the strangest things found so far very curious indeed. Leading to the question Who is Dianne and does she like dancing?

This is the story of a small green robot and a Manchester based PHP developer.

The Phone
The HTC Hero won award after award after its release, recived lots of wonderful reviews and celebrity endorsements. All of which were deserved. The phone pushed Android 1.5 to its limits and HTC’s Sense UI and support for Flash topped it off nicely and make it a great phone to use. The ability to browse the Internet as you would on your desktop is something I think is a crucial requirement from a phone today, the camera has a little to be desired but at 5.0 mega pixels it matched most phones of the day, the lack of a flash is a shame as it means pic’s in low light tend to not come out so well.  Hardware-wise the phone operates perfectly, its fast and responsive, has only crashed a handful of times since I got it (not bad for 12 months, my WinMo phone crashed a couple of times a month, but then what version of Windows doesn’t.. :p).

The Software
The Hero originally shipped Android 1.5, which was great (note the past tense), at the time of the Hero’s release in July 09 it was the latest and greatest.With HTC’s Sense UI  plopped on top, made it a beautiful phone to use. Android 1.5 had its flaws tho, there are a lot of bugs and missing features (admittedly Sense UI added a few back in), but it was still missing a lot of basic functionality that people expected from a mobile device, send/recieve over bluetooth anyone? not with Cupcake you dont. There were also a lot of problems with the browser when not in “mobile view”.

The Hero has since been updated to Android 2.1, unfortunately (for HTC and Orange UK) it came 8 months too late. We were originally promised an update to the Hero back in October 2009 via HTC’s Twitter feed but it took till July before HTC finally managed to push the update out the door. And took a further 6 weeks till the update was available to Orange customers. This resulted in me losing all confidence with both HTC and Orange to provide me the Android experience I was looking for. Yes HTC can provide the hardware, and Orange (occasionally) the network but as far as Android goes… they both fail miserably.

Luckily for me, and you too, there is a wonderful development community available for android, and many developers willing to donate time and energy into making an android experience worthy of the software itself. And back in June, I took the decision to void my warranty and root my Hero so I could flash a custom ROM. Im now running Android 2.2 (FroYo) on my Hero, whic HTC still wont admit is possible and will not be releasing. All thanks to the guys at VillainROM.

The Apps
There are so many apps available on the Android Market and I haven’t tried a fraction of them, but I’ve added a page with a list of the apps I use, If you know of an app that does the job better, please let me know.

The Android Market is still quite young compared to Apples iStore, it has a lot less apps and seems to be filling up with a lot of useless apps, but thats the price you have to pay for an open, unrestricted (to a degree) market place. It desperately needs a better way to search and manage applications, but this should be made a lot better once the website version launches later this year.

Android Development
A couple of months ago, I started building my own Android apps. Its been fun brushing up on my JAVA and learning a new “language” to work with the Android api’s. I’ll be posting another time on how to setup and build basic apps but in the meantime if you want to get started, I advise you buy Reto Meier‘s book, Professional Android 2 Application Development, its been a lifesaver for me and has taught me an awful lot about Android. Also read his blog as its packed with useful snippets and advice.

Most of my Android development is for work at UKFast, so Im not going to mention them but the ones I have created outside of work are available in the market under my developer name “gavtaylor”.

So after all this, how have I found my last year with Android?
Well the biggest lesson I’ve learnt that the future of android lies in the developer community, and the only way to experience Android as it was intended is to root and flash custom rom, unless manufacturers and carriers get better with the roll-out of updates, this will be the only way to ensure your phone is running the latest version of Android available.

The delays are mainly down to them implementing custom UI’s and adding branding, hopefully this will get better with Android 3.0 as rumours have it Gingerbread will come with theme support so it shouldn’t take as long for carriers to re-brand future updates. I still think manufacturers will take their time releasing new roms as they will no doubt continue to re-write parts of the framework to implement features not available in the stock ASOP build.

So… thats my year with Android. Joy… frustration… happiness… relief… but this was mostly caused due to Android being so young to start with and as an early adopter you have to expect it to be a bumpy ride at first. And if you were to ask would I do it again? I’s say Yes definitely…

Please feel free to add your thoughts/experiences with Android in the comments below.

Applications

Adobe Reader
Amazon Kindle
beebPlayer
chrometophone
ConnectBot
Facebook for Android
Fancy Widget (Pro)
Formula 1
Google Goggles
Google Maps
Google SkyMaps
Google Translate
Launcher Pro (plus)
OpenSignal
Opera Mobile
Orange Wednesdays
Pingdom
ROM Manager (Premium) *
ShootMe*
Spotify
Terminal Emulator*
Titanium Backup*
Twitter for Android
trackME
WiFi Analyzer
WiFi Tether*
Your Orange
YouTube
ZipSigner

Games

Angry Birds
Angry Birds Seasons
Angry Birds Rio
Gensoid
Kids Paint †
Robo Defense
SNesDroid
Solitaire
ShootU!
Solitaire
Speedx 3D
Tank Hero
Tetris
X Construction

* Requires Root
† For Charlie/Riley

My Launcher Screens

Phone: HTC Hero (Graphite) ~ OrangeUK
ROM: CyanogenMod7 [nightlies] | Kernel: Las Venturas – 2.6.35 ~ 352-691MHz | Radio: 63.18.55.06SU_6.35.17.03

Please note: This Guide is for people with an Orange Branded Hero (the Graphite version, with the Orange sticker on the back) but should work for everyone else too (but don’t flash the orange rom!)

All Credit and thanks go to the wonderful developers at XDA and VillainRom.

Disclaimer

While this process worked perfectly fine for me, and  I have done if 4 times now, I take no responsibility if you turn your phone into a  paperweight while trying to do this. If your not comfortable with the risks, please ask a friend or wait for HTC and Orange to release *snigger* an official *lol* update instead.

Setting up your Hero

To get around the various software locks you need to be running the 2.73.61.5 version of the rom. If your using a higher version you wont be able to flash the recovery image.

I had a few problems downgrading my firmware as my Laptop was running Windows 7 so I kept getting Error [170]: USB CONNECTION ERROR and also when it did occasionally reboot into the Bootloader it just timed out trying to re-establish a connection.

After a lot of frustration, I managed to find and resolve the issue, here’s how. If you have an XP machine you can skip this part…

1) Download the Sync drivers from here

2) Open Device Manager on you pc and expand the Android device driver tab. Then run the Rom updater

When the phone reboots into the Bootloader, check the Device Manager to see if a Yellow ! appears over the Bootloader Driver
If it does you have the same problem I had, otherwise this may not work but is worth a try (you can always uninstall it it doesn’t).

3) While the phone is still in the bootloader, right-click on the device and choose update driver.
click on install from disk or known location, and browse to the drivers you downloaded.
You should then see a list of available driver, (I saw 3) one was called Bootloader but don’t pick that as it didn’t work for me, the other two had the same name but different version numbers, I picked the highest version.

(sorry for the vagueness of this step, am at work and cant quite remember, will update the post when I get home)

4) Click Next to install the driver and we’re done.

If you manage to do this within the Bootloader’s 60 second time-out, the updater will kick in and start flashing the rom. If you have hit the time-out just, restart your phone and re-run the updater.

You should now be successfully downgraded.

Flashing the recovery image

I’m not going to write the process for this step as there is a wonderful guide over at www.roothtchero.co.uk which is what I followed.
If the site ever comes down I will update this post, but by then I don’t think anyone will be using a HTC Hero. Just follow the guide, step by step until you can successfully load the recovery screen by holding the HOME and POWER buttons to turn your phone on.

Installing Android 2.2

I tried a few different 2.1 roms after I had installed recovery and none of them felt right, a couple were sluggish, the stock was ok but didnt have root so I settled for VillainROM12 which is based on the official 2.1 Hero update.

This is however a 2.1 based rom and when last week I saw this announcement on Twitter, I thought Yes please so I popped over to the VillainRom forum to download and install it. (the current version at time of writing is 1.1.1)

To install is easy, download the rom and rename update.zip.
copy the file to the root of your SD card and reboot your phone into recovery.

Perform a full wipe of both data and dalvik cache (ext is you are using it) and then flash the rom

All that’s left is to download your favourite apps and enjoy the FroYo goodness….

Note: I will update this post with some pictures when I get home tonight…

With this in mind, this last week or so I have been dipping my toes into the wonderful world of native Android development.I have gone for the setup advised in the SDK documentation, Eclipse with the ADT plugin. Quickly passing over the Hello World app, as a developer its a task  I must complete before doing anything else, I started on my first application. I decided that for my first attempt I would stick to something I know and rebuild a web based tool I help develop for a well known Manchester server hosting company.

Its been a long time since I last did anything in Java so was a little rusty, but after a few lunchtimes and couple of late nights I have managed to cobble together something that resembles and could just about pass for an Android Application.

So what is it you ask, this wonderful app you have been building up (wont shut up about if you follow me on twitter)? Well I can now tell you, its a speedtest. Not for how fast your mobile connects to the internet, I’ll leave that to the guys at speedtest.net, but to test the speed your website can deliver files to your visitors, now I cant provide you with a link to download and install it as its not really finished and as its not an officially sanctioned app, but I can show a couple of screen-shots from the current alpha version.

This is probably as far as this application goes, unless the boss asks me to continue with it, as although its quite basic and there isn’t all that much to it, it has served its purpose and helped me to figure out how an application should work, its activity life-cycle and how to correctly put one together.

The next step is to think of that award winning, must have,  how did we live without it  idea that will make me millionaire… any suggestions?