Android 2.1 on my Samsung Moment
A LOT has changed with the hacking of the Samsung Moment since I last posted any updates.
SDX Developers is the site for keeping up with the pace of things. Don’t take anything I note here to be current, things change sometimes more than once a day so I may mention something that turns out to be not such a great idea for your phone. If you are interested in playing with all of the mods, start your reading there.
I just finished installing what seems to be the leaked Android 2.1 beta release for the Moment. It ships currently with 1.5 on the phone, so hopefully this adds yet some more stability to the phone and some new and interesting features.
Right now I’m just running the more or less ‘stock’ image without any fancy ROM mods to it, to get the hang of anything that is different.
Immediately the thing I notice is that the built in gmail now supports multiple gmail accounts and also Google apps accounts….this in itself is worth doing for me. I can now have all my G* accounts aggregated in a common interface. If only gmail itself had account aggregation for the web interface…..
Some nice cosmetic updates for the calendar widget and a few other things are immediately obvious too. They aren’t as hideous as they were with 1.5.
I’ve only had it installed for an hour or so at this point, but no immediate instability issues are obvious. There is an organized bugs report on the SDX site, so definitely have a good look at that. Evidently one of the worst is that streaming of media seems to be broken for people. I really only SMS/email/phone for 99% of my use with Twitter/FB and web browsing, and all of that is working for me so far.
I still haven’t found a particularly great case solution for the phone. Aside from belt cases, which I personally hate, slip cases seem to mash down on the buttons and kill the battery dead in 3hrs of being in my pants pocket. I’m still using a microfiber sunglasses soft pouch to carry it around in. It’s really not that bad as the cloth is handy for cleaning the screen, though it looks a bit goofy to pull the phone out of a baggie all the time.
So onward SDX goes with 2.1. It will be very interesting to see what they can do with the performance of the phone once Samsung releases the sources to the kernel so they can get fiddling with compiler optimizations. So far, if anything, the phone might even be a bit more responsive with the version I’m running compared to the 1.5 hacked release I had on previously. So things are good.
Android at this point is pretty solid and a lot more addicting than I’d imagined it would be. As it gets cooked a bit more, it should be really something. For now though, it’s still a bit of a ‘hobby’ to fiddle with. For a business type user, I’d still say stick to your Blackberry if you really need it to ‘just work’ without any other level of understanding.
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