Be Excellent To Each Other

I have not. I shall investigate.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2010/08/31 ... unctional/

Rockbox is coming to Android! It's still in pre-beta but I installed and it does stuff! Hopefully this will be stable in time for my phone upgrade in January then I can retire my Rockboxed iRiver H140.

There's a beta of angry birds out, so we can see what all the fuss was about. Seems like a lot of fun so far.

Angry Birds is brilliant, Im gonna have to stump for the full version when it's released.

Runs loads better on my Desire than it did on my 3G, although that's to be expected I suppose.

Easily on a par with performance on the 3GS/Touch, although it loads quicker and is a bit smoother too IMO.

Looking forward to the full version release.

HTC Desire HD....

http://www.t3.com/feature/htc-desire-hd ... now-so-far

Glad it exists for those who want it but my Desire is just the right size as it is (fnarr) and I'd miss my real buttons on the front. Touchscreen fine, touch buttons not fine.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/09/android-open/

Rabble-rousing piece on Android's openness (with a great headline). I suspect he has a point here, what think you, Android users? Are his examples of shitness US only?

I think android would be better if it was mandatory for all of them to have a "make this phone vanilla android with no bullshit" button, and it was easily reversible and didn't void warrantee.

Seeing as you can get an open Android phone on any network through Carphone Whorehouse in the UK the problem is a bit non-existent, the question itself is based upon a premise that I'd dispute as well... even a bloatware infested 'Droid isn't tied to iTunes, plus anyone who'd know the difference if it bit them is perfectly capable of rooting.

Says me, who's never done it

Regarding Lewie's point, I think Google are letting it run wild for a bit then might step in with the next phase of their masterplan once the market is theirs for the pwning. 2.2 takeup has been mighty slow, but then looking at O2, they released the update and it bricked Desires. Maybe this build is a troublesome one. It's a pretty wide spec of machines to be rolled out over.

I think it's a bit of a two-pronged thing really, I used to own a G1, which just came with a plain Android OS, but, being a T-Mobile phone came with some T-Mobile stuff installed, but it was hardly in-your-face stuff. Now that I own a Galaxy S, there's no carrier specific software on it, but Samsung have loaded their TouchWiz software in a desperate attempt to make the phone look more like an iPhone. Similarly, with a HTC phone you'll find it loaded it with SenseUI, which I've never used, but a lot of people that have rooted their phone and replaced it with something else have said that it's made their phone feel like a brand new one. And I think that's probably the point, without actually rooting the phone, although you can replace the manufacturer installed launchers, you can never get rid of them, so in this country at least, I think it's the manufacturers rather than the carriers that are guilty of installing loads of crap all over the standard Android OS.

I remember having no end of trouble trying to get my old nokia 5800 up to the most recent firmware (which I needed to to use the free nokia satnav), because even after nearly a year O2 had no intention of releasing it (and they had programmed it to only accept their flavour of the firmware).

My Desire from Orange had a bunch of Orange shit installed on it, and a few (fairly large) demos for games, and you're not allowed to uninstall it (requires a root and flashing a new rom).

I'd say that the main reason I don't like networks fiddling with the software on phones is because they pretty much consistently do a shit job of it.

As for the handset manufacturers fiddling with android, I guess that's their call, and how good a job of it they do is what determines whether their modifications are a selling point or a weakness. But I don't see how offering a solution for having vanilla android out of the box would be a bad idea (except for the idiot manufacturers trying to lock android down to be a closed platform).

Sense I quite like, although I've not yet tried a rom without it (I intend to at some point). I'd like be be allowed to uninstall peep, footprints and friendstream, since I don't use them.

Actually, has anyone come across a vanilla 2.2 rom for the desire. Just straight up froyo with nothing else.

I'd like that.

CyanogenMod just recently got a stable release for the Desire (6.01).

Cheers bud. I'll try it out

Tried it,don't like. Going back. At least its easy to do...

any particular reason?

I found it paradoxically to be too flashy (the menu looking like a roll, the gallery) and too plain looking (the notifications bar looks like a child drew it). Also, the custom rom came with even more crap than the original rom I had.

I'm back to a rooted version of the official HTC Froyo rom now. It's nice and simple.

It is, of course, the manufacturers and operators who have done the fiddling that you would need to support this vanilla Android concept. And if they supported it they probably wouldn't have fiddled in the first place. So this idea is dead in the water.

It is an increasing trend, of course.

Firstly, even if the problem doesn't exist outside the US today it's still a problem; UK operators will be quick to copy the lead of the US ones. Secondly, it doesn't matter if there is "an open Android phone" if other popular models are skankified because if the average man in the street is getting a raw deal the whole brand is harmed. And if 65% of users haven't yet received a v2.0 or later update (a ten month old release), that's shit.

And then there's Skype. Not only is it only available on Verizon handsets in the US, it uses your voice minutes to place calls.

We're all doomed!

I bloody well hope not. As an iPhone user the last thing I want is for Apple to have the high end smartphone market to themselves. They've historically not done too bad a job of competing with themselves (killing the ultra-profitable iPod Mini for the Nano was a really smart move) but they'll be a lot sharper if they have actual competitors.

I wonder, has anyone here with a T'Mobile Desire rooted/upgraded to HTC Sense Froyo yet? I've read a couple of guides, but they seem to involve using a second sd card, which I've not got and can't afford. I'm at a stage now where my phone is full and need to start running apps off my SD, which is more or less empty :/

I did this (with mine from Orange) and it was pretty straight forwards. Didn't require any additional hardware.

http://myhtcdesire.com/modding/how-to-r ... y-method-2

I did that too, GY. All above board

Are you on T-Mobile?

I am.

Oooh, now you've done it - lots of questions!

What do I lose by rooting? I'm told settings, but is that just twitter passwords, etc, or all the stuff that lets me connect my phone to T-mobile correctly? Does my voicemail etc have to be re-entered?

Did you update to Froyo? Sense or Vanilla? Again, my concern is having problems with T-Mobile once I've fucked about with stuff. I'm also struggling to understand whether all froyo will rob me of root.

I really would like to get rid of footprints, peep, friendstream, HTC facebook though. I struggle to understand what's the official app, links to the website, touch website, etc. When I got my phone it asked me for my FB details then spammed random contacts' phone numbers across my contacts book, so what app did this, or is that something the OS does?

And so on. This is the real problem with branding, it obfuscates and confuses.

Eep.

Right. Rooting itself changes nothing. It just gives you access to the phone at a higher level. You need a custom ROM to see big changes. I've tried a few (see above) but I've settled on pretty much what I'd get if I'd waited for the official update.

If you change to a custom rom, you'll not have any problems connecting tmob, or at least, I didn't. I could still browse, MMS, SMS, email, etc no matter what ROM I was using. Bare in mind that Footprints, Peep, Friendstream and HTC Facebook are all part of Sense and will disappear if you use a more vanilla build.

Have fun, and back up your shit!

Ta muchly.

Question for anyone now:

Backing up my shit - what is good? I've always been one for backing up individual files, a real luddite on PC and phone alike. Yes, I've got too much spare time.

Just back up anything you don't want to lose. On the phone, that'd be camera pictures, contacts and messages, I reckon.

Your warranty.

Well, yeah. That.

Assuming he's using a google account, then all the contacts should be restored once he signs back in to his rooted phone. Pictures should be on the sd card and should be safe, but it's probably best not to take that chance. Is there anything that can backup messages if you're not already rooted?

"Pushing recovery image" for 40 minutes now.

Hmm.

Yes. I use SMS backup - it backs them up to your gmail account, pretty sweet.

Ah - it won't restore them, though.

Driver issues. Working now though.

/edit ah, fuck it - App2SD requires a gold card in any case

That said, I'm rooted so should now be set to go for the HTC Sense Froyo normal version if the T'Mobile one is released borked.

Yeah, that's what I meant. I use xArchive which sounds like it does the same, but I'm not aware of anything that can restore them back to the phone, apart from something like Titanium backup, which needs you to be rooted in the first place.

So, that's basically Google's vanilla 2.2, modified by HTC for the Desire, as T-Mobile would receive it prior to any of their meddling, but with the added bonus of being rooted?

I think that's what I'm after. I also think now my plans need to be this:

1: Figure out what that backup doodah was I read about which will take a snapshot of the phone so's I can get it back to how it is now (branding, etc) if things go wrong.

2: Backup texts (no photos on there presently and contacts synced to Google).

3: Get that rom and 'flash' it.


Questions - once I've got this new ROM, how do updates come, do I need to flash to 3.0 myself when it arrives? Also, is there anything at all broken about it?

n.b. If at any point you need me to fuck off and stop asking questions, let me know (nicely).

You're asking all the questions I need to know the answers too... Good work!

Actually, seeing as I only wanted root for tether and SD apps, and 2.2 does those anyway, I wonder if there's an even easier way to get hold of the 2.2 that HTC released OTA (albeit I don't think I can actually receive it OTA) as getting stuff when HTC have it ready is more than good enough for me.

You should be able to tether with 2.1. I can, on T-Mobile.

I'd look into that but it's a pretty secondary concern as by the time I'm anywhere except in my house we'll be on 3.0

This page is giving me strong feelings of mayberightness:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=695667

(but I'm not sure) RRU means it's got the right radio aerial drivers or something, I imagine.

Aye, presumably you got a 3rd party app to do this?

Android has it build in since 2.2.

<sigh> There's about a million versions of the RUU and XDA is down now

Hi GY, hope I'm not too late and you haven't pulled all your hair out by the roots.

This is the radio driver that I used.

Nice one, DP.

No, not been doing much other than some light reading about it, which I'm finding impenetrable as there's too much. Much as with maths, this sort of thing just starts swimming about in front of my eyes and prevents me from ever learning to be a coder or whatever. If I can't Google for a clear answer it's 20 questions on my forums. Plus, there's no way I can afford even a crap phone to replace this one if I brick it.

T-Mobile updated Android on desire to 2.2 this morning, I went to find the changelog as the rumour is this update is about 80 meg as opposed to the stock HTC sense version's 25.









As you can imagine, I'm holding fire.

Ive just been notified of a system update, even though I'm on a custom Rom.

I believe there was an issue with the web or something which that fixes. We'll never know unless they tell us though, eh?

It's not working anyway.

Meh