Switching back from Froyo to HTC’s Eclair

Although I was quite pleased with my Hero after installing HTC’s version of Android 2.1 (in the guise of VillainRom 12), I couldn’t refrain myself from wanting to install Froyo, the latest and greatest version of Android. The guys over at VillainRom provided a great Froyo rom (Froydvillain 1.2) based on the official Android sources and the work of the CyanogenMod team with CM6 and added LauncherPro, a beautiful alternative to HTC’s Sense, to the mix:


After seeing FroydVillain run on the Hero of a daredevil colleague of mine (thanks Thomas!), I swiftly booted my HTC into recovery mode, made a backup of my Eclair-installation and effortlessly slapped FroydVillain on my handset. But now, only 2 days later, I’m back on HTC’s Eclair.
Why? Because of what HTC adds to the mix. Although Froyo + Cyanogen mods + LauncherPro is a fast & slick combination, there were a number of (mostly minor) annoyances which bugged me enough to do a rollback to VillainRom 12 (i.e. HTC’s Eclair).
Some of the quirks that irked me:
  • the keyboard seemed a tad more clunky, there’s no button to hide it (the keyboard tends to get in the way sometimes) but most importantly there’s no Dutch dictionary installed meaning no spelling correction and above all no text-prediction
  • the new Android-native Exchange mail integration is great, but there’s no indication of new Exchange mails on the Launcherpro homescreen and most importantly it is too easy to accidentally delete a mail (the button is located at the bottom right of the screen!) and there’s no undo or move available
  • battery life seemed shorter and there’s no way to disable ‘always-on mobile data‘ (a continuous data-connection doesn’t help battery life)
  • the dialer application (you know, to actually call someone) does not search my contacts while typing a number (HTC’s dialer searches both numbers and names, which is a great time-saver)
  • in the browser bookmarking is less straightforward (no ‘add bookmark’ in the menu iirc), there’s no ‘reload’ in the main UI (it’s at the right side of the address-bar in HTC’s Eclair)
  • the free version of Launcherpro does not come with a calender widget (the “Plus” version does though) and I could not find one to my liking on the Android market
  • as I had to re-install my apps, Shazaam didn’t recognize me as an existing user, meaning I lost unlimited tagging

So in spite of increased speed and an overall very nice package, I decided (after having had to run downstairs last night to move that accidentally deleted important mail back to my inbox on my PC) to abandon FroydVillain and switch back to VillainRom 12. I was a little upset with Nandroid spitting out that horrible “Run nandroid-mobile.sh via adb” error, but it turned out that it wisely doesn’t like to have to work on an almost empty battery. After recharging I successfully restored good ole HTC Eclair.
Froyo + LauncherPro is a great combination, but it’s not in the same league as HTC’s polished Eclair builds yet. Thanks for the great job HTC, I’m looking forward to your Desire HD with HTC Froyo (or Gingerbread?) which I’ll probably buy from you next year.

March of the Androids

Lots of exiting things happening in Android and HTC Hero-land these last few weeks:

  • June 22nd: I flash my HTC Hero with VillainRom 10.3 (i.e. Android 2.1 aka Eclair + HTC Sense)
  • June 23th: Google releases the source code for the blazingly fast Android 2.2 (aka Froyo)
  • June 23th: CyanogenMod announces that he and his team will create CM6 based on these sources for a great number of HTC devices, including the Hero CDMA (the US model for Sprint)
  • June 29th: HTC finally pushes out Android 2.1 for Hero in Europe
  • July 1th: The VillainRom-guys announce VillainRom 12 based on that new ROM
  • July 3th: Lox, one of the CyanogenMod developers, announces the first Hero (GSM) Froyo-build
  • July 5th: HTC released the kernel sources (based on 2.6.29) they used for Hero
  • July 5th: Lox & co are working on a merged HTC Hero GSM and CDMA build based on the official kernel sources

So I flashed my Hero again, with VillainRom 12 (clearly more responsive then 10.3, a few bugs are solved as well) and I’m looking forward to flashing CyanogenMod 6 once that’s stabilized. Because, after all, Hero’s like their Androids fresh, don’t they?

Eclair on HTC Hero: going rogue with Villainrom

I flashed my HTC Hero again, this time with an Android 2.1 image from Villainrom. Why not wait for the official update? Well, we’ve been waiting for quite some time now, the HTC-update might not even work on a rooted device and a colleague of mine was running Villainrom 10.1 for over a month now and was quite pleased with it.
So if you want to go rogue as well, go Villainrom using this installation guide. And in case things happen that aren’t described in that detailed howto, here are 5 things I had to learn the hard way;

  1. Formatting your SDCARD when on a Modaco rom might not work, having a colleague nearby who can format for you on his handset or PC might help.
  2. If flashrec complains “Could not run command” but your device is already rooted then forget about flashrec, you’re a superuser now
  3. nandroid+ext might not work, just perform a normal nandroid backup
  4. market downloads sometimes don’t work, in my case this was solved by resetting privacy and location-sharing settings to their (permissive) default settings
  5. Villainrom provides OTA-updates, but these aren’t always applied, re-downloading and re-applying the update did the trick for me.

My first Android 2.1 impressions; clearly snappier (and tests show 2.2 to be a lot faster still), some great apps on the market that weren’t there for 1.5 (Google Goggles looks great!) and most importantly; one of the best mobile browsers around (as confirmed by Quirksmode Webkit tests). So yes, I love my Eclair!

Google loves html5 (in Android 2.0)

android 2.0 aka eclairThe specs for Android 2.0 were just released and whaddaya know;

Support for HTML5:

  • Database API support, for client-side databases using SQL.
  • Application cache support, for offline applications.
  • Geolocation API support, to provide location information about the device.
  • <video> tag support in fullscreen mode.

Great, no more fiddling with Gears just for Android’s sake. Let’s hope they adhere to the relevant html5specs the same way Apple does, so you don’t need to do differentiate between iPhone os3 and android 2.0 when creating offline-capable web-apps!
Off course there’s more than just html5 in this new Android version, here’s a short video showing some of the changes in Eclair:

Android 2.0 Official Video

A personal message for HTC to finish this blogpost: feel free to skip Android 1.6 to focus on using 2.0 as the basis for my Hero‘s next rom update 🙂