Plurk integration. That’s right, Plurk! I know you were sat there wishing for just such an app and now you have it. Luckily these custom ROMs tend to do away with this sort of thing. Put it this way, if the one you’ve got doesn’t dump the bloat then find one that does. There are plenty of good ones.
At the moment I’m trying Pays-ROM which you can download here. So far it looks like it has all the best features of the new Sense UI with none of the Stocks or Plurk apps. There’s the 720p video recording, the stock Android Contacts app which I prefer to the Sense equivalent. It has HTCs Flashlight app that uses the camera flash, and the HTC Wi-Fi hotspot app that turns your phone into a Mi-Fi like device.
With the addition of Launcher Pro this seems to be a brilliant set up. I hope I can stay with it for at least a few weeks. I’ll let you know how it goes.
My Adventures In Rooting My Android Phone: Part 2
Jul 20th
I’m now a couple of days in to this phone hacking stuff, and I have to point out that I still have no regrets about doing it. My original aim was to end up using the leaked version of the HTC Sense software but things haven’t worked out like that.
It was just before Craig’s album launch party on Sunday night. I was getting ready to have a go at streaming the gig via my phone. In early testing I just couldn’t get it to work. Any video I managed to stream over the internet was very choppy and came without audio. A quick run of the SpeedTest app showed me that I was getting 1.8MB down and 0.01MB up. Clearly that isn’t right as I was on my home Wi-Fi, and I know just how wrong it was because previous speed tests had produced 6.6MB down and 1.2MB up.
After a bit of searching online I discovered that there was a problem with the way I had partitioned my memory card. You need to partition your memory card so that the phone can install apps to a section of the card. That isn’t a feature of Froyo, it’s a feature of ROMs, one which saves you a lot of trouble as with Android you have only been able to install apps to the phone’s internal memory. Unfortunately for me, it is also possible to partition some of your memory card to act as RAM for the phone. In older phones it speeds things up and lets you run apps that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. In the Desire however, it just causes problems. That meant re-partitioning the card and that means losing everything that’s on it. More >
My Adventures In Rooting My Android Phone: Part 1
Jul 17th
I was trying to come up with some sort of vast, dramatic story about what I’ve done and why. But I get the feeling that all you’d really like to know is the answer to two questions. What is rooting your phone? and What do you get out of it? Well, I’ll try to tell you.
When we’re in the world of computers, having “root access” is all about having access to everything. You’re more likely than not the Administrator of your home computer, and that lets you do anything you like. Installing and uninstalling apps, formatting discs, changing system setting and stuff like that. By contrast, you probably aren’t the Administrator of your computer at work. You’ll just be a simple user that can only use the apps that the IT department see fit to give you. It’s all a matter of security.
Because of the great opportunity to really mess things up, you don’t have Administrator or Root access to your phone. Besides, it simply isn’t nessesary for most people to do what they want to with their phone. Root access is generally what you need when you want to do something with your phone that either your service provider or handset maker don’t want you to do. I suppose the most talked about case of this is people hacking their iPhone so they could install apps in the days before the app store, or unlocking the phone to work on any network.
Android phones don’t have quite the same restrictions, but the principle is the same. I had to gain root access to my phone so that I could do things with it that O2 and HTC don’t really want me doing.
So what are these things? Good question. After all I can already install any app I like and I moved to O2 to get this phone so I certainly don’t need to unlock the network. Not even iPhone users are suffering the same restriction that once caused the great unlocking community. Well, I want to install different ROMs on my phone.
What’s a ROM? Think of it basically as the operating system of your phone. That’s not entirely what it is, but that’s all the explanation you really need. Rather than hacking the current operating system, I’m hacking the phone and replacing the operating system with something completely different.
There are a couple of reasons for doing that. First of all the Android development goes very quickly and you can find yourself stuck with a handset running old software. Sometimes phones get updated by the handset maker, but more often than not they get updated by your network, and they tend to take an age over it. In my case my HTC Desire is running Android 2.1, the latest version of the OS is 2.2. HTC say they’ll be releasing an update sometime before the end of September, probably. Even after they do I’ll have to wait for O2 to load it up with their wallpapers and other crap before I can update my phone. You might be suffering even more if you’ve got a slightly older phone that’s running 1.6. With a rooted phone you can load any OS you want, including versions of the very latest.
Not only can you get the latest versions of the OS, you can choose which ROM you go for. For example HTC have their own UI that they put on top of Android with their own apps and widgets. It’s actually not bad, but it might not be for everyone. If you don’t like it you can download a ROM that doesn’t use the Sense UI. Maybe you’d like an OS that’s stripped of everything except the most basic software, you can do that too. The possibilities are endless.
The majority of ROMs are free (which is to say I haven’t found one asking for money yet) and gaining root access to the phone is as easy as could be. I used an app called Unrovoke 3. All I had to do was download the version for my phone, set it running on my Mac (there are also PC and Linux versions) and connect my phone to the computer. Thirty seconds later my phone was rooted and ready to accept new ROMs. A quick search on the Market found ROM Manager, another free app, which lets you download new ROMs and switch between them when you feel like it.
After playing around with a few different ROMs I have eventually settled on what seems to be a leaked version of the HTC Sense ROM that will be out officially for my phone some time in the future. Something which has given me the ability to have seemingly endless storage for apps, HD Video recording, Wi-Fi Hotspot functionality and a much snappier experience when generally using my phone.
All in all it seems to have been worth it so far, but this is day 1 and I’m still reinstalling apps. There’s plenty of time for something to go wrong. One very important piece of information you need to know before you try this is that you will absolutely 100% invalidate the warranty of your phone. Make no mistake about it, if you brick your phone it’s your problem. Do this and you lose the ability to ever complain to your network about a handset problem. That said, I haven’t broken mine…yet.
Nokia Smartphones
Jul 5th
Anyone got one? Anyone? Is there a single reader out there who could legitimately email me with an message that starts ”I’ve got a Nokia N97, it’s the best phone on the market, and here’s why”.
I didn’t think so, I certainly don’t expect to get that email. Remember when everyone had a Nokia phone? I don’t really know how well they did in the US but in the UK there was a time when you just wouldn’t consider getting a phone that wasn’t a Nokia. Now you’d be crazy to get one. I keep seeing lots of sales charts that say Nokia is still the world’s number one smart phone producer. What? Really? Who’s buying them? While office after office are crying out for iPhones and Android phones, I doubt there is a single company on the planet who are making all their staff move over to the Nokia E72 or some other Nokia excuse for a phone.
Let me be clear, Nokia do sell an absolute boat load of phones. It’s just that they’re what we class as feature phones, which is a bit of a bad name because we’re referring to phones that don’t really do much. You know, the ones for people who say they just want to make calls. Surely this market can’t be long for this world. I noticed today that you can get the HTC Wildfire for free, on a £15 per month contract. Why would anyone in their right mind buy anything by Nokia.
I’d like to suggest that all Nokia need to do is release some decent hardware or a better operating system, but the problem is well out of their control now. We only need to look at the computer market to see what’s going to happen.
At one point in the 80′s there were over 600 computer companies in the UK alone. That’s 600 types of computer, most with their own operating system, and most of them doing pretty much the same things. As time went on Microsoft released their BASIC operating system and the number of computer companies began to plumet. They just started making computers that ran the OS that everybody wanted to use. Now we have two. A main one that most people use, Windows, we have one for people that don’t like Windows, OS X, and we’ve got one for people that don’t really like using their computer, Linux (but that doesn’t really count). I’m only messing you Linux people.
In any case I hope you can see my point. What we really need as consumers is a couple of competitors. Somebody to make something good, and somebody to make something sightly better so that the other guys up their game a bit. And, it looks like those two are going to be Android and iOS. Most people will carry some sort of Android phone. Sorry iPhone supporters but that’s the way it’s going to be. Android phones are available for free and on cheaper contracts than the iPhone. As good as the iPhone is, it’s not £300 better than Android. However, I think the next largest group of users will be iPhone people. RIM and their Blackberry will probably represent the Linux which is mainly used on company servers around the world, with their penetration into the corporate market. It’s fair to say that as Android and iOS get better at the corporate stuff RIM might find themselves in trouble.
Where does all that leave Nokia and their Symbian OS? Nowhere. Looking at everything Nokia have released in the last three years it’s clear that they don’t let their engineers go on the internet, into shops, or anywhere they might see what other people are doing with phones. If you do a quick search for the upcoming Nokia N8, their new flagship phone, you can’t help but feel that they haven’t got a clue what’s going on in the world. It’s a shame that they haven’t come close to keeping up with the times, but I can see there being a time in the next ten years when you can say “Remember Nokia?”
Android On The HTC Desire
Jun 23rd
When looking into getting an Android phone I felt there was a lack of visual information about how the operating system worked and what kinds of things you could do with it. So I went and made my own video. It seems that lots of other people have had the same idea and so I may as well not have bothered. Still, none of them went on for over half and hour like I did.
iPod Music App
Jun 23rd
One of my aims with my new HTC Desire is that it would replace my iPod Touch. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with my iPod Touch, it’s brilliant and I love it. It’s just that I wanted to finally get to the point where I only had to think about picking up one device as I leave the house.
Unfortunately that hasn’t completely happened. My phone hasn’t replaced the iPod in the car due to the interference noises I get when it’s plugged into the stereo. I think it’s a symptom of the Universal iTrip that I’m using to do it. Never the less I am using my phone as my main music player whenever I’m not driving.
Android comes with a music player app as you would expect, and in the case of the Desire, HTC has created their own music app as part of the Sense UI system. If you don’t like the one HTC provides you can go on to the Market Place and chose from a wide selection of media player apps. All the ones I’ve tried so far were perfectly fine and do their job well, as does the standard offering from HTC.
However all of them lack the same one feature that the iPod Touch and iPhone do have. No software exists that makes my phone act exactly like an iPod. I’m talking all about the automatic syncing with iTunes, but also the simplicity of the music player app on the iPhone. Basically I want exactly what I get when I hit the Music button on my iPod Touch. After all, it’s just an app like any other.
I realise that this one has to be added to my “Obvious Things That Apple Will Never Do” list, but how cool would it be! I’d be willing to pay a lot of money for it too. Right now you can pick up an iPod Shuffle for £46 or £60, and an iPod Nano for £118 or £138. What if they made the iPod Music app available for Android and BlackBerry and priced it at say £80 or £90. Even if Apple went crazy and priced it at around £140 which sits in between the Nano and the Classic, I still think they’d be on to something.
Like I say, it’s never going to happen. It would be nice though.
