"Cyanogenmod"

Clearly I haven’t kept up with my intended frequency of posts, mostly due to having lots of work to keep me busy, but this should just about make it once a month…

Right now, I have what I consider to be one of the sweetest mobile phone set ups possible.  I have an HTC Desire Z, originally released about 18 months ago, which I bought off Amazon for £376 in March (when the phone had been out for 6 months).  I then downgraded my contract with T-Mobile to £5 per month, for 100 minutes, 100 texts and unlimited internet, which is entirely reflective of my usage of the device.  If I remember correctly doing it this way saved me about £50 over 2 years compared to getting the device with T-Mobile and paying them silly money.  This way, the phone is mine and I have the optimum level of flexibility as to what I do with my phone and which carrier I go with.

As an aside, I have been pleased with T-Mobile.  Their signal tends to be good in places I go where other carriers’ signals aren’t so great (in 1st Year, my flatmates with iPhones had to lean out of the windows to get signal from O2) and now that I’m paying £5 a month, I don’t feel like I’m being ripped off.  This is backing up my theory that the less contact you have with your carrier, the better they are…

So anyway, a few months ago, I noticed my phone starting to feel a bit sluggish.  Moving between desktop pages wasn’t so smooth, and Android was starting to close HTC Sense (the Launcher, or program that shows the desktop, shortcuts, widgets and app tray) so it would take a few minutes to reload it all again when I wanted to go back to the desktop.  To fix this, I decided to try out Cyanogenmod, an alternative version of Android, to see if it would fix my issues.

Installing Cyanogenmod was a pain.  The phone needs to be rooted and unlocked before custom Android distributions can be flashed onto the device, and that process took some time.  In order to root the device, its firmware needed to be downgraded and in order to downgrade the firmware a ‘goldcard’ needed to be made.  A goldcard is an SDCard with a particular code on it to make it harder for anyone to mess with the phone (I mean, who’d want to do that?  It’s not like Android is some kind of Open Source operating system that people may want to tinker with…).  Once the phone had been rooted though, actually flashing the Cyanogenmod firmware to the device was a piece of cake.  Literally just install ClockworkMod and ROM Manager and let them download and flash the new firmware.  Unfortunately I lost a couple of neat things when I downgraded the firmware for rooting – my Pokemon Yellow save and a calendar reminder app that gave Text-to-Speech reminders that I can no longer find.

Having Cyanogenmod is like having a new phone.  Everything zips around so smoothly and quickly it’s untrue, and my phone’s memory usage has halved since switching, so there’s plenty of space for everything to run and apps to be kept cached.  I also get the newer Market app and no more HTC Sense, which is probably what was clogging up my phone’s memory.

I also now have root access to my phone, so I can now run apps I previously couldn’t, like Titanium Backup and ClockSync, which both require root privileges to run properly.  I can also run rsync.  Rsync is a primarily Linux based utilty for unidirectional file synchronisation which can efficiently keep two file systems in sync, like a load of music held on a file server and my phone’s SD Card…

I don’t know why phone manufacturers go to all this effort of customising Android, when a bunch of volunteers can take what Google gives them, and include a small, simple set of powerful, useful additions and make a version of Android that gives my phone a new lease of life.  On HTC in particular, Sense is a dead weight.  Its launcher certainly didn’t add anything I miss and the extra gadgets and services that it loaded to help me do things like track the stock market either wasted memory, or have entirely capable alternatives on the Market, usually for free.

The additions that HTC made to Android, on my phone at least, are no different to the rubbish that OEMs install on new laptops.  I don’t need Dell’s Media Centre alternative, I don’t need Netgear’s Wifi Management App and I don’t need Sense.  Unsuprisingly, the effort that such companies obviously don’t put into such programs makes them pretty ugly and difficult to use, and makes no sense when the Operating System is perfectly capable of performing such tasks, like connecting to wireless access points.  I’ll accept that when such features aren’t in the underlying OS adding them can be useful (like when Windows XP can’t play DVDs out of the box), but HTCs additions haven’t done that in a way that an app on the Market couldn’t do.

Upgrading to Cyanogenmod was entirely worth it.  My phone is now smooth and fast and hopefully ready for many more months of service until it stops being supported and something else better comes out.  I can understand why phone manufacturers may want to build a brand and unique experience around their device but I bought an HTC phone for their hardware building and physical design prowess, not for their skills at writing operating system and user interface components…