Getting more from my Original DROID (Part 2: Restoring and Troubleshooting)

April 13th, 2011 by John Mahlman IV 2 comments »

In part 1 I described (in little detail) how I rooted my phone and installed CyanogenMod 7 on it to get some more mileage out of it until I upgrade to a newer device this year.  But of course every upgrade and every hack isn’t without it’s issues and every hack isn’t perfect at all.  Cyanogen never claims to be 100% trouble-free, and every users’ experience will vary depending on device and applications installed; after all, it is technically a hack made by third-party developers…and no developer is perfect. The methods for flashing are also different for each user.

I installed CM7 when it was at RC1 for the DROID (still buggy, but still good for everyday use) and I originally flashed my phone by doing a factory reset of the device (removes everything) and then installing the ROM. This gave me an endless boot screen.  What I had to do to fix this was not only do a factory reset, but wipe the cache partition AND the Dalvik cache partition.  This was easy with the ClockworkMod and it was also nearly 100% risk free since I had a complete Nandroid backup.  After wiping the two it booted successfully!

I noticed that in Android 2.3 Google will restore all of your previously purchased and downloaded apps if you want it to automatically on a new device (only the app itself, not the data..like game save data).  This is great, but I already decided to use MyBackup Root for this, mainly because I wanted to have my stuff there with all of the data.  So i just told the phone not to download everything and I’ll just restore everything from my backup.  What this left me with was broken installed apps with no way to update them because the Market links were all hosed.  This sucked, now what was I supposed to do?  I decided to flash again and allow Google to push the apps to my phone.  This process took some time but everything was downloaded for the most part; unfortunately, I didn’t have my app data, so all of my game data and all of my settings were gone…I check MyBackup and sure enough I was able to restore data only!  I did that and bingo, everything worked again with all of my old data!  A few apps needed to be reinstalled or needed their data wiped (Google maps and Facebook I think) but for the most part everything worked just as it was supposed to.

Choose which to restore? Yay!

So now that I had my apps on my phone, I was nearing happiness with my hacked DROID.  I say nearing because I was still having many issues with other things.  I won’t go into every little one but I will talk about the two that almost made me decide to go back to stock.

LED Notifications

The one thing I love about Android phones is the LED notifications.  A simple little LED in the corner of my phone blinks different colors for certain things (texts, emails, etc) so I don’t need to turn the screen on, or unlock my phone to see what I missed or see what that beep was from…I can just look at the color of the LED.  Funny thing happened after installing, it stopped working.  I would look down and nothing would be blinking but when I unlocked my phone I’d notice an e-mail that I missed!  What was going on here?  I looked in the settings and found that CM has basically rewritten the notification system and you can customize colors and blink rate from it if you so desired, but instead it broke the damn thing.  This wouldn’t fly with me, I was about to go back to stock because one of my favorite features was broken…then I found the forums.  I searched the issue on the forums and found a lot of people with the same issue, on different phones even!  Reading through many of the posts they all usually came around to the same solution, un-check everything in the LED settings then check them again then hit “Reset all LED notifications” and reboot. And it worked!  I had my LED back and working and now it was even better because I can change the settings for every program and even change the colors and blink rate for them, pretty neat.

Change color and rate for LED notifications

Missing Messages

Now that my LED notifications worked I was happy that I could look down and see if I missed any emails or (more importantly) text messages…but strangely I felt that I was receiving less messages.  I went an entire day without a text message, which is very odd for me actually.  I looked at my phone, no blinking LED, I unlocked the phone, no notification in the menu, I opened the messaging app and boom, new texts, some as old as a day!  What the hell was going on with this?  I’m missing text messages now?  This used to happen with my EnV Touch, never my DROID!  I tried resetting my notifications for the app, and it would work for a while after I opened the app.  I figured, okay, it’s fixed, but then it would stop later on in the day.  I was getting very frustrated with this now and was again thinking about going back to stock.  I hit the forums again and found one post about the issue with one simple solution:

The solution! Check that box!

Once I checked that, never missed another message.  It locks the message app in the memory so it’s always running.  Sure it uses up memory, but my messages are more important to me than the amount of apps I can run at one time.

Side note: But why does the DROID do this with CM7?  The DROID has 256MB RAM, this was a lot when the phone came out and with 2.1 it was fine.  Once 2.2 was released memory was becoming a problem for the phone.  The phone had trouble even keeping the Home app in memory; if you ran a program that was memory hungry and went back to the home screen you’d have to wait for it to redraw because Android’s memory management would kill it.  So in CM7 you can see the two check boxes for home and messaging, this stoped the redrawing(relaunching) and the missing messages…but it took some memory away of course which means you can only do so much multitasking before apps start getting killed.  Android 2.3.3 uses more memory, and the DROID just doesn’t have that much…so CM7 also allows asset purging to free up RAM as well as compucache (memory compression).  These use a little CPU but allow you to multitask fairly well;  it’s nowhere near as good as other newer phones, but it works.

There were some other small odds and ends that I had fixed by tweaking settings and installing updates but I thought that these two were really the most damming for me.  I managed to fix them with help from other nerds at the CyanogenMod Forums who were running into similar issues and there are some I managed to fix by trial and error.  Now, he ROM still has it’s occasional reboots and hiccups (not very often) and they usually happen with two programs; Google Maps and the Camera app, but these crashes happen less and less with each update.

CM7 is now out of RC and was released as Gold…but not for the DROID yet.  It still is very much a work in progress, but the progress is going very quickly, and I really like the direction it’s heading.  They’ve managed to give DROID users Android 2.3 even after Motorola decided it “wouldn’t work” on the phone.  Well, it is working (for the most part) and I’m fairly happy with it.  It has really allowed me to use my phone a bit longer than I was expecting.  I’m probably going to wait until August to upgrade my phone instead of going for the Thunderbolt, but time may change that.  What I do know is that my phone still works well and I will get more time out of it because of the ROMS.

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Getting more from my Original DROID (Part 1:Rooting and CM7)

April 11th, 2011 by John Mahlman IV 2 comments »

I love my DROID, I have since I got it over a year ago.  But in a year, a lot can happen with technology of course.  My phone was originally equipped with Android 2.1 (the first phone to have it actually) and had an ARM 600MHz processor (underclocked to 550 for battery life), and 256MB RAM.  It was fast, really fast…and it took a while for phones to be that fast…but it didn’t last long.  Soon after the DROID came out every new phone that came out just got faster and faster very quickly..I mean, that’s what technology does, right?  But the DROID looked slow very quickly.

So when Froyo (Android 2.2) came out the DROID got it down the line and that’s when the DROID started to show it’s age; extremely slow…a big drop in performance.  So I decided to root it to get a little more millage out of it before my upgrade.  Mind you, I was waiting for the Thunderbolt to come out to replace it…but decided against upgrading for the time…another story I suppose.  I decided to use SuperOneClick to root my phone, and damn it was simple.  Literally one click and it was done…but what can I do with this root?  Well, first thing was overclocking to see if I can get some more speed.  I overclocked it to 800MHz and really didn’t notice much of a difference besides the fact that I could now have a wireless hot-spot…oh and I could take screen shots now (why doesn’t Android have this functionality built in? Seriously!).

Android Screen shot

Hey look, I need to ROOT to take a screen shot!

So I decided to take it a step further.  My buddy was telling me about CyanogenMod and how he loved it on his MyTouch and basically brought life back into it.  So I said “Why the hell not?”  Not only does it add a lot of functionality, it will give me Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread)…something the original DROIDs won’t ever see normally.  I backed-up my apps and text messages phone using MyBackup Root then flashed my recovery ROM to ClockworkMod which allows me to install firmware from the SD card and allows me to backup my entire phone to an image just in case anything goes wrong.  After the backup with MyBackup Root I rebooted into recovery mode and backed-up the entire phone using the Nandroid backup (in the recovery) then started to flash CyanogenMod 7 on my phone..this meant I had to do a complete wipe of the phone which is always scary but with the backup I should be cool!

Wiped the phone, flashed the ROM, and booted the phone. It worked! I had the Release Candidate (at the time it was RC1) of CyanogenMod 7 on my phone!

I had some issues with CM7 at first and some issues with getting my apps back (which I’ll talk about in Part 2) but after some initial bumps I was up running as smooth as I could be on a release candidate.  I had some reboots and some programs would crash but reinstalling them from scratch helped for the most part.

After a few updates it became more and more stable.  I am now running RC4 with a new ultra-low voltage kernel (which allows me to overclock to 1GHz and uses less battery power than the stock kernel). which gives me good battery life, pretty good performance, and all around a pretty good experience.

Android 2.3.3 and 1.1GHz!

So if you’re looking to get some more time from your old DROID this seems like a great way to do it.  It’s not up there with the new phones, but it does give your device a nice little jolt until you decide to retire it.

In Part 2 I’ll talk about installing all of the apps from backup and troubleshooting the many issues I had with memory issues and how they were resolved.

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Another Stupid TUAW post: “Why I’m staying with AT&T” and a moron too!

January 12th, 2011 by John Mahlman IV 5 comments »

I always enjoy reading tech blogs the day after a big announcement.  Not because I want to see coverage about the previous days event but because I I love seeing all of the weeping and moaning about what “failed” with said announcement (even though all of the expectations were rumors and speculation) and I like seeing the people who were so gung-ho about the event suddenly drop down and go back to their old crap.  I’ve seen the posts about the “failure” of the Verizon iPhone, and now I’m seeing the posts about “sticking with AT&T.”  Again, that’s totally fine of course; don’t switch companies for a single phone, but if you have various complaints and problems, isn’t that enough to switch?

This post by Mel Martin on TUAW, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, really confused the hell out of me.  I saw the title “Why I’m Staying with AT&T” and was expecting to see things like “I haven’t had the issues everyone talks about,” or “I like their customer service!” No, what I found was a long list of complaints with some reasons why he’s sticking with AT&T through all of his problems.  Let me break this down a bit more.

I admit, AT&T has been sloppy and at times downright incompetent. Who can forget the massive foul up when the first iPhone came out and literally millions of customers couldn’t get AT&T servers to sign them up? It happened again with the 3G iPhone and the iPhone 4.
There’s the really nasty rate of dropped calls, lousy or inconsistent reception, and how AT&T always seemed to put endless roadblocks before developers who wanted to use the iPhone in the way it was designed. Months of delays on the SlingPlayer app, no Wi-FI tethering, and more delays delivering a 3G tethering plan that was overpriced and forced you to give up your unlimited data plan. Oh yes, AT&T dropped unlimited data so it could start enabling some of those features that might force you to go over AT&T’s newly imposed limits. Nice. The list goes on and on.

Let’s see.  That is a list of eleven complains or problems faced on AT&T with the iPhone, not to mention that he put “the list goes on and on” at the very end, meaning there are more complaints!  Any normal, competent person would have tossed their provider out on their ass a long time ago with this list, I know I would have, but that’s because I actually like being able to make and receive calls and texts and data anywhere I like.  This is a VERY bad list of complaints for any cell service and sticking with someone this bad is just insane.

Now, with this list of eleven you figured there would be a much longer list of good reasons he’s straying with AT&T, right? Let’s take a look now, one by one, and try to keep count!

Big Fee to drop my AT&T plan. Way too much. $325 for those who purchased after June 1, 2010, and $10 off of that for every month of completed contract.

This is a good reason! Why would you want to pay a fee to drop your cell company only to have to pay another $200 to buy a new phone which you already own!  Let’s hope a trend of smart follows.

Coverage. We all know that AT&T coverage is generally worse than Verizon, but AT&T ponied up and let me have a MicroCell device for free. It solves the ‘no coverage at home’ problem, and after some initial growing pains it works well

There goes the smart…out the window.  This is where I start getting very confused.  You’re claiming you want to stay with AT&T because of their coverage but you say in the very next sentence that they generally have worse coverage than Verizon?  And because you had such bad service they gave you a personal 3g device to make calls in your home?  So you’re sticking with AT&T because they have bad coverage but solved your home service issue?  Why bother have a cell phone then? Isn’t the point of a MOBILE PHONE to be able to use it…mobile-ly?

Competition is good. I expect AT&T to step up and compete, not because they want to, but because they have to. Maybe there will be a reinstatement of unlimited data plans. Maybe FaceTime will finally work on 3G.

Another stupid point.  While I agree that because Verizon now has an iPhone that AT&T will have to step it up, AT&T has always had this problem and still haven’t resolved it for the most part.  Why would they all of a sudden just start to “compete” now?  Haven’t they been competing in the past, or were they just  riding the dollar waves of the Apple fanboys turning a blind eye to their crappy service just to have an iPhone?  Not to mention that you’re basing this on speculation that “maybe” something will happen.  I don’t know about you but when I’m paying for something now I want it to work now, not “maybe” in the future.

Simultaneous voice and data are huge. I often fire off an email or web link when I’m on the phone. Going to Verizon means I kiss all that goodbye.

Okay, a valid reason to stay on AT&T.  CDMA cannot do voice and data simultaneously and if that’s a big issue for you then you should have no questions to ask, just don’t switch. That’s two instances of sanity.

Speed. At least here in Arizona, I get really fast data on the iPhone. Yes, the Verizon voice network is more reliable, but in local side by side tests on the data side, my AT&T phone really is faster than a Verizon smartphone.

Speed is another thing that I have trouble viewing as a major issue to switch cell carries.  For one, the difference in speed isn’t really that much, unless you’re using 4G on a device.  Now, I would say that this is another good reason if you really need that speed, except for the fact that you point out AT&T’s flaw right in the next statement.  You say AT&T is faster than Verizon (true) but Verizon is more reliable.  Tell me, what’s more important to you: getting something done quickly while praying that you keep a steady connection, or getting something done a little slower, but knowing it’ll get done because you have a strong, reliable connection?  If you say anything other than the latter, you’re a moron.

New iPhones. There will likely be a new iPhone this summer. I expect it will be a lot easier to talk AT&T into an upgrade than Verizon.

Guess what, you’re probably right! It really doesn’t take a genius to figure out Apple’s release schedule. But I also think that if someone wanted to upgrade early they will pony up the dough.  If they switched to Verizon and paid the fees they won’t have an issue upgrading their device.  Not to mention that so many people will probably wait for a new device before switching to Verizon anyway.

And that’s the end of his list. Five reasons he’s staying, five. And only two of them are valid.

Explain that to me please: 11 complaints vs. 5 reasons (of which only 2 of them are valid in any way).  How can someone who apparently knows something about technology see this as a good decision?  If I had half the list of complaints this guy has, I’d drop Verizon like a bad habit.  I have maybe two complaints about Verizon and neither of them has anything to do with service or call quality (mainly cost and devices).  His entire post seems to me like he’s sucking the AT&T pee pee all the way home while getting his free cell service too.

I should also point out that I have called TUAW out on a very misleading title in one of their other posts and they responded by sending me tweets to rumored stories about the iPhone 4G on Verizon.  It seems they do not understand the concept of a rumor.  Over there they seem to be a bunch of AT&T and Apple fanboys…and dealing with fanboys is a hard thing to do.

Sound off in the comments if you have anything to say!

Update note: I found this post on a blog I frequent (The Adventures of Systems Boy!) and I was so happy to read it.  Three sentences and it’s already the best post on the Verizon iPhone. Thank you, Systems Boy!

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Verizon iPhone: UNICORNS!!!!

January 11th, 2011 by John Mahlman IV 1 comment »

Okay, so it’s finally out, Verizon now has the iPhone.  And unicorns are flying around now apparently.  Of course the blogosphere and the media are insane right now but I have also seen my fair share of complaints and I laugh at a good amount of them.  Some of them even make me want to slap someone. Let me go through them.

  • Not GSM, can’t use all over the world:  Okay, were you really expecting this? Verizon is CDMA, their phones work only in the US.  Yes, they offer world phones, but did anyone really believe they’d make a “world iPhone?”
  • Not 4G/LTE: Apple will not update the iPhone in the middle of it’s life cycle to put 4G in the device.  Maybe the next one in July will have it, but expecting a 4G iPhone to come out today was really far-fetched.
  • Can’t use data and voice simultaneously: Let me see. Anyone who would need this should know that CDMA cannot do this, it never has been able to and it never will.  Why the hell would anyone expect the iPhone to suddenly let CDMA do this?  It’s not about the phone people, it’s the network.  In my life, I have probably had the need to do this maybe 4 times, and I’m a tech junkie!  Maybe that’s me, but I still wonder how much people really need/care about this.
  • Verizon might install apps on the phone: I don’t think Apple would allow this. They didn’t allow it on AT&T….why would they allow it for Verizon?  If they do, I’ll eat my shoe.

So those are really the fun ones I’ve heard. I’m sure there is someone out there who always uses data and voice, but then stay with AT&T! If you travel out of the country a lot, chances are you don’t have Verizon anyway. I believe that these complains are from people on AT&T fed up with them and they were hoping Verizon would swoop in and save them from everything bad about AT&T…and are disappointed that they can’t just get everything they want.  So a message; stop crying. You’re never going to get everything you want, face it.

Unicorn Power!

What everyone expected...

What will Happen Next?

How many people are going to jump the AT&T ship to go to Verizon now?  I know of a few off hand that will as soon as they can. Honestly, switching carriers for a phone is just ridiculous.  I always thought this, especially when everyone complained “Oh my god I can’t wait until the iPhone is on Verizon so I can finally dump AT&T!”  My question, why bother have a cell phone on a network that doesn’t make you happy?  Isn’t the point of a cell phone to have cellular service?  If you switch providers simply for a phone, then that’s dumb.  Switch because one has the features you want, or because one’s cheaper, you know..a good reason.  If you’re going to leave AT&T now because you had shitty service and were just waiting for an iPhone to come to a better network, that’s even a good reason..that’s probably why most people will leave, but don’t complain when you can’t use your voice and data at the same time since you switched, that’s your own dumb fault for not knowing you can’t do it.

I also wonder how many Verizon Android users will hop over to the iPhone.  I know this will happen (again, I already know of some people who are thinking of doing this), but I really want to see how many people will end up doing this.  I myself have thought, “Humm, if a Verizon iPhone came around, would I go for it?”  I do like the iPhone hardware and iOS is nice but I’m very happy with Android and I see very good Android devices coming out in the near future.  I’m also used to it’s features and I know I’d miss some of them if I went to the iPhone.  Only time will tell, but come August when I’m up for a new phone I hope to have a choice of some LTE Android phones or even an LTE iPhone.

Wrapping up, what does this change?  Nothing much.  People will still switch companies for a phone, and people will still not be happy with things they’ve wished for.  Not a single person will get everything they want from their phone or network, and that’s the way it will be forever.  I want a device that can work on CDMA and GSM and underground, but guess what? That’s not happening. Am I going to complain and call something I waited for a failure? No, because these are my wants, my needs.  Cell companies and device makers don’t have an obligation to anyone.  This iPhone hype was all created by the media.  All of these wishes were created by the media.  Verizon and Apple didn’t promise anybody anything, they simply said “we have an announcement” and that’s all it took for everyone to go ape shit and expect all of these things from the device, hell people didn’t even know it was actually an iPhone announcement until they said it.  It could have been a Windows Phone 7 announcement!  The fact of the matter is that you can’t always get what you want.  Listen to the Stones, people.

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My Experience with an iPad

January 5th, 2011 by John Mahlman IV No comments »

Happy New Years to all!

Now that that’s out of the way I present an update! It’s been a fun 5 months, and I’ve been busy and I really have not had much to write about in with technology ranting or whatever, but I feel the need to actually write something now.  It might be funny to see me write about it because of my February post on the iPad, but I am writing about my experience with my iPad.  Now you might ask “you said you wouldn’t buy one!” Well, I didn’t buy it.  I won it at work back in September (see!).  So after 3-4 months of using it I felt I should write something about it, so here we go.

When I first got it, I was excited (who wouldn’t be) but I found out quickly that I really had no practical use for it.  Everything I would want to do with it on the road (send/read email, calendars, Facebook/Twitter, etc.) I can do on my phone.  And what’s more, I can do those on my phone from ANY location as opposed to anywhere with wifi (this iPad is wifi only).  I began downloading and installing apps and games and found that while a lot of the iPhone versions of apps and games are free, iPad versions aren’t.  I’m cheap, so I don’t buy apps.  A lot of the apps I wanted for the iPad also had free counterparts for Android, so I might as well use my phone instead.

I did find it useful at home when I didn’t want to take out the 17-inch laptop.  I can check Facebook and Twitter without an issue (and the apps are usually better than using my laptop anyway) and watching Youtube videos on the iPad is great actually, much better than the site!  I also use it to play Scrabble with friends.  All of these are just secondary things that are just helping push my laziness even more, nothing totally useful for me at least.  There are two apps I found particularly useful though; VLC and Remote.

Everyone knows VLC (and if you don’t…you SHOULD), it plays any video file on the iPad without having to convert it, and you don’t even need to sync your computer and iPad, you just drag the video into the VLC list in iTunes and it’s done. I found this great to watch downloaded video’s and ripped DVDs while witting around, just put a pair of headphones on and you’re good to go.  I like being able to hand off the iPad to someone to show them Archer or something.

Remote is an iTunes remote control program.  I can control my home desktop iTunes from the iPad from anywhere I get my home wireless signal.  This comes in handy when you want to listen to music while you’re cleaning, or cooking, or in the other room.  You can raise the volume, change and search songs, make palylists, etc.  I also found it can wake a sleeping computer up to connect to the iTunes library.  The only thing is that iTunes needs to be running on the machine for it to work of course, a very minor issue I think.  I found this extremely useful during a party when I just left the iPad out and asked people make playlisst and add whatever they wanted to hear to the list.

So all in all, I do enjoy having the iPad but I still believe that it’s not something I need.  It’s fun, it’s helpful, but for me it’s just not a real replacement for anything just yet.  Maybe when I get a cable provider that utilizes it I will change my mind, but right now, not yet.

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