Experiment: Getting By With A Six-Year-Old Android Phone

I used my old Android phone as a daily driver for a month. How did I survive? Click on to learn...

CyanogenMod 7.1 - an even quicker eval

The CyanogenMod team recently released the final version of their 7.1, which is based on Android 2.37.

There's not a lot of differences between 7.03 and 7.1 that is immediately obvious. I did notice a new lockscreen, which is nice. And there are a lot of smaller or under-the-hood changes which you can read about on the full changelog here. One thing I have noticed is that it seems to have fixed some of the most annoying bugs I noticed in 7.03, namely:

• The email app refusing to fetch new email. Quite often on 7.03, it would not retrieve new email when I hit refresh, and I'd have to either force stop the app or reboot to get it working again. I haven't noticed this problem with 7.1 in a week or so of testing.
• Google Navigation slowness/force closes/reboots. Google Nav in 7.03 was unreliable for me (though others with the same phone reported no problems). Sometimes it would work fine. Sometimes it would close without any kind of notification. Sometimes, it would cause my phone to spontaneously reboot. In limited testing (on a train home, which forced it to constantly reroute and was reminiscent of driving off the track and into the grass in '80s video games), it seemed to work well.

 To sum up: So far, 7.1 looks to be a great release for my HTC Hero. Thanks to the CyanogenMod team for not only keeping my aging phone up to date but making the phone run better, faster, longer and with far more stability than it had originally.

Unfortunate update: though Google Nav seemed to work find in my early tests, I did have a problem earlier today, where it became unresponsive. Switching to it brought up a black screen, and it no longer was voicing directions. So it seems that Navigation is still a little flaky on my Hero -- perhaps it's a hardware issue?

Cyanogenmod 6 Custom ROM Eval: Part 4, Cents for Sense-ability

I thought I'd do one final post in this series, focused on apps that bring some of the things I liked in the Sense UI to CyanogenMod 6. There are plenty of widgets and apps available that can add Sense-like features or design elements to any Android phone/OS. Unfortunately, most of them that I've found you have to pay for. Here's the list of what I've installed. Most of these have free trials, so you can decide if they're worth the $$ or not.

Beautiful Widgets

PowerAMP's lock screen

SwiftKey

• Beautiful Widgets: adds nicer-looking clock and weather widgets, along with a number of toggle switches for wi-fi, bluetooth, etc. (most of which are unnecessary for CM6, thanks to its great notifications panel). The package, which comes with a number of options, sizes, layouts and skins is $2. Though I like these, none of the Beautiful Widgets (or skins) I tried were quite as attractive as the Sense clock/weather widget. But they are a nice improvement over the look of the built-in clock and weather widgets.
  
• PowerAMP music player: this player has a lot of features, most of which I haven't tried. It looks great too. The thing that sold me on it, though: info and album art showing up on the lock screen, which is a nice improvement over the stock player's buttons-only approach. $4.99
  
• LauncherPro Plus: replaces the ADW launcher that comes with CM6, and allows you to set the number of homescreens, add apps to the ribbon at the bottom, and more. The paid version (which I haven't tried) comes with a Sense bookmarks-like widget and a lot of others. $2.99
  
• SwiftKey Keyboard: I was using this even before CM6. It's one of the best Android keyboards I've used, and it gives you shortcuts to commonly-used words at the top to reduce the amount of pecking required. The keyboard looks great, has a nice layout, and learns what words you commonly use first from your text messages and then as you go, and is therefore much more likely to pick shortcuts you'll actually use. $1.99

One last note before wrapping this up: CyanogenMod 7 (based on Android 2.3 aka Gingerbread) is coming! Nightly builds of the ROM are now available, though I haven't tried any yet...

Cyanogenmod 6 Custom ROM Eval: Part 3, Quibbles and Conclusions

Though the CyanogenMod 6.1 custom Android ROM has a lot of great features (detailed in Part 2), I did run into a few issues and found a few things lacking. Here's the list:

• When I first installed the ROM, I had occasional total lockups. The screen would turn white and I would have to take the battery out of the phone and restart it. This happened less frequently than the spontaneous reboots I had when using the original firmware, but still troubling. I did find a fix in this thread, and since installing the uncapped kernel this hasn’t been an issue.
• I had a few problems connecting to my work’s Outlook Exchange server. Sometimes, it would give me a ‘can’t connect’ error message. Other times, it would try to connect but not be able to and not give an error message -- the little animated refresh icon would just spin and spin. I never found a solution to this, but it didn’t happen very often to me anyway.
• Also email-related: Sense shows the time when emails were last refreshed. Because CM6 doesn’t have it, I probably end up manually refreshing my email more often to make sure I’m up to date.
• Some things like the music player, keyboard, and the camera)  aren’t as attractive (or don't seem to fit in as well with the overall aesthetics of the phone) as the Sense versions. Though album art works consistently for me now on the music player, it shows up as a little box on the screen -- in a jewel case.
• If you have the pattern screen lock set, you need to enter it to be able to change music on the player, dismiss notifications, and so on. I found a workaround: if you use a pin number rather than drawing a pattern, you can access the music buttons without having to enter it.
• CyanogenMod 6.1 comes with an old version of the Android Market. It was a little strange to update to a newer version of Android and end up with an older version of the Market. They both function the same way, though.
• GPS seems a bit more finicky. I seem to lose signal more often than I did with the stock ROM, but I’m not sure if this is an issue with CM6 or just bad luck.
• Voicemails come with a free text message. Due to the way Sprint handles voicemail, whenever I get a voice message I also get a text message notification. Though there are a number of solutions to this posted online, none of the ones I tried eliminated this slight annoyance.
• CM6 comes with fewer and less pleasant ringtone/notification sounds out of the box -- though it’s easy enough to add ones you like to the phone.
• I miss the Sense bookmarks widget (the pay version of LauncherPro has one that looks similar).
• The Gallery app is a bit slow because it's tied to my Picasa account, but as it is tied to my account, I see it as a mixed blessing.
• With Sense you can have a customized lockscreen that’s different than the background pic. That’s not an option with CM6.

Was it worth it?
Yes. Though it was a bit of work to set up, and despite the list above, I’m glad I made the switch. My phone is much more useful overall. One thing to note: CM6 is no longer being developed for the Hero. CM7, based on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), is what CyanogenMod team is working on now.  Builds are available for the Hero, but when I last checked there wasn’t a lead developer yet focusing on that phone. Regardless, CyanogenMod 6.1 is definitely a step up from the stock 2.1 ROM.

So Should you do it?
If you have the time (it takes a few hours), the nerves required (it’s not that scary one you commit to doing it), and the desire to get more out of your phone, it’s well worth it. And as long as you back up your phone before installing the new ROM, you should be able to go back to the original firmware if necessary.

Cyanogenmod 6 Custom ROM Eval: Part 2, The Likening

Thing I like: my current home screen, Car Home, Contacts, and the Notifications Pane

For a month now I've been playing around with the CyanogenMod 6.1 ROM (CM6) installed on my aging HTC Hero (read part 1 here). In this post, I'm going to detail some of the things I like about it. Some items mentioned are part of Android 2.2, while some are unique to CyanogenMod. Regardless of the source, here are things I dig about CM6:

• Speed: though not as fast as the current crop of Android phones and not always as fast as I'd like, the phone is much more responsive overall and runs most things at a respectable speed.
• Stability: thus far, I’m not getting spontaneous reboots I did with the stock 2.1 ROM. (With once caveat, which I'll detail next time.) 
• Battery life: seems to be a bit better, but I'm not 100% sure. One complicating factor that makes it difficult to say: I have been using my phone a lot more, both because it's more responsive and for testing purposes. 
• Toggles on the notifications panel: No more clunky and unresponsive widgets needed to toggle commonly used things like ringer/vibrate, GPS and Wi-Fi on/off, etc. It's all in the panel.
• It's easier to play favorites: though the Sense UI also has Favorites, CM6's Favorites tab is easier to use and more intuitive. Star a person, and they show up in your favorites. The Contacts app in CM6 is easier to use overall, primarily because the phone is more responsive.
• More talk, more action(s): the Google Voice Actions app works surprisingly well. I tell my phone to navigate to a contact's house, and it does. It can also voice dial, send emails, text messages, and more -- with no typing.
  
• The Car Home app: a panel of large buttons puts the things you're most likely to need at your fingertips -- Navigation, Music, Phone, Contacts, and so on.
  
• Photo gallery improvements: the Gallery app can be set up to show photos in your Picasa web albums. It’s also easy to upload camera photos to Picasa. The Gallery app can also do basic photo cropping and rotation.
• Improved email/Gmail interface: no need to go back and forth from an email to the list of mail in your inbox -- arrow buttons allow you to easily work your way back and forth through your messages directly, message to message.
• My Hero now downloads whole emails/Gmails at once -- no more having to click to load the rest of a message.
• Easier snaps: the Camera app is quicker and more responsive than the one in the stock ROM, and it’s easier to make adjustments to exposure, zoom, resolution, etc. as you shoot.
• A smarter market: Android 2.2's Market remembers which apps you've installed and reinstalls them if you wipe your phone, which is handier than it sounds.
• Choose your unlock: in addition to the pattern-drawing security unlock, you can also use a pin number or a password.
• Cool apps that are available only on phones that are rooted, including ones that allow you to take screenshots on your phone (examples at the top), turn your phone into a free Wi-Fi hotspot, and apps that allow you to easily back up your phone.
• Album art just works now: all of my album covers now display in the Android music player. Whew.
• Facebook sync works!

Those are a few of the things I really enjoyed in my 'new' phone. There are a few other cool things that CM6 has that I didn't touch on because I haven't used them much -- like the built-in equalizer, for example. And note that I installed the free version of LauncherPro and Beautiful Widgets right off the bat, as you can see in the screenshots.

Next up: a few areas where the CyanogenMod ROM came up short, and some final thoughts. Now available here!

One Month with the CyanogenMod Custom Android ROM. Should You Install?

Radical!?!

Frustrated with the performance of the stock OS on my phone and envious of others who run newer, shinier versions of Android, I finally decide to take the plunge and install a custom ROM on my phone. There are plenty of how-to guides, quick reviews and videos demoing the bajillions of custom Android ROMs available, but I couldn’t find any that do a good job of describing what the process is like, or any reviews that seem to go much beyond initial impressions. My aim in this short series of posts is to help fill in those gaps. Hope you find them useful.

What is it?
CyanogenMod  is a custom version of the Android OS built by the CyanogenMod community. It’s  available for a large number of phones and has been in development since 2008. A month ago, I took the plunge and installed it on my phone (an HTC Hero on the Sprint network).

Why do it?
Though the Android platform is continually being developed, it’s up to the networks and the handset manufacturers to release updates for specific phones. In the case of my phone, the Hero, Sprint has stated that the phone will no longer be updated to newer versions of Android, so it’s permanently stuck at version 2.1, which was released in May of 2010.

In addition to being outdated, the stock firmware is also buggy. Though none are showstoppers, some of them can be pretty annoying:

• It is often slow to respond. The phone’s hardware is probably a little underpowered, and it can make things a bit laggy and slow -- especially compared to newer phones.       
• The phone would often reboot unexpectedly -- which ties up the phone for about thirty seconds -- most often when exiting out of the browser.
• Bluetooth was finicky. I’d often have to turn it on and off a few times to get it in sync with my car.
• Dismissing notifications would often snooze them instead. So they would come up again. And again. And again.
• If you lose GPS signal while using Google Navigation, it usually won’t find it again without first turning GPS on and off, which can be a big hassle when you’re supposed to be driving.
• Though Sense UI (HTC’s user interface and package of widgets and apps for their Android phones) ties neatly together your contacts with Facebook  it stopped syncing on my phone after the last official update
• Try as I might, I could never get the music player to show the album covers consistantly. It would for some, not for others, and despite all I've tried (embedding, linking, etc.), I couldn't get them all to work always.
• The phone contains a number of annoying apps installed by the network that can’t be removed -- NASCAR, NFL, SprintTV, etc.
• Short battery life. I could get through a day without recharging if I didn’t use the phone much, but if I did a lot of anything on it, it would start crying ‘feed me’ before the day was out. 

The current stable version of Cyanogenmod (6.1) is based on Android 2.2, so the ROM benefits from many of the features in the newer version of Android. In addition, the ROM includes many tweaks and enhancements done by the community to further improve the platform.

 There are a number of custom Android ROMs out there to choose from,  I decided to go with CyanogenMod because it is:

• One of the most popular
• Continually developed by a large and stable community
• Relatively well documented
• Focused on speed and stability
• Does not use HTC’s Sense user interface. Though it is a nice UI -- perhaps the best out there for people unfamiliar with Android -- it is a bit of a resource hog and a contributor to my Hero's sluggishness.

Installing The ROM
Getting the CyanogenMod ROM up and running the first time (or any custom ROM, for that matter) takes a fair amount of time and work. There are many guides to doing this online (including one on the CyanogenMod site), so I won’t go into detail here, but the basic steps are:

• Recognize that this can be a risky procedure, that it will void your warranty, and that there is the slight possibility of bricking you phone (in other words, making it not work).
• Make sure you have all of the tools necessary (which often come from a variety of places) and that you understand all of the steps necessary for the entire process.
• Root the phone: allows you to access, update, and back up the phone's firmware. A bit of research is required for rooting and backing up your phone, as the procedure varies based on the phone model and which version of the original firmware you’re running.
• Back up your phone: there are software packages out there that will back up your firmware as well as your apps. Unfortunately, a lot of them aren’t very clearly documented, and some of those often mentioned can be hard to find or no longer being developed.
• Install the new ROM, which may also include installing other software such as a new radio for the phone.
• Install Google Apps. These are distributed separately from Cyanogen, for legal reasons. Installing these allows you to access the Android Market, use Google Navigation, Gmail, etc.
• Re-install your old apps. Newer versions (2.2 and up) of Android remember what you have installed and will do this automatically.

So How Do I Like It?
I’ll post specifics about my month with CM6 very soon, including info about its features and performance.

Update: part 2 is here.