Gadgetory

hey everybody its Joe from pocketnow.com with a special first look at what everybody's been wanting for an awfully long time its Android 2.1 Eclair running on the t-mobile g1 yes it's finally been done and I'm going to show you how to do it so the first thing I've got this is my wife's t-mobile g1 I've already gone ahead and unlocked it and rood it did that long ago and I have just now using the rod dream the 1.6.2 recovery ROM I've gone in and done an Android backup so just in case something goes terribly terribly wrong I can get her back up to where she was before I started all this without any problem at all so what I've done is of course booted up into recovery mode to do that on the g1 the way you do that is you shut down the phone power it up using the power button then hold down the home button until you're brought up into your recovery menu so you can see here I've just completed the back up I am going to come down to flash zip from sdcard and I have placed that on the SD card it's called update CM five point zero point seven DS test one important thing to note this is an experimental ROM it is not a final release ROM as of the time of this video it's not available via the CM updater that may change but for now you have to download it directly from dub dub dub cyanogen mod dot-com and I'll have links to that in the article that accompanies this video so from here we've got that selected and I'm going to press the scroll button and it asks if I want to do that remember this is a g1 so I have to press the home button to confirm and it says that it's installing from the SD card finding the update opening the update verifying the update and it's going on and doing its thing this is probably going to take a few minutes so I'll let it complete and we'll be right back okay install from sd card is complete that process took right around three minutes so not too bad if you haven't done anything out of the ordinary you're probably good to reboot at this point if you've done an awful lot of customizations and whatnot or specifically if you're not coming from CyanogenMod four point two point fifteen point something you may want to go ahead and wipe it the article the cyanogen posted said that you don't need to wipe if you're coming from four point to point fifteen point one so I'm not going to we're going to see how that works instead we're just going to select menu option one which is reboot system now go ahead and do that and let's see what she does first thing is we've got our t-mobile g1 boot screen this is where you start biting your fingernails and waiting to see how everything's going this screen can last for several minutes it might just be there for 30 seconds and go away but don't be terribly concerned if it sticks around for quite awhile that's perfectly normal when you're going from one room to another ROM it's got to do a lot of housekeeping and I could get into a lot of technical details about everything that it does but suffice it to say cyanogen and the rest of the people who contribute to this ROM are geniuses in what they do to go through and optimize the way the packages are loaded to place things into various different folders whether it's system app system data system cache how they've got the the dalvik caching set up the the tweaks that they have to the kernel the kernel that's being used in fact cyanogen says that the kernel being used here which I believe is 0.33 adds significantly to the speed of the device and his first impression was that running this ROM is faster than running the 4.2 point 15 ROM which is impressive that was a pretty quick rom especially for this phone which now the g1 is it's old as far as technology goes we've had an awful lot of updates to hardware to to processors the amount of RAM just a lot of progress has happened since the g1 came out and to know that we've gone from Android 1.5 when the t1 excuse me that t-mobile g1 first came out and other of the HTC dream series all the way through 1.6 and now jumping up to 2.1 and still being able to run most of the things that are built in to 2.1 we'll see here what's what's been left out but that's just impressive that speaks a lot not only a hardware that's in these phones but also in all hard work that the developers the in the independent community are putting into developing the Android OS the Android platform you know this isn't something that t-mobile is saying hey let's put this all together and let's pay these guys you know they're not on the payroll of Google or t-mobile or any other carrier most of these guys are doing it in their spare time which really speaks a lot to their character so if you find value in this I'm going to put in a plug to visit their websites and click on any ads that you feel are relevant to what you might be looking for or if they've got a donate button go ahead and donate five ten bucks to them for their efforts just in appreciation for what they do the more you donate to them the more that you voice your appreciation the more likely they are to continue their development processes and to keep delivering good stuff that you and I use so back to the process here you see we've got the Android animated logo this is the cyanogen logo I really like it it's got a little cyanogen Android guy on a skateboard waving at you and you've got this reflection animation going across the Android word if that doesn't show up in the video that lets you know that it's still thinking it's still doing its thing and like I before this process usually takes several minutes so to spare you that time we're going to use the magic of video and skip all that and I'll be back when I've got something fun to show you okay so about another two three minutes has passed since the last time I left you and no problems at all and we're met with the Android 2.1 lockscreen that lets you easily mute or unmute and unlock your phone this is behaving just a little bit sluggish but with an older processor I'd expect that I also haven't waited too long at that loading screen so it's probably still running through some processes in the background if we look we've got the cyanogen style drawer which we can grab a pull up you'll notice this is not the advanced drawer like I come stock with 2.1 the Star Wars style drawer is just the traditional one which I think is most likely for speed this obviously doesn't have your 3d hardware acceleration built in just has the regular 2d stuff so for speed it's probably not doing that you can still see here even with home screens that are pretty loaded up with widgets and apps it's not too bad the responsiveness is pretty good and see what else we have go ahead and open up the browser here and it's firing up Google not too bad now what I like to show you here is the buzz icon in the stock browser you don't have access to this at least not the last time I checked because it doesn't support html5 all that well the browser that comes with the Nexus One does show the widget or the the panel if you will in the web browser this is showing it just fine so it looks like the web browser is all up to speed with the the latest and greatest stuff so that is really cool let's go in and look at the gallery that's one of the things that everybody likes so we'll come in and look at it and you'll notice here this sure looks like it's the 3d gallery that comes with the Nexus it's got your tip and your tilt it's got the tiles that fly in so that's really cool it's still got your camera icon in the corner real time test here let's see how camera works picture works just well that was kind of interesting a little bit of a video anomaly there but the picture did take successfully you can see there's the tabletop that I just took so we're good to go go in and open up the settings and everything looks good there flip over to camcorder look at the settings there well so far so good let's go back out home and let's take a look now at our settings to see exactly what this phone is doing now you'll notice here this is also got the the 2.1 style settings i'm going to go into a bow phone just to see it is an HTC dream firmware version is to point one update one it is running colonel two point six point three three point three CyanogenMod and the mod version is CyanogenMod five point zero point seven - DS - test one so there you go folks you can now run Android 2.1 with all of the android 2.1 widgets that you want all the apps that didn't run on your old Android running one point six you can now do that on your t-mobile g1 so I'll first look at the test one beta release experimental release of CyanogenMod rom 5.0 point seven for the t-mobile g1 this is Joe Levi for pocketnow.com