devlogic.org

*pffffff* Wow, that’s a lot of dust.

I bought an Android phone last year. A T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, which is a rebranded HTC Magic 32b. I like it a lot, even though about 2 months later the Nexus One was released. It’s become my pri­mary pocket-based inter­net device; Heather inher­ited my old 1st-gen iPod Touch. Being the huge geek that I am, I’m sur­prised I waited the week that I did before I voided the war­ranty, got root, and installed a “mod”. Mostly because I could, but also par­tially to gain some per­for­mance and fea­tures that weren’t avail­able on the stock ROM.

So let’s look at that. My phone came with Android 1.5 (Cup­cake), but T-Mobile had already released the OTA (over-the-air) update to 1.6, so I never really expe­ri­enced 1.5, which I hear is a good thing. 1.6 looks like this:

I used this ver­sion of Android (stock, with some rearranged icons) for about a week, and then I hacked my phone, and installed Cyanogen­Mod 4.1.9999. That gave me root access, an easy-to run ter­mi­nal emu­la­tor, and teth­er­ing (which I’ve used exactly once, to make sure it worked). I also called T-Mobile at some point and got the sub­sidy unlock code for my phone, so that I could use other providers’ SIM cards when I’m in T-Mobile dead zones. Cyanogen­Mod, through 4.2.15.1 (the lat­est sta­ble release as of today), looks vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal to “stock” 1.6. It’s got some neat fea­tures, like an improved dialer and lots of technology/backend ports from Eclair (Android 2.1). About a month (6 week, maybe?) ago, Cyanogen released a test ver­sion of Cyanogen­Mod 5.0.7 for my phone, and I snapped it up. Early adop­tion of tech­nol­ogy is def­i­nitely for me. 5.0.7 is a port of Eclair (Android 2.1) to the Dream and Sap­phire hard­ware (those are the pro­duc­tion names that HTC used for the G1 and MyTouch 3G). There’s stuff miss­ing in this port from the full release of 2.1 that’s on the Nexus One or Droid (the 3d launcher is the most obvi­ous, but there are oth­ers), but it’s very nearly feature-complete. And I think it’s good stuff. 5.0.7-test5 came out last night, and it’s the first –test ver­sion that I’ve run that I’ve not felt the need to enable swap space for. Things are snappy, I haven’t seen any bugs that aren’t already being worked on, and I get to use things like the offi­cial Twit­ter for Android app (which only works on 2.0+). By and large, though, the screen hasn’t changed all that much. Here’s what my cur­rent “home screen” looks like:

And really? It looks pretty much the same. I don’t go out of my way to make my phone flashy (although it’s def­i­nitely capa­ble of that); I go for func­tional. I use every­thing on the home screen on a daily basis, and things launch nice and fast, oper­ate as I expect, and then stay out of my way.

End result? If you have an older Android phone, like the T-Mobile G1 or the MyTouch 3G, and don’t mind void­ing your war­ranty, think about mov­ing to Cyanogen­Mod. It’ll be worth your while, espe­cially if you want to use new fea­tures (and not wait for an offi­cial 2.1 upgrade, which may never arrive).