HTC Desire: official FroYo update

[abortrephrase]

The official update from HTC came out over the past few days. It's not being made available OTA, if you want it you'll have to grab it from the HTC support site. Given that this wipes all data on the phone it's probably a good thing it's not OTA...

The first big downside is that you can only install it from a Windows box. I believe there are leaked copies floating about that'll install from Clockworkmod Recovery, but I just opted for using Boot Camp and doing it the "official" way.

Initial impressions are good. It's FroYo with Sense on top, as you'd expect. My one big annoyance with the 2.1+Sense build -- the use of the system-default input method for the PIN unlock screen -- has been fixed, it now uses a dialpad-style keyboard, just like stock Android.

Not noticing any obvious differences in Sense from what was previously running on the phone.

The official install process blows away the recovery partition, so if you were using Clockworkmod Recovery you'll need to re-do that. Unrevoked^3 works just fine.

I did however get a bit of a scare after installing Clockworkmod Recovery: the phone was working Just Fine, then I rebooted into Recovery, did a nandroid backup, and rebooted. At this point the phone got stuck in a reboot loop.

Tried a few things to fix it, including removing the SD card and removing the SIM. The fix turned out to be to boot into Recovery again and restore the phone from the backup I'd just made. Now it's working properly again. Weird and scary, but at least it's working.

Comments

Re: This is why Android seems scary to me

[ptomblin-lj.livejournal.com]

Because I hear stories about Android phones with extreme vendor lock in, such as Verizon forcing you to use Bing instead of Google, or not pushing out OS updates until months or years after everyone else has updated, or Skype apps that force you to use their cell phone network rather than wifi, or being forced to use the cell phone company's apps store, or any number of things that make it sound like people are spending more time trying to subvert the vendor lock in than actually using it.

Re: This is why Android seems scary to me

[ideological_cuddle]

So choose carefully.

It's not like iPhones don't have idiotic limitations, like no VOIP over 3G, or extra-cost to tether, enforced by the telco. And content restrictions enforced by Apple, for that matter.

The update thing is a bit of a problem, I'll grant. You're basically stuck relying on the chain Google->OEM->telco and it can fail at any point. Samsung for example refused to do updates for recently-released handsets. HTC is better about it, but it took months before 2.2 passed both their testing (and modification -- they had to port their overlay stuff) and then Telstra's testing too.

That's why I wound up "hacking" mine: it means I don't have to rely on that chain. There are alternatives, and will continue to be alternatives for so long as the hardware is capable of running newer releases and there's a community willing to support it.

Two sides of the same thing. Buy an iPhone, get updates from Apple ASAP but when they say "no more" that's it. Buy an Android device -- carefully selected -- and it takes longer to get updates from the OEM+telco combination, but when they say "no more" you'll still be able to get updates anyway.

(Oh, and the official Skype app, which you can run so long as the phone includes the Market application? Makes calls over 3G or Wifi or whatever, perfectly happily. Likewise sipdroid.)

Re: This is why Android seems scary to me

[ptomblin-lj.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the official Skype app, which you can run so long as the phone includes the Market application? Makes calls over 3G or Wifi or whatever, perfectly happily.

Not in the United States:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Skype-Released-For-NonVerizon-Android-Phones-110739

Verizon: 3G only burning your minutes.
Everybody else: WiFi only, not available on the road.

Re: This is why Android seems scary to me

[ideological_cuddle]

Wow. That's clearly a case of US telcos sucking. Presumably the same is true for Skype on iPhone, WebOS, and any other mobile platform where they have a client.

I'm pretty sure sipdroid doesn't give a damn. It's open sauce, they don't have to care about commercial deals. Not that I've had a whole lot of luck getting it to work reliably with my SIP provider...