…and listen to this.

Near Agara, Bangalore

All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.

Watchmaker

Motorola has always been a company known for its excellent but stubborn values. They rarely try out disruptive trends in innovation (as far as I know) and have always followed a path driven by the market. I remember this from the time the RAZR took the mobile world by storm. Flagship devices that ruled the industry has been the manufacturer’s stronghold for over a decade. The mobile unit of Motorola almost withered away few years ago. They chose the Android platform after, hoping that it would save the company from collapsing; which later became one of the best decisions they’d ever made. One might question the relevance of this introduction, for which I’ll jot down my two cents in the coming lines.

The Milestone was a “locked” device unlike the Droid, which meant the company had chosen to protect its boot loader from being tampered. The debate on how this contradicted Android’s ‘open‘ nature led to a lot of heat and is still going strong. The company believed otherwise and claimed that it was best to control this decision (and thus keep the boot loader locked) due to their business reasons. This didn’t stop the developer community from disregarding the situation and later led to thousands of developers from around the world to go on a quest to set the device free. This community started of with just a handful of people who spent night and day understanding the device, living and breathing the Milestone’s boot loader and kernel. They now dominate almost half of all the Android modding forums on the internet. Blessed with a surprisingly robust combination of hardware, specifically the OMAP 34XX processor and a truly durable form made it one of the few devices that could withstand normal amounts of shock and mishandling. The processor alone was known for it’s ability to work beyond recommended thresholds, i.e., perform flawlessly when overclocked. Ever since I lost touch with RAZR modding, I’ve been waiting to see a device that could live through constant experimentation.. and this was it. It also happened to be my first true smartphone (if Symbian hadn’t made it to the game). The only disadvantage I saw was Motorola’s OS update schedule. They were known for their merciless and slow update service. After learning about this, XDA became my morning coffee companion for about 3 months.

It was also advertised worldwide as the first smartphone with real Adobe Flash support, and failed to deliver as the OS didn’t support Flash initially; again, due to business decisions, a.k.a the mother of all screw-ups. Froyo, or Android’s version 2.2 brought with it Flash support and a lot of performance enhancements which sadly hasn’t made it to the Milestone. Yet. The only solution? XDA. In the last week of January, a firmware leak of the supposedly final build (since it still wasn’t official, it was considered a test build) of Froyo excited the developer community. Completely stock, newer kernel, updated firmware configuration, the works. It had been only 5 months since I’d got my Milestone, but the desire to experiment kept growing everyday. After much pondering, I was determined to try out the new firmware. Installing the firmware on a device that had a locked boot loader was a bit tricky. The first step was to ensure that a backup plan was in place in case something went wrong – luckily the official factory build of the phone’s software was available online. If I’d happen to screw up something mid-way, I could restore this factory build and the device would revert to its original condition. The second step was to unlock the boot loader. I did this by “flashing” something called a vulnerable recovery (the recovery is like a backup partition in the PC hard-drive; it stores system files that aid in repair). The process to get to this recovery bit was quite something – I had to press a combination of keys in a specific sequence when I booted up my phone. Once I managed to unlock the boot loader, I just had to do something like a hard-drive cleanup before installing the firmware. The rest was a piece of cake. Within minutes, I was running Froyo, and it was marvelous!

A lot goes on in the developer community. Hours were spent on optimizing the Froyo firmware for the Milestone – coffee, coding, bug reporting and fixing.. it kept going on for over a month, until one fine day to everyone’s surprise, a Gingerbread (Android 2.3) port appeared out of nowhere. The excitement was too much.. the number of downloads for the first experimental build of Gingerbread soared high. Within days, the devs managed to get the build updated to 2.3.3 (which is the latest Android build as of today for smartphones) with very few bugs. I hear that many consumers even with their newly acquired Nexus S don’t want to update to 2.3.3 as Google decided to stop syncing Facebook contact information for newer devices. It’s entirely possible for a stable build to roll out any time now for the Milestone. It’s also interesting to note that after-market firmware such as CyanogenMod really do justice to the Android Open Source Project and ensure unparalleled value to the end user, whilst big organizations struggle with the bureaucracy of business decisions in rolling out software updates. My urge to understand the nature of such work seems to be increasing by the day; to the extent of even questioning the relevance of the stereotypical day job. I’m currently running the third release candidate of 2.3.3 for the Milestone, and it seems stable for everyday use.

Hardware Counts

Buying a mobile phone is slightly different from buying a computer. Convergence has made the phone into something that’s not just a phone, into a gadget that can handle several complex computing tasks. It has been the motto since the last decade, evolving phones from monochrome screens to super-AMOLED capacitive touch screens for instance. The hardware of a mobile phone simply has to be top notch for any tech enthusiast. And when I talk about hardware, I’m not just referring to specs. A lot of computers (PCs) today have superb configurations – ultra-fast processors, loads of memory.. but downright suck due to their choices of assembly and operating systems (you know what I’m talking about!). It’s about the quality of hardware – the material, the durability of form, the finish and polish of the circuitry. Recent news on the much hyped Adam tablet (by Notion Ink) revealed hand-soldered wires present within the device – which is an absolute no-no and a great danger to the device as well as the user. Components that are robust and have the ability to withstand abnormal temperatures, stress and conditions are necessary. The Droid/Milestone wins this hands-down even though it doesn’t boast of too much memory.

Developer Community

For any device, popularity is a key factor that ensures widespread adoption, manufacturer support and necessary software updates. A popular phone gathers developers like moths to a tube light. Marquee phones such as the Nexus One, Nexus S, Droid and Galaxy S maintain their presence in the market for a long time because developers love experimenting with them. When a device is assured to stick around for a while, developers have more time to understand and experiment with it’s software without their efforts going to down the drain. Some phones like the Motorola RAZR, HTC’s Nexus One, iPhone 2-3GS and the Motorola Droid have been around long enough to gain a large repository of software builds and modifications. Over the years, I’ve learnt to pick devices that conform to these guidelines. Learning from such devices is a fantastic bonus and adds flavor to the geek in you!

Philosophy behind a Platform

When I first heard about Android, I thought it was just another software project to keep up with the trends. Little did I know that a group of people shared an outstanding vision, one which extends beyond the realm of mobile devices. A particular quote from an interview with Android’s current head of User Experience comes to mind:

What I am looking for is that sense that you get when jazz musicians improvise together – Matias Duarte, Director of User Experience, Android

When a platform is designed with its core inspiration from music, what comes out as a result will be nothing short of exceptional. I love Android, not because of its Apple-opposing-approach, not because of its widespread adoption.. but because it defines cool. Ultra cool.

1. >format F: /u
2. Partition F: into FAT32 “Android”, EXT2 “System”, FAT32 “Linux” [no fdisk, no system partitioning routine]
3. >cd Android
4. >Android/install.exe
5. One reboot down >haret.exe to boot into Linux
6. Robot says hello

Posted from WordPress for Android

Posted from WordPress for Android