Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - htc

Phone v3.0

2011-01-07T17:56:00+00:00

I went to the pub last night with some of the ex-Transitive crew who have migrated south. It was a fun night of over the top geekery of the kind you only really get when people like to discuss processor architectures and the pros and cons of various language standards updates. For example I found out they have stuffed lambda functions into the growing list of functionality handled by the C++ behemoth. At some point we did whip out our phones.

I had resigned myself to the fact the Android 2.1 update was the last one HTC would be supplying for my Hero. So I finally got around to rooting my phone.

The process is fairly simple but I did have to spend some time hunting and sifting through numerous guides to rooting. One thing I didn't want to be forced to do was downgrade my system image just to root it. In the end I followed this guide which uses Universal Androot. It took a couple of attempts to work but once it did it was fairly obvious the phone had been rooted.

Instead of using the on board terminal emulator I used "adb shell" from my desktop to flash the recovery image. I had a small panic when the process reported all sorts of read/write errors and looked like it had broken. In the end I rebooted the phone (holding my breath) and tried again and it worked fine.

I chose the VillianROM FroydVillain as a replacement ROM. It's based on the CyanogenMod but with a moderately customised kernel and a few additional packages. The process is fairly simple but it does wipe all your current settings and apps. It's extremely advisable to back-up all your data before you go down this road.

First impressions are fairly good. The phone certainly seems a lot snappier but it's hard to know without having a second phone to hand to do side to side comparisons. I dumped the "Launcher Pro" launcher and installed the open source ADWLauncher instead as I was getting pissed off with constant nagging to upgrade to the Pro version every time I tried do something. About the only thing I miss from the old HTC Sense setup is HTC's clock widget/alarm/timer/countdown.

I suspect if I'm going to do any hacking on the low level I'd switch to using CyanogenMod as most of the derived ROMS aren't exactly source driven. However I need to start writing some proper Android Apps first. However I'm mainly just happy not to be reliant on my network/phone manufacturer to be able to update my phone. People running older Androids might find this article slightly worrying. While the iPhone is never going to be the device for me the fact they centrally manage updates rather than delegating to vendors who may or may not care means they do actually role out security updates. Given a modern smart phone contains so much personal data it does make one think.

New Phone

2010-07-22T14:03:00+01:00

One of the advantages of the current bread of smart phones is they are field upgradable. As so much of their functionality is basically software it makes no sense to treat the phone as a static product once it leaves the factory gates. Coupled with the rapid development of the Android OS means that updating the system firmware can result in a much improved experience without having to buy new hardware.

My phone, an HTC Hero, was one of the second generation Android phones. It's a nice phone with a solid feel and nice touchscreen and display. However the default system software is the now rather old Android 1.5. It has been a continual source of frustration watching other phones get their updates to more recent versions while HTC continually slipped the release dates. As the base OS is all open source one might wonder what took them so long. Part of it might be due to the need to integrate HTC's Sense layer with Android. A large part is no doubt due to the fact that by not submitting changes to the kernel upstream the company gets to keep the burden of porting the drivers to a newer kernels. It's not entirely HTC's fault, Google can take some of the blame for developing a power management infrastructure behind closed doors and being surprised the kernel developers weren't going to just dump Wavelocks into their carefully engineered kernel. Eventually the embedded world will wake up to the cost of not working with upstream but I predict it will be a while yet.

The greatest reason is most likely that the bulk of HTC's engineering resources will be working on the software for their latest phones and therefore making older phones work better is lower in their priorities. Unfortunately without jumping through hoops to install community firmware I was dependant on HTC to provide the update. While I was relaxed about getting a locked down phone (compared to a locked down PC) the experience has reminded me there are other reasons to prefer open systems than just a desire to hack about on them.

Unfortunately the promised Over The Air (OTA) update never arrived on my phone so I had to bootstrap the upgrade by manually updating to the next minor version. This took me two days of fighting with various flavours of Windows (install, un-install, re-install in a different order, arrggghg!) and HTC's rather crappy update tool. However once done the notification duly arrived and 3 phone reboots later I had a brand new spiffy Android 2.1 phone.

First impressions are good. The responsiveness seems a lot better and the Google applications all offer significant improvements to the 1.5 based ones. While the hardware has always supported multi-touch the older Android release couldn't take advantage of it. Now I can quickly switch between the many work spaces with a quick pinching motion. It really does feel like getting a new phone.

Free Software legal battles version 2

2010-03-03T12:40:00+00:00

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

- Steve Jobs, Apple

With the embers of the SCO's legal shenanigans slowly dieing down we were long overdue for the next round of legal attacks on Free Software. We all knew it was coming, having failed with spurious copyright claims the next tool the enemies of free software would employ would be patents. The opening salvo came from Microsoft when they sued Tom Tom for making their devices interoperable with the worlds most used operating system. It was a short skirmish that ended in a settlement and no clear precedent set, and the usual technical workarounds. However free software advocates knew that bigger patent threats were out there and have been preparing for the next round. The biggest fear would be a patent troll would assert rights over free software that would be hard to defend against with counter suites. As it happens the next enemy of free software is not a troll but the polo-neck wearing lawyers of Cupertino.

Apple is obviously worried by the rise of Google's Android smart phone operating system and has decided to protect it's market share by suing the competition for patent infringement. While Apple haven't invented the smart phone (much like they didn't invent the MP3 player) they were the company that brought smart phones to the mainstream. It's obviously an area they wish to monopolise.

Regular readers will be aware of the many problems with patents, especially as they relate to software. Patent's are meant to be awarded for novel and innovative solutions to problems and give the inventor a limited time to monopolise those inventions in return for making the details public and growing the corpus of human knowledge. Patent's are routine in areas like biotech where companies get a number of years to sell their drugs at higher prices to recoup the cost of development before the patent expires and everyone can make them. The problem with software patents is they are rarely novel and innovative, they are usually just a codification of commonly used techniques written up in patent language and submitted to the relevant authorities.

Apple have listed 20 patents in their suit. They include such innovations as turning off the camera when power is low. Others are more technical like the concept of using objects to manage graphical elements on a display. Needless to say none of them look especially novel and hopefully most will get invalidated now the legions of free software users that were so instrumental in researching the flaws in the SCO case turn their attention to finding prior art. There is also the possibility the Open Innovation Network will step in and counter-sue with it's broad range of defencive patents. Unlike a patent troll who has nothing to loose Apple could have it's injunctions served against shipping products if they (as is likely) infringe.

It will be a few days before all the key players make clear how they are going to respond to Apple's legal attacks. It's a fight that is likely to get fairly nasty given the stakes involved. In the meantime any pretence that Apple are a company that is friendly towards free software is should have demolished by their action yesterday.