Spring Clean

Yesterday I made the drastic decision to get rid of all of my phones except the following:

• n900 - I am still interested to see how this develops
• E63 - a nice cheap phone that is being used as my work phone
• 5800XM - I am keeping this as a sat nav

I am getting rid of the following because I want a nexus one and an ipad later this year but here is a summary why:

• HTC Magic - Great android starter phone but limited on specification
• HTC Hero - Compared to the magic this is a breath of fresh air with the sense ui but HTCs lack of Android OS updates has shocked me. The magic is already on 1.6 whereas the Hero is 1.5 and newer applications I want to use are on android 2. HTC will update the Hero in march 2010 to Android 2 but my fears of not rolling out frequent updates where correct and as such I am abandoning non Google based Android handsets. I am of the opinion HTC either want people to upgrade to their new HTC Desire or Legend to use Android 2. Whilst this is their prerogative they have in effect stuck the two fingers up at existing owners. March isn't too far away but I believe this is a sign of things to come and I don't want to be party of it At least with a google phone I am guaranteed more frequent updates as Google develop the OS. SenseUI on the hero is great but does not bring that enough benefit to keep me on Android 1.5
• N810 - I now have the N900
• E75 - A great work horse but the 5800XM will now fill that position as being a back up device. The E75 is kind of phone you would either take out at night or away as the hidden keyboard really does make it look like a normal boring phone.
• E90 - A great communicator and specification on a phone on par with the E75. I a sad to see this go but I really haven't used it for for over a year.
• Palm Pre - There is a lot of potential with WEBOS but like the first generation iphone as there are no applications, the hardware is becoming long in to the tooth and now other phones such as the N900 and Hero with SenseUI no integrate with other social networks there is really no use for synergy. Should there be more applications that are more productive based I may look at WEBOS again. But for now, my conclusion is, it is nice to use but there is no substance due to lack of applications.
• Palm Treo 680 - An old phone I had just lying around doing nothing. Again, nice OS and lots of applications but long in tooth for me.
• BeBook Ereader - Not a phone but it will be replaced with the ipad or an android equivalent. I have not really used it and whilst it great on battery power I don't read many ebooks. Further its PDF support is limiting on the emagazines I read in that it is slow and does not render the pages well.

The replacements:

• Nexus One - To replace all of my phones with its larger screen and Google android based OS. Because I have already purchased a lot of android applications I can quite easily port them over to the new phone.
• Ipad Or an android equivalent - I am interested in a tablet device after using the Archos Android Tablet where the Ipad has caught my interest. However with the Dell Mini 5, ICD or a Tecra based Android tablet there will be others to look at.

Although 2010 might end up as 2009 with me purchasing many devices my intention ebaying the old devices is to fund the new purchased but also ensure I am not collecting clutter. I should hopefully have the nexus one within the next couple of weeks so will no doubt end up posting about it then.

HTC Hero

Due to delays in the n900 and the lack of software both in this and the Palm Pre application catalog I decided to purchase a HTC Hero.

There was some hesitation wondering if I could easily transfer my original HTC Magic software over where kind soles on Twitter indicated this should be easy.

I opted to get the sim free version from carphone warehouse. Setting the phone up took a couple of hours as I had over 100 applications to reinstall. Thankfully from entering my Google credentials the app market recognised what I had purchased and allowed me to download and reinstall the apps again.

Overall I am happy with the phone and find it a lot more responsive than the magic. This is no doubt helped by the additional RAM available for the Hero.

The other difference is the application installation space is smaller than the magic.

However the changes that HTC have done to Android including built-in exchange support and the sense UI make this one hell of a phone. Also the multi touch on the browser is great and really should be standard on Google Android now

Whilst ota updates are not supported yet, the current rom seems stable and it is good to see what Android can do when you give Android some track with which to accelerate by not being restricted by Google.

Long term there is potential but the snap dragon based Android phones are looking more appealing over the pre and n900.

Compared to the Hero these will certainly have some catching up and overtaking to do now the Hero has set the pace on that track.

To Hell and back again

The HTC Magic has been driving me mad today. It has taken me over 5 minutes to write a tweet to the extent I ended up slapping the phone through frustration. Although this calmed my nerves I ended up looking at cooked roms for the phone hoping it would speed it up.

After advise from people on twitter I downloaded a recovery image to put phone into a mode where I could back it up to SD. I also used the Astro file manager to back up my apps as well to SD. Then using Linux (Ubuntu 8.10) I re flashed the phone and went upon my way restoring it.

The Asto File manager was bad in that it would allow me to bulk select all apps for backup, but I had to individually restore the apps back onto the phone. Further even though I had restore the apps individually the market application would not acknowledge this. This means I would not be notified of any application upgrades unless I reinstalled the application via the market place. This, coupled with the phones failure to sync again using road sync prompted me to restore the phone from the backup I had taken. Further the all of my settings had gone so I would need to input logins and passwords again etc....

Before installing the cooked rom, I used an emergency recovery rom which used a mode call fast boot and an application called nandroid to backup the android to SD. I merely reversed this process to restore the phone to its previous state. But again, the applications although restore from SD card would not show up in the market place. Through using an application called App Manager this somehow allowed me to go into the market place, rebuild the database of installed applications so I could complete the online upgrades. I have removed the offending application hoping this will resolve my speed issues.

I am still humming and ahhing about the N900 and wonder should I impulse buy, but in the interim my Magic is what it once was. I will observe the cooked roms and choose another in time what should assist with my speed issues. Lastly, I believe Android 2 will be out soon so multitouch will be available and hopefully speed bug fixes.

The lesson(s) from this tale are, don't use cooked roms unless you know what you are doing and don't run too much on your android unless it dies....

I will root the phone on the original rom that is installed so I can tether and run scheduled reboot applications on the phone. But looking at the windows mobiles, Palm(s), S60 and UIQ phones I have had in addition to Android. All of them are bad when backing up and restoring as they do not restore the phone fully. They always miss something.

I can only recall my old Psion 3 series and 5 series over 10 years ago where you could run a scheduled backup. The battery would die and you would loose you main system disk data. You could then power on the device, run a restore of which would restore the device perfectly.

The question is we now have User Data Protection areas (UDP) on phones, flash memory and external storage, yet none of these devices whilst slightly more sophisticated than the Psions still cannot do a complete restore.

Thank goodness for the cloud as this is where I store my data. But as I have said before, the cloud is a great backup but always ensure you have another parachute (additional backup) incase the first chute fails.....