Tag Archives: ROM

Murphy’s law

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Imagine a giant explanation mark and a giant question mark right over my head these days, followed by a loud yell saying, “Seriously??!!??!!”

It’s nothing emotionally driven that bothers me nowadays, it’s the sodding technical devices that die like flies under my hands. First it was/is my MP3 player that decides to no longer make a data connection to my PC (or any other PC). That’s basically bad manner. I have to listen to the same songs and albums eternally because I can’t transfer new music to this damn thing. It’s just four years old and the generation of MP3 players that’s currently on the market is much of an improvement compared to the own I currently own.

Secondly, my outdoor phone, aka Motorola Defy, also decided to pass away the before. It ran with ICS alpha version for a couple of days. I found it very laggy so I switched back to CyanogenMod 7.2 RC1. Which worked fine. Totally. Until I had to a reboot. The phone hung on restart. I was able to get it into USB mode that I can install the stock ROM and set everything to default. The procedure worked totally fine as well, said “PASS” at the end without any error messages. The phone rebooted, and… NOTHING. Nothing was happening then… black screen of death, or whatever you like to call it.

This is two devices lost in one week. Well, my MP3 is still working and charging under some circumstances, but I guess, my phone is lost for good. And I just prepared it for some outdoor sports activities to get rid of some weight. Murphy’s law.

Androidified backflip

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After a long period of reading, learning and researching I’ve finally made it and customized my Android phone. The customization included things like the simple rooting of the device, upgrading to a newer version of Android, overclocking and getting rid of some factory default applications. But, first things first. I got a Motorola Backflip (MB300) last year’s October and it was my intention from the very beginning to use this cellphone as a “learning device” to get into the whole Android stuff. Unfortunately did I figured out that this phone wasn’t able to be upgraded by simple clicking “update” here in Europe. The cellphone was shipped with Android 1.5 as factory default. It was more than clear for me to get this device to Android 2.1 which is officially only available in the U.S. for AT&T customers. A lot of theory followed after getting this phone though. Worst thing about this, I had to get back to Java coding.

It took a while but I finally found some ROMs with Android 2.1, also one version without the Motorola BLUR applications that slow the phone on factory default setting pretty direful. I’m not going into detail nor do I offer a tutorial at this point. I tried every ROM I could find for my cellphone and tried to figure out which one has the best performance, which one has the lowest number of bugs and most importantly, which one looks nice the most. Finally I found disturbing bugs in every ROM and none of these ROMs had all the “optical features” I was looking for. The solution for this problem was simple and trivial at once. I picked the ROM with the lowest number of bugs and errors and merged the features of the other ROMs into it. As expected, the system was buggy and unstable the first time but after flashing the phone the fourth or fifth time with debugged ROMs I finally had the Android 2.1 version I actually wanted.

The most important applications from the Android market for me were ADWLauncher, SetCPU, TitaniumBackup and Android Task Manager. The first one was to get rid of the Motorola look. SetCPU is used to overclock the phone and to increase the battery life at once. TitaniumBackup was my companion to figure out which of the applications of the ROM can be disabled and removed. Last but not least, Android Task Manager was and is my RAM cleaner on the phone.