CyanogenMod 9 Working On the Nexus S

MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about progress toward getting an AOSP build working on the Nexus S. From the article: "Over the past week, ROM Manager extraordinaire Koush has been frantically working on making a working build of CyanogenMod 9 (Ice Cream Sandwich) for the Samsung Nexus S. The custom ROM, which is built purely from the Android Open Source Project, has now reached 'alpha 11.' All major features are present and no significant bugs remain. It's too early to say that the build is ready for prime time or mission-critical work — the final release of CM9 is due in the new year — but it's certainly stable enough for daily use. The most significant feature, if you can call it that, is that Koush's build of ICS is really very smooth — it's as nimble as Gingerbread, if not more so. Unlike the previous, non-CM build that was released last week, this alpha build of CM9 has every feature enabled, including Google Wallet, and setting a mobile data limit. As usual, the custom ROM is pre-rooted, has ROM Manager installed, and absolutely no bloatware. "

Comments

Yay

[masternerdguy]

I want a real linux distro, not google's vision of how linux should be. Let me know when I can load Debian, SuSe, Fedora, etc, on my phone and then we'll talk.

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on now, follow the rules and post that stuff in the apple section.

Think of the children.

Re:Yay

[Kenja]

Done. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN4c61ETCWg Totally useless of course, but knock yourself out. Just hope you dont need to make calls on your "phone".

Re:Yay

[Kenja]

So you want a Nokia N900. Not too many people did, which is why it was dropped.

Re:Yay

[PitaBred]

You sure are demanding and lazy, aren't you?

Re:Yay

[TheReaperD]

Then why don't you program it? It's not something that I want so I have no plans of doing it for you.

Re:Yay

[masternerdguy]

The android manufacturers should provide an open source kit for getting any linux distro to act as a phone. It's their hardware.

Re:Yay

[mjwx]

Then it hasn't met my standards, because it's no longer a phone. I want an open source program I can compile and install on my distro of choice that lets me use it as a phone.

Well, get coding. It's open source after all

Otherwise all this sounds like is Varuka Saltz stamping her feet and shouting "Daddy, I want it NAOOOOOOOOOOO".

As for me, I'm grateful to Cyanogen, Koush and the rest of the rather lengthy CM team for their hard work (yes I donate too). Most of us have to work with what we've got, thanks to Google we've got a great platform to work with (anyone complaining about Android never used WinMo) and thanks to people like Cyanogen, we've got an even better phone OS that is free and open.

Re:Yay

[Microlith]

No, it was "dropped" because Nokia's internal politics damaged the company enough that they stuck an ex-Microsoft executive in the CEO slot who promptly killed off the winner they managed to create in the N9 and forced Nokia on to WP7.

But please, blame the core OS for political and managerial failures.

Re:Yay

[Microlith]

Should, but they won't. Mostly because at least in the US they're subservient to the carriers who don't want you to do as you wish, but rather want you to do as they wish and use your device as little as possible, pay as much as possible, and throw it away in favor of a new device and a new contract after 2 years are up.

Until then, pick a handset and go look at http://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo">Nemo, maybe grab an N900.

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

I want a pink unicorn. And it has to be able to speak English. And shit rainbows. I want it now.

Re:Yay

[dave420]

Because that's what he wants, and that's all that matters.

Re:Yay

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

No, it was "dropped" because Nokia's internal politics damaged the company enough that they stuck an ex-Microsoft executive in the CEO slot who promptly killed off the winner they managed to create in the N9 and forced Nokia on to WP7.

Uh, no. It was dropped because their marketing strategy of having three guys chime in on every Slashdot smartphone thread about how great the N900 is was insufficient to gain any traction in the US.

Re:Yay

[Belial6]

Different people have different price points. I always said that I would buy my PC games if they were priced reasonably, and didn't have DRM. In the last year I have bought 140 PC games from GoG. That is at least 10 times the number of games that I had purchased over the last 10 years.

If I could buy PS1 games in a paper sleeve at the checkout of the drugstore for $1 a pop, I would buy just about anything I could get my hands on. I would pay 2 to 3 times that for PS2/XBox games.

99 cents per song is a ridiculously high cost for music. The cost of producing music has dropped dramatically in the last 2 decades, and 99 cents per song is what it used to cost for a physical disk. It is actually surprising how many people have bought into having the price RAISED for the privilege of not having a physical disk.

Re:Yay

[chrb]

Not done. That is Ubuntu running in a chroot environment. And it makes phone calls fine, because Android is still present. Personally, I would love to see a real Linux distribution running on an Android device. Android has so many limitations: the bionic C library, Dalvik apps only (yeah, I know about NDK, but "real Linux" has Python, Perl, C++, OpenJDK Java etc.)

The limitations of Android stem from being targetted at 2005 phone hardware, so they created a cut-down Linux. With 2012 tablets, dual-core 1.2GHz+ CPU and 1GB+ memory, there is absolutely no reason for these artificial software limitations. I want to see Gnome on a tablet. And KDE. And other GUI environments. And I want Android to be relegated to an app-compatibility environment in the same way that Java and Mono exist today - not because that's a bad thing, but because Android is just one application environment of the many that exist on Linux. Why shouldn't tablet programmers use Python+PyQT to build their apps, deployed on Debian-style apt-get repositories? Why shouldn't we have Ubuntu for Tablets? The hardware is powerful enough now, and it is only going to get more powerful, we don't need to be hobbled by the design choices of what was (8 years ago) a small startup in California.

Re:Yay

[Hal_Porter]

Varuka Saltz

It's Veruca Salt. Verruca are plantar walts.

Re:Yay

[CalcProgrammer1]

It is definitely possible and work is being done. The issue is that many devices have a restrictive bootloader and pre-determined partition setup that prevents the creation of additional Linux partitions and installing extra boot options. Some devices do have "developer" boot loaders (such as Archos' SDE) or modded in custom boot loaders (such as moboot on HP Touchpad) that allow you to boot whatever you want. Beyond that, getting a proper "real Linux" environment requires Xorg drivers for the video devices and many mobile systems do not have such drivers. Even when they do, those drivers are often merely framebuffer implementations which allow GUI functionality but with zero hardware acceleration. The GPU's on mobile devices are pretty much exclusively proprietary and require binary firmware blobs that may or may not be compatible with non-Android (or other OS) environments. Finally, devices found in many mobile devices are nonstandard and are not present in the main line Linux kernel source, so a one-size-fits-all kernel package such as is typical on PC setups will not work for mobile. Instead, each device must have its own custom maintained kernel that keeps all the device-specific hardware patches up to date. Some devices (such as the Archos tablets) require you to flash the kernel and initramfs into a special boot area, meaning that typical kernel upgrades through package managers will not work. Finally, even if you do get GPU acceleration to work, mobile GPU's only support the limited OpenGL ES architecture. Almost all of the desktop window managers that support acceleration do so through traditional OpenGL interfaces, meaning that these window managers must be rewritten to support OpenGL ES instead. The same applies to video acceleration in media players, and the DSP and GPU systems are much more varied in mobile devices. These are just some of the restrictions that prevent true Linux installations on mobile devices. I actually did get Debian running decently on my Archos 43 tablet but only after finding a modified 2.6.37+ kernel that did not have all the necessary drivers installed. The core functionality worked despite having to write some boot scripts to initialize the WiFi, Bluetooth, and power management systems. Even then the Bluetooth was spotty at best, often dropping connections and refusing to pair (despite working perfectly in Android with the same devices). To all mobile hardware developers: Please, if you really want consumers to get the most out of your hardware, make sure your drivers are compatible with standard Linux system utilities in addition to those found in Android and other mobile OS'es. This will help out such porting efforts and give your device a wide variety of OS choices. Also, please consider open-sourcing more drivers, especially video drivers. If not open-sourcing them, at least make Xorg compatible drivers with OpenGL ES acceleration so we can actually use the full potential of the hardware.

Re:Yay

[impaledsunset]

Debian runs on the Neo Freerunner, and there's software for the phone functionality. You can make calls, receive and send SMS, connect over GPRS and read your email, browse, use the GPS. It's usable, although running desktop apps on a phone can be frustrating sometimes. And it's slow.
There's a project to run Debian on Nokia N900, however it's incomplete and because of a few proprietary components you can't "compile and install" something to make the phone work. The community is working on replacing those.

The original OS on the phone is Maemo, which is essentially Debian-based, X-based, and you can compile and run it except for those few components. You can also run full Debian in a chroot. You can also port the apps missing in Debian from there any time you wish. It's non-trivial perhaps.

You can run Kubuntu on N900. The phone functionality in Debian and Kubuntu is being worked on.

Re:Yay

[gutnor]

Mostly because at least in the US they're subservient to the carriers who don't want you to do as you wish, but rather want you to do as they wish and use your device as little as possible, pay as much as possible, and throw it away in favor of a new device and a new contract after 2 years are up.

No they won't because they want to sell a shitload of handsets and that means that they focus their effort on the most juicy target. Advanced support for geek has an extremely limited return on investment.

Re:Yay

[Miamicanes]

Well... there's a little more to it than that. A "phone" environment is fundamentally different in the sense that an incoming phone call usually will (and should) stop whatever else you're doing dead in its tracks until the call is dealt with. A scheduling and notification strategy optimized for realtime multiplayer games is going to be completely dysfunctional when your real-world use case involves being able to freeze the action mid-shot and take an incoming phone call, then gracefully ease back into the action when it's finished. That's why Android makes such a big deal about differentiating between "service" and "activity" -- a service can keep running when another activity has the activity focus.

If Android apps weren't forced to divide up the workflow and separate out the parts into "things that can (and should) run in the background without a user interface", and "things that only make sense when the application has focus and the user's exclusive attention", we'd have the same problems that IOS does. Where things in Android's world become confusing is the ambiguity at the "service" end, between "things that happen occasionally on a schedule" (like polling a server), "things that happen in response to something else" (incoming communication, arrival at location, change of sensor state, etc), and "things that should happen, and keep happening, until something else gives them a reason to stop" (like music playback). Complicating things more is the fact that you can sort of *get away* with doing things in background services using threads and traditional Java sleep/wait strategies, but Android will break things that insist on doing things that way in increasingly aggressive ways (particularly Gingerbread and beyond), even when they do it in ways that are considered to be perfectly legitimate and polite in mainstream Java.

Starting with Gingerbread, Android has started becoming downright mean & aggressive towards apps that use TimerTask to schedule periodic tasks in background services instead of using alarms & intents... not quite breaking apps outright, but getting VERY aggressive about killing background services that use TimerTask with partial wakelocks in ways that even a year ago would have been considered mainstream and exceptionally well-behaved (like grabbing a partial wakelock ONLY during actual network activity, to at least ensure that the phone didn't get put to sleep halfway through a http request, even if the service itself ended up suspended until the phone was awakened by something). Now, Android will kill background services after about an hour simply because it decides they've been running for "too long", even if they've been asleep in a TimerTask for most of it. I never even noticed this until I got my Photon last month, because my previous phone (Samsung Galaxy S/Epic 4G) was stuck in Froyo-land, and my app worked flawlessly on it. I knew it didn't reliably poll when the phone was asleep, but it still managed to make it work often enough to not be a big deal. Once I got the Photon, I noticed that it was just silently dying outright after about an hour, and not coming back to life after the phone was awakened.

I can see Google's logic, but I don't think they've done a particularly good job of reaching out to developers (many of whom are still stuck in Froyo-land, if only because American carriers suck & most users are still stuck with it, often including the developers themselves). Yes, the emulator exists for newer versions, but frankly, it's so slow, even on a fast quadcore PC, I'd rather tear off my fingernails one by one than suffer its slowness (and the fact that it seems to either die, or spontaneously lose contact with Eclipse, once or twice per hour, necessitating even more delay and interruption). After I bought my new Photon, my old Epic turned into my "permanently tethered to the computer development phone".

Re:Yay

[tlhIngan]

I think Google looked at the vast Linux ecosystem and GPL community and decided very wisely they'd keep the kernel but write their own non GPL userland.

Exactly. Same reason why Apple chopped down OS X to make iOS for the iPhone and iPad.

Usability of desktop OSes on handheld and tablet devices is awful, even though compatibility is great. You can buy phones running Windows XP and Windows 7 (they're on the market), but we're talking about Windows UI on a 4" screen. And we know how Microsoft did with nearly two decades of trying to sell tablet-ized Windows (Pen Windows, XP tablet, Origami (XP), now Windows 7).

Right-click is hard enough on a touchscreen already - I can't imagine trying to simulate a middle click And then there's the typing.

It's why there are QT environments for pocket devices, as well as Maemo/MeeGo and other UIs around - what works on the desktop does not work on a touch-enabled tablet nor phone necessarily.

Re:Yay

[Miamicanes]

TimerTask might never have been officially "supported", but the practice of using it was widespread to the point of making it into at least one major book on Android programming as an example.

Yes, Android has always been entitled to kill background services when RAM is needed, and has reserved the right to do it for any reason, or no particular reason at all. The unhappy surprise was Gingerbread's aggressive enthusiasm for killing background services for reasons seemingly closer to "just because it feels like it".

In Froyo, it was reasonable to assume that Android wouldn't kill off a background service unless there was a bona-fide need to free up resources, or the service appeared to be leaking resources or spinning its wheels doing busy-waits and keeping the phone awake for extended periods of time. As of Gingerbread, it literally DOES appear to kill off long-lived, but otherwise tame and sleepy, background processes just because it thinks they've been running for "too long".

There's a bigger problem -- to this day, there's no easy way using the bare API to say, "at XXX, wake up the phone, attempt to connect to a network, make this complete http request, and keep the phone awake until its response has been received, digested, and handled. Then go back to sleep if you feel like it." You can't directly pass a PartialWakeLock acquired by an Alarm's BroadcastReceiver to the service, but if you merely try to start the service so it can acquire its own partial wake lock, there's no guarantee the phone will remain awake long enough for the service to finish initializing. There are various ways to kludge around it using static objects, but Android's own development team has admitted that they're ugly hacks. That's why so many people used long-lived services with TimerTasks -- they worked. Not 100%, but if you could live with the service running only while the phone was awake, and you did your part to have well-behaved and polite Threads, they worked pretty well (and definitely worked better than most guerrilla attempts to make Alarm-triggered network activity work properly).

What Android's API *really* needs badly is something like PendingHttpRequest, where you could set up a HTTP(S) GET/POST, specify the args, define intents to fire when it succeeds or fails, and throw it into a metaphorical pile for Android to execute as a bach along with PendingHttpRequests from other apps/services within 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 60, 90, 120, 180, 240, 360, 480, 720, 1080, or 1440 minutes. THEN, let ANDROID deal with bringing up the network, firing them off, retrying if appropriate, and shutting everything down when it's through. Kind of like the general idea behind SetInexactRepeat, but incorporating wakelocks and network-connectivity management into the equation as well. The problem we have now is that everyone is forced to reinvent the wheel, and just about everyone does it badly.

Network connectivity in a narcoleptic Android device is a really hard problem for individual developers to solve. Wakelocks are a dance through a minefield. The need to make a single successful http request at some not-particularly-critical point in the future when the phone has reliable network connectivity is a common use case, and we'd all be better off if there were a nice, clean, easy way to just throw the URL, args, and handler intent at Android and say, "here's the request. Make it properly, and let me know when it's done."

Re:Lies

[TheReaperD]

Although Android is not a true open source project, they normally release the source code with one major exception. A lot of the argument about that was because Google refused to release the 3.x Honeycomb source code. Google themselves said that the reason they never released it was that it was a 'hack' to get Android on tablets and was not up to their quality standards and they didn't want it spread any further than necessary. They promised that they would release 4.0, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich, which would meld the phone and tablet code and they have done so, leading to the CyanogenMod 9 release.

Open source vs. community development

[DragonWriter]

Although Android is not a true open source project, they normally release the source code

A project that releases source code under an open source license is an open source project.

Android, unlike many open source projects, isn't an open community development project, but while those two things often go together, they have no necessary relationship.

Re:Open source vs. community development

[Namarrgon]

Here's a big difference: Android is pretty much entirely funded and developed by Google. It's not a community project.

Their project, their copyright, their licence, their rules. Demanding that they give you the source to everything they develop is simply childish. Be grateful for the source you get, since it cost the wider community nothing, not even time.

Re:Open source vs. community development

[Namarrgon]

Well, unlike Android, MySQL is under a GPL licence, requiring them to open the source to released binaries in a timely fashion, is it not? So Oracle couldn't legally withhold source at all, unless they changed the licence somehow.

I was under the impression that MySQL is (or perhaps was, until a couple years ago) a much more community-driven project, with many contributors who would be livid to see their work bought & derailed, but perhaps I'm wrong there. If it really was developed solely by MySQL AB (and then Sun, then Oracle), with little to no direct community input, then yes, I would think Oracle would be well within their moral rights to turn it into a restaurant ordering system, if they felt like it. The community can go play with the MariaDB fork instead, and should be happy that they were given a free DB as good as it is.

Re:Open source vs. community development

[rtfa-troll]

This is a simple matter of competence and trust. When Google says "we will release the source later" even those of us who are a bit outraged* mostly trust them. When Oracle says little and occasionally mutters "we are working on the community" we immediately see a bunch of executioners coming out and start to panic. I know that I immediately switched to Jenkins / Libre Office the minute I heard that there was a fork away from Oracle. I still haven't got it together to get Cyanogenomod even though it's probably more beneficial for me. I have stopped basing anything on MySQL that I can avoid for a while.

This is actually correct. Oracle's behavior is generally outrageous and should not be rewarded. It's completely reasonable to take almost anything Red Hat says on trust whilst I wouldn't accept a contract from Microsoft without Billions in cash, a series of senior management hostages, ownership of 90% of the voting shares, a safe room, free use of the US army for my own defence and a personal promise from a known trustworthy dominant alien intelligence to intervene on my behalf. Let's just say I'm not expecting things to work out well for Nokia.

* A "bit outraged" is difficult to explain. It doesn't worry me most of the time because I have come to believe that Google does what they say, but when I think about it too much I get very annoyed. I guess I don't want to trust Google, but feel forced to do so by other people who are more evil than they are.

Re:Lies

[exomondo]

It's easier to just say which releases/versions of Android are open source rather than trying to say whether the entire project is or is not. Pretty much all of them are with the notable exception (up until recently) of Honeycomb.

You mean Droid 1? Re:droid3

[BillTheKatt]

You mean when is it going to work on the Droid 1 right? You kids and your Droid 3's. Back in my day we had 550 mhz and 256 MB RAM and had to use it on the way to school in a blizzard, uphill both ways. Still rocking the Droid 1 with CM7, although this little puppy is getting slooooowww...

Re:SGS4G support Please!

[mjwx]

I have had to use ICBINB builds of Gingerbread for my Samsung Galaxy S 4G because CM7 was not available for that phone.... please please please support it for CM9!

If you're into hacking, the difference between the SGS 4G and the SGS is the radio (IIRC), so you'll need to replace the radio drivers with ones that work (I.E. one's you've backed up from the device). I had to do this on a Motorola Milestone (and the locked bootloader didn't help).

This is a "Do at your own risk" thing, if someone more knowledgeable then I has better advice, by all means please post it, mine info is 2 years out of date.

Re:Lies

[markkezner]

That's right. Just to clarify, even Honeycomb's code has been released at this point, although it's not "tagged" so it isn't as easy to get to. Google did this on purpose to encourage developers to build using the Ice Cream Sandwich code instead, which is probably better for everyone involved.

What happened to qwerty devices?

[nightfire-unique]

I recently left the n900 world for an Android phone - my first - the Samsung Captivate Glide (SGH-I927).

I expected to root it easily; I hadn't realized how hostile manufacturers are becoming towards their customers. Indeed, as I write this, I still haven't succeeded. It actually feels like I may be the only person in the world who bought this device, which, to me, is utterly confounding.

What happened to qwerty phones? Why did they fall so far in popularity? I find it excruciating to surrender half my screen real estate to an on-screen keyboard.

This Nexus S looks great, and is easy to root and flash, which is nice. But, without a keyboard? To me.. useless. Come on Google! Put some weight behind a qwerty model of this!

And for the love of god, start playing hardball with manufacturers that lock their bootloaders and fail to provide a clean method of rooting! Simply deny them access to the Google utilities.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[dell623]

Qwerty keyboards are useless. Swype or similar input methods are faster and more intuitive than mashing tiny hard keys that add bulk and extra mechanical components that can fail. Screens are huge these days so seeing the keyboard on screen while typing is no big issue. Instead of getting a thicker bulkier keyboard equipped phone a bigger screen phone is a better compromise. Physical Keyboards are simply inefficient on mobile devices - not that great for typing, add bulk etc.
The Galaxy Nexus kind of device with no buttons at all is the future, even the soft buttons disappear for video etc, maximizing screen real estate. Ultimately you want the smallest possible device with the biggest possible screen.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[phoenix_rizzen]

I hear you.

It would be so nice if the major Android phone manufacturers would stop spitting out new phones every 6 weeks, and instead focused on 2-3 phone hardware platforms per year. I say platforms in that they use the exact same innards (SoC, storage, etc) but with 1-2 screen sizes, and with/without keyboards.

Sony Ericsson is the closest to doing this with the Xperia Mini/Mini Pro, Xperia Neo/Pro, and Xperia Arc/Play. They all basically have the same hardware, with just screen size and keyboard/gamepad variations.

Just imagine how much simpler life would be for their Android devs, support staff, and customers if they did this.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[Microlith]

I hadn't realized how hostile manufacturers are becoming towards their customers.

But you aren't the customer. The customer, at least in the US, is the mobile carrier who wants to restrict you as much as possible. The fallout from this is that even in places where you can buy the device unlocked, the devices are still crippled (see Motorola.) The end result is that ~2 years on I am still using my N900.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[phoenix_rizzen]

What's the point of having a big 4" screen if you constantly lose half of it to an on-screen keyboard? Especially in landscape when vertical pixels are at a premium? If I wanted to constantly have a 1" high screen, I'd buy an older model QWERTY phone, the landscape screen size would be the same as a 4" keyboardless phone.

Not everyone buys a phone just to watch videos or play games. some buy it to use as a phone (giant screens aren't that great to talk on), or to type a lot (QWERTY phones have more usable screen space even if the actual screen is smaller), or have issues with on-screen keyboards.

There's no such thing as "the one perfect phone for everyone", just as there's no "perfect keyboard" for everyone. Hardware keyboards aren't going anywhere. Here's hoping more manufacturers add them to their offerings.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[forkazoo]

I recently left the n900 world for an Android phone - my first - the Samsung Captivate Glide (SGH-I927).

I expected to root it easily; I hadn't realized how hostile manufacturers are becoming towards their customers. Indeed, as I write this, I still haven't succeeded. It actually feels like I may be the only person in the world who bought this device, which, to me, is utterly confounding.

I still carry my n900, but I got an iPhone for work, and bought an Android tablet recently, and I have had the same rude awakening of just how user-friendly the n900 actually was. I have spent the last two years looking for something newer, faster, and *better* than my n900, and I just haven't found it. Given how awkwardly Maemo begat Meego which has stumbled into Tizen, I'm not even very optimistic that anything will come along in the forseeable future. I'd practically kill to have a whizzy new n900 with the latest CPU and screen, but nobody wants to sell it to me. Even the most open android thing kind of pales in comparison to the promise of a genuinely open platform.

I love the fact that I can write PyQt scripts while I am on the subway that work perfectly on my real computers when I get to the office/home. I can forward X11 apps to/from my phone just as I do with my normal computers. (Obviously, some aren't worth forwarding to a phone, but others work just fine on a touch screen.) The X11 forwarding over SSH with implausible complicated SSH tunnels between overly complicated networks is, AFAIK, impossible on Android, despite the fact that Android has VNC and ssh terminal emulator apps. In the context of working on a real big "Enterprisey" production network, having a "normal" ssh/X11 stack makes a huge difference.

I know the n900 never got Angry Birds, or whatever, but it has been an invaluable tool in a way that no other mobile device seems willing to be, not even the "very open, easy to do whatever you want" Android platform, which is disappointing.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[assantisz]

Try using an ssh client like ConnectBot with a virtual keyboard. You are losing enormous amounts of screen real estate that you need to get work done. I am in nightfire's camp - a phone without slide-out keyboard is utterly useless. I do not want to schlep around another piece of equipment in form of a bluetooth keyboard or some such. There are some hardware solutions for the iPhone 4 (cases with built-in keyboards) but the accessory market in the Android world sucks donkey balls thanks to manufacturers pumping out a new phone every 7 days.

Re:What happened to qwerty devices?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Jesus, buy a netbook. £200-300 (half the price of the phone in your hand) and you get a keyboard with keys you can actually press (albeit not as well as a full size keyboard) and a much better screen to work on.

The thought of anyone trying to do actual work on a smartphone boggles my mind.

Yeah Baby

[gearloos]

Sweetness. Guess I haven't been over on Cyanogenmod for a little too long as I didn't realize Koush was this close. I just happen to have a Nexus S and am a Cyanogen Advocate. I've been running Cyan Roms since about ver3 on my G1 way back and have found that if bugs appear, it usually gets fixed or a workaround is posted fairly quickly. I can actually say I trust most of the Cyanogen stuff to not brick my devices but I do reserve that I have a little experience with this type of thing. Can't wait to go get me an Ice Cream Sandwich !

Re:Yeah Baby

[GenP]

I'd like to run Cyanogenmod on my Nexus S but for the life of me I can't seem to find a procedure that will let me backup my entire phone before I root/wipe :(

Re:Yeah Baby

[glitchvern]

Like the other poster said it's a bit of a catch 22. You can't do a nandroid backup without a custom recovery image. Can't do a custom recovery image without unlocking the bootloader. Can't unlock the bootloader without wiping the phone.

I had this same problem on the nexus one. The trick is to root the phone without unlocking the bootloader and then using a backup utility that requires root (Titanium Backup or whatever, I actually preferred MyBackup Root). This can be done by using a local root exploit. I think it took me two days to find one that worked on my phone at the time. I think you can even get a clockwork mod installed and install a new bootloader without wiping, backup the whole phone, and then install cyanogen mod that way. I say think because I didn't know at the time but sometimes clockwork mod just plain fails to install a new bootloader and you have to try multiple times. Having already backed everything up I just unlocked the bootloader at that point. The Titanium Backup/MyBackup Root don't create a backup image of the whole phone if I remember right, but instead backup all the data/individual applications. I think they failed to restore one or two of the things on my phone, but they were things synced with my google account anyway so it didn't matter.

Finding a premade local root exploit is surprisingly difficult. Most rooting guides use the unlock bootloader method and many of those give you no warning it will wipe the phone. All of this information is surprisingly hard to come by and the documentation leaves much to be desired. Everyone says rooting and installing cyanogen is easy on the nexus's, but it turns out that is only true if you don't care at all about the current content of your phone something you'll only discover when you actually try to do it. For that matter you would think backing up your phones contents would be something that would be easy to do. I mean that seams like the sort of thing normal people would want to do, ya know?

Good luck

Motorola Droid3

[csumpi]

It exists. Motorola Droid3 -> http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/DROID-3-by-MOTOROLA-US-EN

The keyboard is amazing. The phone is awesome (even the actual phone part, as in I can hear the other person and the other person can hear me). Dual core processor, very nice screen.

One click rooted, removed motorola/verizon crap, can't be happier.

Re:Lies

[Rennt]

If you honestly can't tell the difference between the ASOP (open source), Google Apps (closed source), and the devices based on them (spectrum runs from Free through Tainted to Overtly Hostile), then hand in your geek card.

Not open enough

[Richard_J_N]

I bought one: it was a wonderful device (except for the touchscreen being resistive), but what killed it for us was that it had critical parts of the GUI being non-open.
We would have deployed 200 of them, but we needed one minor bugfix: the ability to operate the camera during a voip phone call (which meant being able to disable the shutter sound so as to allow the sound-card not to block). Sadly, the camera library was crippled: it's very, very easy to use Hildon (basically GTK) to access the image capture with gstreamer, but we only if we didn't use the proprietary feature called "auto-focus"! So we couldn't fix it ourselves, and when we reported the bug, the Nokia team confirmed it, but didn't actually get round to fixing it (at least, not within many weeks).

It's a real shame too: I could SSH into the phone, launch X-applications (on either $DISPLAY), install applications with a real package manager, and enjoy all the other Linux goodness.

That's the joke.

[reluctantjoiner]

Roald Dahl wasn't above pun-ishing his readers on occasion.

Re:Linus says Google has complied with the GPL.

[AmbushBug]

"Android is GPL" is flat out wrong. Only the linux kernel and a few bits are GPL. The bulk of the code is Apache licensed. You're being disingenuous by dismissing the most interesting parts of the Android system as "cruft layered on top".