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 5, Ex-cha-cha-cha-changes

My eval just goes on and on. This one will probably be the last, though, as CM7 should be here before long. In this post, I'm going to type a bit about Microsoft Exchange support.

When I first installed CyanogenMod 6.1, the company I worked for was using the pleasantly datet Microsoft Exchange 2003 for corporate email. CM6 handled it no problem.

Then my company upgraded to Exchange 2007. CM6 didn't handle it as well. At first, it didn't work at all. I couldn't connect. I talked to our IT department, and they had to create an exception on their end for my phone. And it worked -- some of the time. When it worked, it was peachy. It was a little unsettling, though, as I had to give my company permission to wipe my phone remotely, if needed, through Exchange. But I digress.

When it didn't work (which happened to be the times when I needed it most), it was frustrating. I would get "Unable to open connection to server due to security error" or just "Unable to open connection to server" messages with no further explanation. Rebooting would fix this -- sometimes. Other times, it would just start working on its own, email suddenly filling my inbox in an endless stream of chirping notifications. I added and removed my account from the phone, which also didn't solve the problem. I needed a fix.

I downloaded TouchDown for Android and thought I'd give the free 30-day-trial a spin. TouchDown is a full-featured email client for Android that supports Exchange ActiveSync, among other things. I used it as my Exchange client for about two weeks.

Some of the features of TouchDown I liked were:

TouchDown's email menu

• A Quick and easy setup
• Rock solid stability 
• The app felt very nimble and responsive
• Programmable peak hours to control when it checks for new email
• Reminders that chime every few minutes until you dismiss them (similar to how Sense UI handles them) 
• The ability to create and update tasks
• A variety of widgets (email/calendar/contacts/tasks, and combinations thereof)
• Comprehensive diagnostics that give you the details about your connection to a particular server
• Many more features that I haven't had the chance to explore

There were a few negatives to using TouchDown to manage my corporate email, though, and those included:

• Ending up with two separate calendars on my phone -- one for work and one for everything else. The TouchDown calender does not sync with the Android calendar.
• The TouchDown UI look and feel doesn't integrate with the Android UI very well -- it looks very different
• Some of the buttons in the TD interface are in odd places (the pin pad, for instance)
• Given the security requirements of my work account, I effectively had to enter a pin number twice -- once when I woke up my phone, and once when I needed to do anything in TouchDown beyond dismissing a meeting alert, which got tedious.
• The cost. TouchDown costs $20. 

While I was investigating TouchDown, I also did a bit of asking around on the CyanogenMod forums, and was pointed to this possible solution. I installed the suggested Email.apk, which was a bit of a chore and required me to install the Android SDK on my PC. But thus far it seems to work well -- I've had none of the syncing problems I had before in a week's worth of use. One hint: you can be sure that you have the new Email.apk installed by how the Refresh button looks in the email menu. The stock CM6 email has a circular refresh icon. The updated app has an arrow that looks like a play button. If problems return, I'll go back to TouchDown. For now though, I'll stick with this solution.