From iPhone to Android

Okay.. enough iPhone, I need a change, something new to play/hack with. WinMo is his own world of stylus and task managers. Nokia phones are not for geeks Blackberry still doesnot have a decent touch-screen phone and its hack-ability is known to be very low.

I am left with the Android which is making a fuss almost every day. I did try the android in its very early days of T-Mobile G1 then tried the G2 (HTC hero) but none of them proved to be compelling and the absence of multi-touch from majority of applications made me stick to iPhone. So which iPhone I am talking about? The very very very old 4GB iPhone. It still rocks my world with its simplicity and powerful basic functionality as in the iPod, the phone app and the safari browser.

Now android caught my attention again with 2 recent major developments-

• The Google maps app now has a turn by turn navigator !! something which only $50+ apps like tomtom used to have.
• The Nexus One getting multitouch in browser,maps and other apps. (more on this)

Hence I got a T-Mobile G2 back today as the Nexus One is out of my reach. Popped in my Docomo simcard and was really taken away by the amazing HTC sense UI. The first thing I do in phones is to check if I am running the latest software or not. Boom! this phone is still on 1.5 or the cupcake! I remember seeing the 2.x firmware mentioned in most of the good posts and announcements about android. I wanted to try out the other features like the facebook integration, gmail and the android marketplace.. BUT all that would go with new firmware install. My impatience was growing to install the latest firmware on my phone.

So here starts my hunt for the latest firmware for HTC hero with multitouch apps and new google maps. Initially  I go with the stable shipped  ROMs and later use them to benchmark against the custom roms. I came across the words “OTA” wherever I read about new android updates. I dug my phone for the ‘check for updates’  button, but couldn’t find any. I thought if I give this clever device a internet connection, it would automatically check for updates and prompt me to download. My belkin router malfunctioned and i had  given it for service, so I created a AD-HOC wireless network to take android to internet. But wait the adhoc wireless network just doesnot show up in android !! And I thought the blackberry and the PSP were the only devices to ignore adhoc networks Some googling led me to an article which claims to get it working, but right now I am more keen in the ROM update, Google might have fixed it in 2.x?

The HTC websites has some kinda rom update, but it asks for the serial no. etc just to download the ROM. I am not doing that. Lets search for a decent rom which is tweaked to the least..

Now I come across – Rooting the HTC Hero, installing custom recovery …  this page cleared a lot many things for me and pointed  in right direction. After reading reading and reconfirming from 2-3 sites I choose the following path for new ROM.

Stock (1.5 or HTC 1.7 software version) ->Custom Recovery Image -> HTC 2.73(rooted) -> Latest radio as here

I expected I would end up with hacked/rooted 2.0 android with latest radio.. BUT damm the phone (even though its snappier than before) is still on 1.5!!

I went to the ultimate destination for cooked roms I remembered from winmo days- the xda-developers.com They seem to have everything! even android 2.1!  Without much reading I downloaded one ROM. While it was downloading, I started to read about these android 2.1 roms. I figured out that most weren’t stable enough like the 1.5 stock, the UI looked horrible on many(I downloaded one with sense UI), camera was not able to deliver full 5mps and mms wasn’t working yet. Inspite of these I just wanted to try this 2.1 and went on to install it. My phone would take any ROM now as it had a custom recovery patch. The phone booted.. I could spot the new loading animation. After 5 mins of use, HTC Sense felt like a  non-sense! apps were crashing before I could actually explore every menu item in them. Google Goggles wasn’t there. The new google maps app, couldn’t determine my location but was able to route and offered me to try the new beta navigation feature (woot!). I couldn’t find any satellites as I was indoors. The multitouch gestures were there in browser but not swift like the iPhone’s.

Tomorrow I will take this new google maps for a ride in my locality. After that will go back to the rooted latest HTC ROM with android 1.5 and explore other features.

On other side, I have also put the  android source code for download, why not make the OS say Hello Aakash when it boots

One more thing, if you are on Windows 7, download the android drivers from softpedia. You need them to run the ADB and hence to install patched recovery image. I have read that all these changes, hacks are reversible, to go back to factory state all you need to do is– run the RUU from HTC on PC.

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