CyanogenMod 6.0
14 Oct 2010 / 23:55 / NO RESPONSES / blog / / / /

Last week I successfully upgraded my HTC Magic to CM6.0 (based on Android 2.2). In speed my phone didn’t change much, I actually disabled Compcache and JIT in CyanogenMod’s custom performance settings. Because they did seem to be slow down my phone. But I’m happy with it, because I can use the new Gmail app, and now the Android Market finally opened up in Belgium too, I’m can pretty much install any application I want. The guys at Cyanogen did a pretty good job again.

The stock keyboard is really annoying, so I bought and installed Better Keyboard which has the English and Dutch dictionary. I also bought Retro Camera Plus, which is basically the same as the free version without the ads.

Cyanogen is working on version 6.1 (based on Android 2.2.1) which has a few extra features, and should be coming soon.

Running Android 2.1
29 May 2010 / 00:10 / NO RESPONSES / blog / / / /

This week I rooted my HTC Magic with the customized ROM of Cyanogen. It’s a firmware based upon Android 2.1 for the HTC Magic, HTC Dream, Nexus One and Motorola Droid. There a lot of ROMs out there, but I choose this one, because it gets good reviews, and, to my knowledge, it is the only one at the moment that is running a stable full featured version of Android 2.1.

The procedure is not that difficult. You can find a lot of information on their forum (which is down for the moment, though). But there are also other sites you can depend on for help, such as xda-developers and TheUnlockr. I actually followed a good tutorial on the last one.

Of course I made some mistakes, which resulted in a rather stressful course of trying, failing, trying and failing again. But thanks to some tips on Golb’s blog, and some support of Cyanogen’s forum, I managed to get it up and running. I lost my backups in the progress, so don’t be a n00b as me, and copy them to the hard drive of your comupter before swiping your SD card! But in the end I am super happy with the upgrade, as Android is a damn good OS. The Cyaogen Mod even comes with some extra features. And even though the upgrade progress didn’t go as smooth as I hoped it would, you can not really f*ck up your device that easy if you stick to the tutorials. I’m not going to describe the whole process here, but I will if someone is interested of course.

My smartphone is now equipped with a better and faster firmware. Suddenly my battery life is restored (since my battery drained in one day, the last few months). And I can install almost every application in the Android Market. Coming from Android 1.5 this is quite the upgrade. Of course I could have waited for an official upgrade, but because I bought my phone through my mobile carrier, Proximus, I had to wait for them to release one. And I don’t think they every will.