HTC Desire

HTC just announced via facebook that they will not be updating the HTC Desire any longer. Apparently it doesn't have enough storage space for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) + HTC Sense 3.0. There are a few angry ways that users could react to this.

First of all, there is the argument that HTC are only refusing to upgrade the Desire because they want users to upgrade to new handsets. Extending the lifetime of their old phones doesn't make them any money. This is at the cost of customer satisfaction though, and it's sad because most users will have 2 year contracts, and like me, had hoped that updates would at least carry on for the length of your contract since this was one of HTC's flagship phones. I've owned my phone for a whole year already, but I would be pretty pissed off if I had bought it recently to then discover HTC had abandoned it. What version of Android will be out one year from now, and what will the resale value of your Desire be if the Android version is 18 months out of date?

Secondly, the Nexus One, which is basically a Desire in a different shell with a trackball, is quite capable of running Android 2.3. Google pushed it out a few months ago.  So it seems to be clear that the problem is HTC Sense, it has become too bloated and no longer fits on the small storage of the Desire. In an ideal world they should give us the upgrade option of Android 2.3 without Sense.

Thirdly, there are TONS of Android 2.3 roms that include HTC Sense on XDA. The fact that these exist and work perfectly well as a daily rom helps to argue the point that HTC's reasons for abandoning the Desire are a load of crap. Whether you root or not, you can see that this phone is capable of running Gingerbread.

Finally, there are the rooters. They don't care; they have been running Android 2.3 on the Desire for 6 months already. But it's been a tough journey - HTC went out of their way to lock the bootloader and the nand (storage), to make flashing custom roms difficult. Without groups like AlphaRev we would not have freedom to install whatever we like on our Desires and we would be chained to Froyo for the lifetime of our phones. It's sad because shouldn't have to be this way. Normal users will not hack their phones to run CyanogenMod. They will be stuck on Froyo for the remaining lifetime of their phones. They won't get any of the new features of Android, bug fixes, or security updates, and to me that just seems wrong.

Update: Apparently HTC will bring Gingerbread to the Desire after all. We'll see.

1. Cycle Hire Widget - Market Link

This is quite a cool little app, despite the name there is more to it than just a widget. The widget hides under a homescreen icon of an Android riding a bike. When tapped, it reveals the directions of the 3 nearest docks, colour coded, the colours showing whether you can get a bike or a slot at the locations. This is very handy if you know your way around and can know which 3 docks it's pointing to.

Home screen widget, map view, and list view

You can also view the docks in a list view, which is a relief as waiting for a) the map to build and b) the location/gps lock can be a bit tedious. I also discovered you can add docks to a list of favorites, if you pay for the premium version. I will probably do this as I am quite a fan. In terms of looks and usability, it rates quite high. The interface is obvious and easy to use. The dock data also seems to be accurate and up to date.

2. SpotCycle - Market Link

I quite like SpotCycle, this is the one I've ended up using the most over the last few weeks, mostly because of the favorite docks lists. I guess most people in the cycle scheme are like me and visit the same docks every day. I've found going to a list of these is always going to be quicker than opening a map view, waiting for the map data to load, waiting for location and GPS lock, etc. I have to admit though, I had to spend some time to figure out how to create the groups for storing favorites. Those options are hidden away in a place where you don't expect.

SpotCycle: Favorites and Map views

The map view is pretty decent, it shows you circles of varying sizes and shades of red, to denote availability of bikes or docks. The data has always been up to date with this app, I've never turned up and been completely surprised at how wrong it was. A few criticisms: sometimes it stays on the splash screen for an unacceptable long time. Not sure what it's busy doing, maybe getting location data or refreshing the lists, but it's quite annoying. It also frequently says "Can't get cities list, make sure you are connected to the Internet" - well, it's a smartphone, I am always connected to the Internet! Another annoyance is it throws errors into the notification area when it can't update the dock data, to be honest I don't really want to see those. I would prefer it if could just try again later and keep quiet about it. Over all I like it though, it's very configurable and despite annoyances it's reliable, and offers a lot of features. Being able to keep lists of favorites is a big win.

3. London Cycle Hire Live - Market Link

Your mileage may vary, but I didn't really have success with this app. It only has 2 stars in the Market which I guess is a fairly accurate measure of it's quality. It worked sometimes, but usually crashed with the error in the screenshot below. I have had apps Force Close on me before, but never seen anything like this.

Holy crap.

This may be worth coming back to if the dev is still working on it, I didn't spend much more time checking it out though.

4. Boris Bikes Live - Market Link

I like the eye-catching icon of our beloved Mayor of London riding the bike, but sadly you don't get a good first impression when you open this app. The landing screen is ugly as hell, the icons are lousy. Putting its initial appearance to one side though, the functionality should be pretty good. It basically offers a map, a list of docks ordered by proximity, list of favorites, and a timer (which is not yet implemented) so you can keep an eye on your journey times (because journeys that take less than 30 minutes are free). The presentation in the rest of the app is fine, and from the list views you can select a dock and get directions to it.

Boris Bikes Live. It's got a nice icon.

With those functions it should really tick the boxes, but I seem to have issues with the bike data being out of date. The last thing you need to to turn up to dock your bike and unexpectedly find all the slots are taken. The update interval is not configurable so I don't think there's much that can be done about it. For that reason and because of the lack of aesthetics, I kept falling back to SpotCycle.

5. London Cycle Hire - Market Link

This is a paid for app. It's only £1.50 but to be honest is not really worth it. Although it's quite well presented, it really just consists of a map with the docks overlayed over the top, but they aren't colour coded or anything like that so at a glance you really can't see any helpful data apart from the location. Clicking on the dock locations then shows you the live data and a button which plots a route there from your current location.

More of the same, but more expensive.

I emailed the dev and they said they are actively working on this app and they intend to release an updated version which has user maintained lists. Until then I guess I will use something else.

Conclusion

My testing is by no means exhaustive, but so far I reckon SpotCycle and Cycle Hire Widget are the best. Cycle Hire Widget probably has an easier to use interface, but once you have SpotCycle set up with your favorite groups, you will rarely need to use anything else.

An exception has occurred in the compiler (1.5.0). Please file a bug at the Java Developer Connection (http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport)  after checking the Bug Parade for duplicates. Include your program and the following diagnostic in your report.  Thank you.

java.lang.AssertionError: writePool E

at com.sun.tools.javac.jvm.ClassWriter.writePool(ClassWriter.java:513)
at com.sun.tools.javac.jvm.ClassWriter.writeClassFile(ClassWriter.java:1333)
at com.sun.tools.javac.jvm.ClassWriter.writeClass(ClassWriter.java:1211)
at com.sun.tools.javac.main.JavaCompiler.genCode(JavaCompiler.java:325)
at com.sun.tools.javac.main.JavaCompiler.compile(JavaCompiler.java:474)
at com.sun.tools.javac.main.Main.compile(Main.java:592)
at com.sun.tools.javac.main.Main.compile(Main.java:544)
at com.sun.tools.javac.Main.compile(Main.java:58)
at com.sun.tools.javac.Main.main(Main.java:48)
make: *** [out/target/common/obj/APPS/VpnServices_intermediates/classes-full-debug.jar] Error 41
make: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....

After trying the most recent update of Java 1.5 I made a cry for help in the XDA forums. The answer seemed simple enough, try JDK1.6. I installed it and modified /home/ben/mydroid/build/core/main.mk, commenting out the lines that checked for Java 1.5. Then after a "make clean", and another "make -j2" (-j4 made my laptop burn up ...) it was building again, and this time finished!

I make a nandroid backup and wiped to factory settings (using Amon_RA's recovery image) flashed the resulting boot.img and system.img to my phone using fastboot:

fastboot flash boot boot.img
fastboot flash system system.img
fastboot reboot

Rebooted my device, and it worked! A very basic system though, no Market or Google Apps.

Next steps ... getting root, creating an update.zip, making my own kernel with compcache ... the list is actually endless, it's nice just to get this far.

In fact next step could be building from Cyanogen's Eclair sources. Will give it a go and post if it works...

This is not rocket science by the way - this is my experience in following the guides from Google and HTC on Ubuntu 9.10. All of this information is already out there, just not necessarily all in one place in this format or adapted for this environment.

Building on Windows is not supported. I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 (32bit) on my laptop. Java JDK 1.5 is required, using 1.6 is supported but you have to make additional steps changing instances of "1.5" to "1.6" in makefiles. 64bit Ubuntu users may want to follow a different guide, not sure if any differences here could cause a build to fail.

Setting up your environment ready for development, install the following packages (reference):

sudo apt-get install git-core gnupg sun-java5-jdk flex bison gperf libsdl-dev libesd0-dev libwxgtk2.6-dev build-essential zipcurl libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev valgrind

In Ubuntu 9.10 you can't get Java 1.5 using apt any more. I downloaded it from java.com and installed it in /usr/local/java/jdk1.5.0. Then:

ln -s /usr/local/java/jdk1.5.0/bin/java /usr/local/bin/java

If you try "java -version" it should tell you "Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0-b64)". Finally, edit your ~/.bashrc using vim and add the following to the end of the file:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/java/jdk1.5.0/
export ANDROID_JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_HOME
export PATH=$PATH:/home/ben/bin:$JAVA_HOME/bin

Reload your .bashrc file using ". ~./bashrc".

Setting up repo - a Google tool to manage your Android source code repository:

cd ~
mkdir bin
curl http://android.git.kernel.org/repo >~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo
mkdir mydroid
cd mydroid
repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git -b eclair

Answer the questions where prompted and then fetch the source code using:

repo sync

This bit takes a while ... when finished:

gpg --import

Paste in the GPG key at the bottom of this page and then press ctrl+D. Now we need the HTC binaries and kernel source to build specifically for the Sapphire.

wget --referer=http://developer.htc.com/google-io-device.html http://member.america.htc.com/download/RomCode/ADP/signed-google_ion-ota-14721.zip?

# line commented -- wget --referer=http://developer.htc.com/ http://member.america.htc.com/download/RomCode/Source_and_Binaries/sapphire.hep-357975db.tar.bz2

Now to do the final bit of setup and start the build (reference here):

cd ~/mydroid/vendor/htc/sapphire-open
./unzip-files.sh
cd ~/mydroid
. build/envsetup.sh
lunch aosp_sapphire_us-eng

Yes that is supposed to say "lunch", not "launch". Now the build can be started! One final thing is required to stop the build from crashing (reference):

cd ~/mydroid/external/webkit
git cherry-pick 18342a41ab72e2c21931afaaab6f1b9bdbedb9fa

Now we can start the build:

cd ~/mydroid
make -j4

Bah, I've got an error: "Your version is: /bin/bash: javac: command not found.". There's a problem with my path (which I have corrected above already).

export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

Now it's building. The HTC website advises this is now a good time to make a cup of tea, or take a nap. I'll revisit this tomorrow I think!