Tag Archives: Defy

There’s nothing to see

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After posting several posts with quite sad and disturbing content, which actually increased the number of my audience (thanks, to all you disease horny bitches out there), I’ve got something more nerdy stuff to tell. Just as a side note, we have to get back to thread where everything started here. Actually, no, sarcasm still rules this blog and will do in the future.

So, here’s the thing. I’ve got my mobile back from the dead. As you may know from a post from the week before, my Motorola Defy passed away for a day. I was near giving it up, but I finally managed it to bring it back to living. A lot of weird, creepy key presses were needed to get into menus of the phone I’ve never seen before. But, anyhow, after almost a whole evening, I got it back, rooted it and installed the latest CyanogenMod. I will stay away a while from Ice Cream Sandwich. There’s too much development that has to be done and I’m currently not in the mood to act as an beta/alpha tester.

Here’s another nerdy thing to beat the boredom shit into you. I’ve filed my tax return this weekend. Exciting, isn’t it? And now? Well, nothing. Just wanted to mention it here and before I leave you with any high expectations. I’m not mentioning anything else about this very topic in the future. That’s it, my short excursion into the world of tax return and boring financial things and stuff. Period.

Anything else? Nope. Nothing. Spring has arrived and I can finally start wearing shorter trousers. I hate these long ones.

…and here we are, the end of the most uninspired blog entry in the whole history of this blog’s existence. Thanks for your patience. Maybe I’ll leave some rather depressing posts here in the future. Just to keep the audience that longs for it.

Dangerous life in the fast lane

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As a hacker, and as a person who loves to modify electronic devices, I found myself very often in a situation where I was simply measuring my skills wrong. Or in other words, I wanted more than I could handle. Tragic, especially when you have an affinity for expensive electronic devices.

Yesterday I decided to update the radio on my HTC. A very, VERY simple progress. Just download a ZIP file. Copy the ZIP file on your SD card and reboot to bootloader. Piece of cake. Well, normally. My experience and my intuition told me that this will fail for some reason. And it did. Update ran totally fine, no error, nothing wrong. Except one thing, this sodding device just didn’t want to completely reboot. I watched the HTC logo screen for like fifteen minutes.

Normal procedure is to put out the battery, reboot again, try if it boots fine and if that fails, try to flash again and see if this finally works. As expected, it didn’t work. So I tried other radio files, tried to reflash the ROM, but nothing worked, except…

…well, sometimes it’s worth to have a backup. It was quite old, but it managed to get the device back on track. It was this tiny little option that says “Restore bootloader” that fixed it.

Apart from this, I’m currently experimenting a little bit with Android 4 on my Motorola Defy. Without a doubt, Android 4 is the best Android so far, but the whole changes that where made to the architecture and the driver handling is a bloody pain in the ass. Developers could have made so much more progress, but the most of them a stuck on problems like cameras that don’t work or LED flashlights that won’t flash.

One needs to be patient on the other hand. This step in development was necessary and even though a lot of people will complain about late update rollouts for their devices. It’s more than just important for the device generation that will follow and even more important, the Android operating systems that will follow.

A taste of ice cream sandwich

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According to the fact that there are no impressive game releases these days and I have a small amount of time left in my spare time, I was digging a little the Android scene. My main intention was to get some hands on on the latest Android – Codename “Ice Cream Sandwich” – and see how it works in my phones. The HTC Desire S and the Motorola Defy.

I tried the Virtuous Quattro RC3 and the CyanogenMod 9 Alpha builds for the HTC Desire. The Defy got stuffed with the experimental builds of CyanogenMod 9 as  well.

At first glance, for all devices, ICS looks amazing and the overall redesign looks very homogenic and a lot of obstacles in the menu structure has been ridden. When you’re used to Android and use it for quite a long time, you’ll find yourself in a re-orientation situation. But ICS is very user friendly and now, in my opinion, on the same level with Apple’s iOS.

Virtuous Quattro RC3 was one of the first ROMs I installed and my impression was, ‘Yeah, looking gooood.’ But in the end, the speed and smoothness of this ROM was terrible. And even though it was an RC it felt more like a fast pushed alpha version. It had several bugs like the clock crashing and syncs that did not sync. All in all, it looked cool, but it felt awful.

CyanogenMod 9 for the Defy was, because it was alpha, the same buggy experience, but it felt usable, except for the camera, but that’s a problem on lot of devices. I was expecting that this ROM would not work completely fine and that it would be another first look thing. Anyhow, despite the slow performance can I say, that the CM team is definitely on the right way and without a doubt, the old Defy is capable running ICS.

Last but not least, I installed the alpha build of CyanogenMod 9 on my Desire S. I tried the builds from January 27 and 30. The first one had almost the same low performance like the Quattro ROM, but the nightly build of January 30 runs almost smoothly and came pretty close to what you are used to with CyanogenMod 7.x

Only one camera is currently working on the Desire S. With the latest release I got some issue with syncing Facebook to my contact list. This ROM still’s got the issue that WiFi is not running fine with certain router/access points and various encryptions. The issue is well known in many bug reports, even for stock ROMs and I was hoping for a final fix. Bummer!

As a summarization can I say, the AOSP ICS developers have done a great job so far and I’m so dead certain that CyanogenMod 9 will be a giant hit. On the other hand, there’s still a long road to walk till it’s time to announce the first beta releases and it’s even further more away to announce a real release candidate. Lots of RCs that you can find these days for many devices are quick born, badly supported ROMs that you should only use when you like to do some bug fixing or if you’re just interested in Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

I personally switched back to CyanogenMod 7.2 on my Defy and will also switch back to Reaper (CM7 derivate) on my Desire S.

Androidify me

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Reading, researching, experimenting, reading, researching and sometimes you fail and sometimes you gain success. Due to the fact that the evenings are getting colder and darker I turned to some more home oriented hobbies. Actually, ninety per cent of my hobbies happen at home, but that’s another story.

Back in the days I hated working on phones and tweak them or whatever. You system memory was ridiculously tiny and the processor was some kind of a joke. Nowadays mobile phones and especially smart phones come up with one or two cores and a clock rate beyond 1,000MHz. And additionally, we were gifted with a RAM that can take more than just 64KB.

My passion are Android phones and the Android operating system. I’ve started with a entry model, a Motorola Backflip MB300. I did a lot of counterproductive to this phone, but it survived without waving the white flag and surrendering. Right now it runs CyanogenMOD 7.1 which is based on Android 2.3.7. This makes this phone pretty bleeding edge and totally bad ass. Anyhow, this phone is slow. Patience is what you need to tweak and hack this ugly thing.

I switched to an HTC Desire S as my new main phone. It also runs CyanogenMOD 7.1. I’m not planning to run a lot of ROMs on this phone. After having struggled so much with the Backflip I want at least one phone that is highly available. My next “big thing” is a Motorola Defy. This will be the phone for my next evil experiments. I’ve found a used one really cheap on Amazon and it’ll hopefully be delivered.

If you want to ask what makes Android so interesting to me, it’s basically the way endless possibilities to customize your phone. On iOS for instance you have one store to get your software. You have only one interface that you can use. If you want to have something special or something the Appstore does not offer, you have to jailbreak your device. The iPad I once had was a jailbreaked one and it was terribly monotone anyway. Appstore alternatives were terrible and most of the apps that should modify the GUI made minor changed not worth to mention.

Windows mobile is not an option. The overall design of and the usability of the phone is decades behind the today’s state of art. As far as I’ve seen the GUI, it’s a giant step backward and far from transparent. I don’t like such things. But discussing this could lead to a discussion like “Windows vs. Linux”

Would lead to nothing and is in the end a matter of taste and user skill. Whatever the case, I’ll hopefully get the Defy pretty soon and experiment with it. I’ll keep you informed about my evil plans.