OK, the title is s a bit over the top, still topical, but I just thought I’d squeeze as many relevant Android-isms in there as I could (Hero, Eris and Legend)
Almost straight after my last Android post regarding my disappointment in HTC’s delay in their release of the promised Android 2.x release for the Hero (or Dream/G1, Magic/Sapphire, etc). Thanks to a leaked build for the HTC Eris, dropped by a sketchy HTC staff member (or perhaps a creative community-driven beta testing process), a torrent of new custom Hero ROM’s were released. Like always, each is slightly different with software/apps included or removed, and installed special optimisations, bug fixes and kernel hacks.
Anyone who’s been around the Hero/Android scene would probably have seen many of these names, and choice always keeps things interesting, but as you can see from the brief descriptions above, apart from different bootscreen/design/installed apps the optimisations in each are almost the same.
Unfortunately the issue is, I believe, while we don’t have access to the complete driver set or an updated (Android 2.x friendly) kernel, true creativity and customisation of each individual ROM isn’t particularly easy, at least from this posters point of view.
Flash forward to tonight (9th March) and a new dump has been leaked, this time for the HTC Legend (newer phone with almost exactly the same hardware specification as the Hero, except for that sweet AMOLED screen), which appears to have even more of the new Eclair features missing from the previous build, as well as more bug fixes I’d imagine!
I shouted my disgust a while ago about the Twitter app called TweetDeck, “an overengineered brainf*** that could have only been created by a flex developer“, I said. Soon after this, I gave it another go (oddly enough), and after getting over the complicated mix of buttons and muddled interface I decided I liked it.
Since then, I’ve been running it on all my machines, on linux, Windows and the Macbook. Quite frankly, I love it, although I’m not sure whether the iPhone client would work very well, especially not with multi-lists and complicated layout, though I could be wrong (and have been before, obviously).
Recently however, I wiped my Ubuntu laptop recently, and after a fresh clean install and subsequent install of the right libraries, Adobe Flash, Air and finally TweetDeck, I was greeted with this:
Uh oh…
Unfortunately, most of the search results pointed back to Windows issues with an incorrect link back to the user’s home directory (thus, TweetDeck not being able to find the data), but obviously this wasn’t a huge help in the situation.
Running TweetDeck from a console gave the answer away pretty quickly: “libgnome-keyring.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”. After making sure I had libgnome-keyring and libgnome-keyring-dev installed, which it was (installed by default, the keyring is used everywhere), I remembered having an issue with installed libraries and Flash on a 64 bit install previously, a problem which is fixed by installing 32bit libraries for the apps that need them.
A quick Google search, (which resulted any many more relevant results this time), a quick fix, and I was back up and running happily seconds later.
Yo may remember my previous post about my the wide range of custom ROM’s available for the HTC Hero, whose makers were instrumental in enabling the humble Hero-sian a taste of one of the finer treats in the Android Patisserie, eclair. (They should definitely name a future release cheesecake, that would, err, put the icing on the cake?)
Nom, nom, nom..
Months on, however, HTC have still not released an office 2.1/Eclair update for the Hero platform, nor have they provided (i.e let slip) an updated 2.1 dump for the cooks to play with. No doubt this is because of the release of the Nexus, Legend and Bravo, so as not to steal their thunder, but I’m betting it’s because they just don’t care. And why should they? In this day and age of Lacoste, Guiness and Apple fanboy-ism, brand loyalty means nothing….. right?
But who am I to complain right? I’ve heard the tired old argument about manufacturers releasing devices to the market with a whole lot of push and marketing to get buyers, then stopping support/upgrade path for them soon after release. Many do it, look at Samsung (the Galaxy fizzled and died as soon as hit the shelf), and from what I’ve seen support from Acer for the Liquid has been no better. But after all, HTC is no different to any other company, they exist for the money and I guess we shouldn’t expect more.
She’s “cool”, Apple win.. HTC, on the other hand.. don’t.
This will most certainly be my last £0/fee per month contract phone though. I love it, but 18 months with one device is just too long. In the future, I’ll foot the ~£500 price tag for a new phone and sell it six months later for £300 repeating the process over again.
Ashamedly, I realise that my lust for new hardware and device happiness has the equal effect of giving the manufacturer exactly what they want, and keeping them happy… many times over.
