I've realized I kinda use the member's lounge as a blog now, but sometimes I get good feedback and or get a conversation started. So if you aren't in a blog mood this might now be for you.
Well the worst phone ever apparently isn't that bad. My HTC Hero (Sprint/CDMA) has some of the worst reviews ever of any HTC phone. It's quite easily fixed.
Let me preface all this with the fact that I'm not a phone geek. Far from it in fact. I've used a Nokia 6820 for the last 5 or 6 years. I had an HTC 8125 but that met it's demise in a cup of water due to a lack of cup holders in 4g preludes.
I've been using my work blackberry for the last year or so as my primary phone and tbh it really sucks. It had sudoku, poker and exchange support which was really all I needed in a phone.
I think the large majority of you know I have a severe addiction to wow (play in the realm of 60-80 hours a week) and they now have a feature (and have had for some time) called wow remote. Lets you chat with your guild mates and make gold on the in game auction house via your phone. Sadly no app for the BB so I broke out the hero (which had only been turned on once since I realized how big of a piece it is) and bought the app. Sad thing was the phone would lock up and be shitty, soft keyboard sucked, slow as bawls, had problems taking my wow authenticator token, multiple levels of bad all in one package. So I bit the bullet.
The hero is only supported to 2.1 (Eclair) and was never going to have JIT support so I did what any good tech geek does. I looked up how to root my phone and installed a new image. Almost all of the credit for this goes to the folks at cyanogen. Without them I would have wasted my money on the wow app, still been clueless about how good android really is, and probably would have ended up with more phone than I actually needed (cause that EVO was really calling my name up until last night).
Rooted the phone, Installed a new ROM Manager (Clockwork) and flashed the phone with Cyanogen7. This thing is fucking awesome now. My entire night on the third was dedicated to learning how rooting and flashing of androids work. ADB is an awesome tool. If you fancy yourself a geek I highly recommend learning it (if you have an android phone). It gets all the little geek bits in my brain firing and gets me thinking what I can do with my phone. I specifically love the fact that I can install 3rd party apps that aren't available in the Market due to EULA restrictions via ADB. That's fucking hot.
For the nitty gritty. Wow Remote used to take anywhere between 10 and 15 seconds to launch and get logged in. This thing has the whole process done in about 3 seconds. I'd say most of that credit has to go to the JIT compiler and a little more goes to cyanogen for allowing me to overclock my phone. I have it set at 600MHz right now (100MHz overclock) and that seems pretty good. I tried 700MHz but realized the phone got a bit toasty if I locked it while Wow Remote was running, 600 seems to be the perfect point for it.
I HIGHLY recommend if you aren't running 2.3 on your phone right now to check cyanogenmod.com and see if they have roms for your phone. The only thing that could make me happier is if the Microphone on this phone actually worked so I could ditch the blackberry. In the end I'm happier having 2 phones (one of which really is more of a PDA instead of a phone) so the little niggle about not actually being able to make calls is an acceptable loss.
If you have any questions about this process I'd love to help someone through it. I feel like I've learned a hell of a lot in the past day and a half. While I can't create my own custom ROMs or anything I am still a linux admin and at it's heart Android is just prettied up linux, so I feel we have a certain bond.
TLDR: Installed 2.3 on my unsupported Hero. It fucking rocks. I love cyanogenmod.com. Let me know if you want help with installing it on your droid.
Well the worst phone ever apparently isn't that bad. My HTC Hero (Sprint/CDMA) has some of the worst reviews ever of any HTC phone. It's quite easily fixed.
Let me preface all this with the fact that I'm not a phone geek. Far from it in fact. I've used a Nokia 6820 for the last 5 or 6 years. I had an HTC 8125 but that met it's demise in a cup of water due to a lack of cup holders in 4g preludes.
I've been using my work blackberry for the last year or so as my primary phone and tbh it really sucks. It had sudoku, poker and exchange support which was really all I needed in a phone.
I think the large majority of you know I have a severe addiction to wow (play in the realm of 60-80 hours a week) and they now have a feature (and have had for some time) called wow remote. Lets you chat with your guild mates and make gold on the in game auction house via your phone. Sadly no app for the BB so I broke out the hero (which had only been turned on once since I realized how big of a piece it is) and bought the app. Sad thing was the phone would lock up and be shitty, soft keyboard sucked, slow as bawls, had problems taking my wow authenticator token, multiple levels of bad all in one package. So I bit the bullet.
The hero is only supported to 2.1 (Eclair) and was never going to have JIT support so I did what any good tech geek does. I looked up how to root my phone and installed a new image. Almost all of the credit for this goes to the folks at cyanogen. Without them I would have wasted my money on the wow app, still been clueless about how good android really is, and probably would have ended up with more phone than I actually needed (cause that EVO was really calling my name up until last night).
Rooted the phone, Installed a new ROM Manager (Clockwork) and flashed the phone with Cyanogen7. This thing is fucking awesome now. My entire night on the third was dedicated to learning how rooting and flashing of androids work. ADB is an awesome tool. If you fancy yourself a geek I highly recommend learning it (if you have an android phone). It gets all the little geek bits in my brain firing and gets me thinking what I can do with my phone. I specifically love the fact that I can install 3rd party apps that aren't available in the Market due to EULA restrictions via ADB. That's fucking hot.
For the nitty gritty. Wow Remote used to take anywhere between 10 and 15 seconds to launch and get logged in. This thing has the whole process done in about 3 seconds. I'd say most of that credit has to go to the JIT compiler and a little more goes to cyanogen for allowing me to overclock my phone. I have it set at 600MHz right now (100MHz overclock) and that seems pretty good. I tried 700MHz but realized the phone got a bit toasty if I locked it while Wow Remote was running, 600 seems to be the perfect point for it.
I HIGHLY recommend if you aren't running 2.3 on your phone right now to check cyanogenmod.com and see if they have roms for your phone. The only thing that could make me happier is if the Microphone on this phone actually worked so I could ditch the blackberry. In the end I'm happier having 2 phones (one of which really is more of a PDA instead of a phone) so the little niggle about not actually being able to make calls is an acceptable loss.
If you have any questions about this process I'd love to help someone through it. I feel like I've learned a hell of a lot in the past day and a half. While I can't create my own custom ROMs or anything I am still a linux admin and at it's heart Android is just prettied up linux, so I feel we have a certain bond.
TLDR: Installed 2.3 on my unsupported Hero. It fucking rocks. I love cyanogenmod.com. Let me know if you want help with installing it on your droid.
