Living with an Android

After a weekend of comparing my G1 with my brother’s HTC Hero, I was impressed at the speed of his phone compared to my older G1

Being the interlectual that he is, he hadn’t crammed as many applications the phone would allow, leaving enough room for the phone to breathe.

As the processor is the same, the speed improvements can only be memory related (proved by cleaning the browser cache from 0K to 9MB and actually being able to make phone calls again).

As the Android platform only allows apps to be run off the Phone memory (not SD), I decided to investigate into A2SD, which lets rooted phones run apps from a special EXT2 partition on the SD card.

Well after a night of wrestling with partitioning the card to have both FAT32 and EXT2 which the G1 would actually read (I think it may have been a size issue), I decided to run a stable build of Cyanogen, leaving the JesusFreke behind.

The amazing thing is that, the build has somehow, magically kept all my apps and moved them to the EXT2 partition, leaving the phone memory almost empty. This at first glance seems to mean that the phone is now running like it means business and everything happens without any lag!

I’ll cane the phone in the next couple of days and keep an eye on the speeds!

This weekend I had a really slow phone.

It turns out that after a load of browsing and application stalling, I had 0 memory left on the phone. Subsequesntly, the phone ran like a dawg and the best solution was to wipe out the browser cache and uninstall a couple of useless unused apps

Tired of having all the power of an Android in my pocket and not being able to use it all because of restrictions has prompted me to take the plunge and root my G1.

Like the first time you type format c: I was a little neverous as I still have best part of 13 months on my contract and the last thing I need was to pay T-Mobile for a brick.

Anyway. Following instructions from the internet, I am now writing this on my Rooted G1 with Rc9 by JesusFreke.

I also have Google latitude thanks to GeekYouUp and a wifi tether, not that I have a laptop powerful enough to enjoy it.

Well, happy as can be that my phone has decided to update to RC9.

Now I’ll be able to find my friends using their Nokias, SEs and windows mobiles running google latitude.

I’ll be able to use by Bluetooth headphones I got for my old SE W880i

I might even use the voice dialling while I’m driving so I don’t kill myself and others trying to find contacts in the phone book.

Well, it looks like I may have to wait a little longer or indefinately, as the update contains nothing which will improve my phone experience.

Latitude is in Google Maps app, but is disable for UK (and europe?) users.

I’ll have to still use the wired, too big for my ears headphones which came with the phone as stereo bluetooth isn’t enabled.

And look out if you see me staring at my crotch when I’m driving, as voice activation hasn’t arrived.

On the plus side, The Market now tells me when applications have updates. A bit like aTrackDog app. So good for me, not so good for the aTrackDog developers.

I installed PicPush the other day.

The app uploads photos to your selected social photo site such as flickr.

I’m still getting to grips with it as it will upload all photos. This is a bit annoying as I don’t really want to upload blurry pictures (as the G1 camera is so slow, or the accidental shots of my pocket.

I’m not the most organised person in the world.

However, I’ve been using Astid to organise, well list the thing I need to do.

Now I spend more time writing down what needs to be done instead of doing any of them, but the though is there.

There have been a couple of useful reminders, such as, File my Tax Return, book ski holiday, etc.

As data transfer is mainly done via USB, there is always the danger of removing the cable before unmounting the card.

Microsoft XP does not warn you of this error anymore, maybe they have fixed hot plugin, however, if it isn’t done, there is a chance the camera stops working with the error mentioned above.

On Mac OS X, to fix this proble, you can go to Disk Utility. If you verify the volume, it will say that there is an error with the non HFS+ disk.

If you press the fix disk button, it will say that there isn’t anything to fix, but the camera will again be functional.

On Windows, people have fixed the problem by re-formatting.

Today I successfully ftped into my iBook without a router. I used internet connection sharing which let the G1 straight in.
As I was using wifi for the connection sharing, I lost the connection to the internet as it too used the wifi.
Unfortuately I was unable to reconnect to the internet as ICS wouldn’t shut down. Nothing a reboot can’t fix, but annoying that I have to reboot to resume normal play,

Before I purchased the G1, I was aware that it didn’t have stereo bluetooth, so my nice Chrimbo prezzie of this year was going to be packed away, until I had a device with stereo bluetooth.

I tried a different headset and bang, it all worked. Excellent.

I tried to sync up my G1 with my old SE W880 via bluetooth. I thought I’d take some old numbers and photos. Nothing exciting.

Well, both were discoverable and they found each other, so I decided to push over a couple of old photos. Nothing happened. I tried syncing up with my ibook, still nothing.

Using a quick Google search (Google is my friend and yet my enemy), it turns out, that there isn’t any bluetooth connectivity other than headsets.

This leaves a small dilemma of how I would make data transfers without USB.

Well the G1 has benn charging for a couple of hours, but curiosity has got the better of me and I have set the phone up.

First thing the phone asks is for your google account details. If you don’t have one, it’ll set it up.

Next, setup wifi. Even though the T-Mobile bundle has unlimited internet, it’s useless when there isn’t a signal and in the middle of the house, there is very little signal. At best there is a one direction voice radio wave going through the house.

As the wifi is open here (address not disclosed and hopefully my ISP won’t close me down for that) tapping in was pretty straight forward. Switch on wifi, find wifi connect to wifi.

Now that my phone is linked to my gmail account, my security head kicked in and was thinking how easy it would be to either lose or have the phone get stolen, so I looked at the security settings.

Locking the screen is easy. With a series of 9 dots in a square, you draw a unique pattern, which will unlock the screen.

The SIM lock is also easy, if you know what the default SIM PIN is. Going through all the manuals, I couldn’t find it. I decided not to try again in the fear of locking the phone out after 2 hours of ownership. Instead I would ask when transfering my old phone number.