Last week on June 2nd Rogers Canada launched their Android-powered phones, the HTC Magic and HTC Dream. « The Revolution is here » according to their slogan.
Well, I got my self an HTC Dream, and my very first reaction after turning on the device was:
HOLY **** IT PLAYS OGG VORBIS MUSIC! AND IT LETS ME SET ANY OF THEM OR EVEN MP3s AS RINGTONES WITHOUT FLASHING SOME RUSSIAN FIRMWARE!
I am happy to give my money to Rogers (and Google), as well as give up some of my privacy so this experiment AND implementation can go further than the OpenMoko has. I never imagined I could someday actually file bug reports against the operating system running on my phone! I know how this sounds. And it won’t be my opening statement about it 😉
So I’ve started doing the free software thing and begun cleaning up a few wiki resources as they were all TMobile G1 – centric:
- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/Android
- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/RogersHTCAndroid
I managed to brick my phone the next day I had it, apparently there is some issue when you let your battery die while using an app that uses the SD card. Rogers answer… wipe all the data on it, reset to factory settings! That’ll teach me, I should have backed-up all before playing with so many third-party apps.
So my next question to Rogers was « How can this device be backed up ? » Uh… Rogers doesn’t know! And of course « We don’t support Linux ». So they dutifully pointed me to HTC customer support who didn’t even know what Linux was (much less Ubuntu). They only knew about Windows HTC Sync (a bit different than full backup). And guess what, they pointed me to the HTC Wiki! Because, « Sir, that’s where third-party support happens » (actual quote).
In case you are wondering why I didn’t ask the community first, well, I work in a support position at Canonical, and I wanted to find out if commercial support for Android was ready for me 🙂 I am not sure if I am mad because this is a major fail (no one knows how to properly backup this Revolutionary device) or happy because I know the community will figure it out before they do. I’ll try to share about that on either Wiki and on the Android group on Identi.ca.
Oh, and don’t miss Cyrket, a public web front-end to the Android Marketplace.
alias canhaz=’sudo apt-get install’
Personally I’ve found HTC’s support fantastic (and they knew what linux was) after you’ve climbed up the support ladder a bit, at which point they are absolutely wonderful.
Crap, and I was hoping that at least the android phones would have a degree of linux compatibility.
Really don’t feel like paying for something that’ll need tinkering with to work.
@Nick, we didn’t speak to the same HTC.
Fantastic is when it just works and I don’t have to look up their phone or even call them.
Impressive that you managed to brick it. Never heard of that one before.
It does work just fine with linux as far as accessing the sd card and charging the phone. And that’s about all you can do with any computer. There’s no backup, because there’s no backup, period. The phone syncs everything over the air. It lives in the cloud.
Well… except that it would be nice to be able to back up some program data. I wiped my phone yesterday and now my saved games are gone in Abduction! World Attack. Bummer. Then again, I wiped my phone, and chances are you’ll do that just about never.
I picked up the HTC Sapphire/Magic from Rogers.
It is slick but it isn’t really Linux without glibc etc. The palm pre looks more linux like as does the pending Nokia N900.
I miss some of my linux applications – busy box, fbreader, evince but I have to admit google is doing a good job.