[Joe]

I'm getting a Tmobile G1/HTC Dream soon, does anyone here have one of these and does anyone here have any idea of good apps + good roms for them? I want speed + compatibility, I like playing games too.

This thread is now about Chewbac... Android phones in general.

This post has been edited by Joe. on Saturday, Dec 11 2010, 04:31

[Pico]

Awesome choice! You may remember my sig was of a G1. I f*cking love my phone


As for apps... I'll just go through my phone and list off some of them.

Well I like to have control of it so I have Advanced Task Manager. You might have to pay for it but I'm not 100% on that. It works great though.

If you don't root your phone and install another modified ROM then you might want to get an overclocking program. I found SetCPU to be the best.

Better Cut allows you to put custom apps/shortcuts on your home screen. You can edit the name of the icon and change the icon image (there's a bunch of icon packs you can download from the market). You can also put direct call and direct text icons on the home screen which is great.

Bluex allows you to use bluetooth to send and receive files through blue tooth, which some how isn't already a feature in the phone. It is a paid app, not very expensive and works well.

CoPilot Live is a damn good GPS for the phone. You can load maps up from your sd card so you don't take up precious phone storage. It costs $35 or something through the market... but there's other ways to get it... as with most paid apps

Gmote links to your PC running the Gmote server program (very light, runs in the background) and allows you to control either VLC or WMP with your G1. You can also use the touch screen to control the mouse and to type. It's free, and f*cking awesome.

Google Sky Map is really cool. It uses the phones digital compass to locate your position on earth and lines up the stars and planets/etc and tracks where you're pointing the phone and tells you what you're looking at. Even has a search on it so you can find specific things like a star or planet. Really cool.

Nesoid is an NES emulator. Really good framerate, pretty much perfect. Uses the keyboard for controls, you can assign the keys. Works with the same ROM files as PC emulators. Pretty sure it's a paid app...

Screenshot is something I haven't really used, but allows you to take a screenshot of whats on your screen. Has a timer of 5 second intervals, allowing you to switch to the home screen or another app before it screen caps.

The Weather Channel app is basically the TWC mobile site, but in a more friendly UI. It doesn't have the moving map like the mobile site does (which works on the browser) but it does have a button to view your local areas most recent video which loads up quick on the 3G network.

Txtract Pro, not sure if it's still on the market. It extracts your texts in a threaded format. I usually do it as HTML, works well.

TxtSpeed is a scrolling word "game" which has words move from right to left and you type them as fast as you can. You can only miss about 10 and when you do it ends. It tells you your characters per second and words per minute. I average about 38wpm.

Unzip, unzips zip files!

Wordup! is a game just like boggle. It's good when you're bored.

I don't play many games on the phone, so I don't have much listed here. The Nesoid app pretty much fills all my gaming needs.

Now, about the phone. First off, the battery sucks. It's the most major downfall. If I'm using 3G and browsing the internet I get about 3 hours of straight use. Sucks, I know. If I use it to text occasionally through out the day and make a couple short calls it'll last the whole day. Basically internet+constant screen on kills the battery fast. The only other bad thing I would say is the build quality. The phone feels fragile. I've only dropped it on the carpet a few times and nothing has happened. But if it were on solid ground I'd sh*t myself. It's also a little squeaky/creaky where the case is attached. Oh, and the SD card door is sh*tty, if you open it too much it can wear out and not stay tight so it kinda wiggles. Just be careful when you open it and don't do it 200 times.

Besides that, it's friggin great. Nice and quick, awesome apps, awesome browser...

If you want to root it you can cause it to slow down depending on what ROM you install. I won't go into rooting it because you haven't mentioned it but if you've got any questions about rooting just ask. I'll be able to tell you what you need to know, or at least point you in the right direction for the answers. Enjoy the phone!

[Joe]

Thanks, I will root it, probably with Cyanogen (Or however you spell it) 4.0.4, how exactly do I do this? Is there any good tuts so I don't brick my phone?

Thanks again, I've got quite a large app list to get now from you and others.

[Pico]

The best place to get info is at xda forums, http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=446

Here's a good one telling you how to root.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=442480

It's pretty simple. I do need to say just make sure the update.zip files aren't corrupt. You can't download them through the phone using 3G at least because it clips off a few bits of data making larger zip files unusable. I like to rename them by right clicking, then going to properties and renaming through there. Then copy the file on to your SD card.
Also, most ROMs now require you to install the latest SPL and Radio. There are modded SPL files but I have only used Google released. I'm pretty sure Cyanogen links you to the latest SPL and radio downloads.

If you're going to root the phone I'd suggest getting a microsd card reader for your computer. At least some way to access the SD card so you can format it and create partitions. With Cyanogens you have to because it stores apps to the sd card on a linux ext3 partition. If you can't get a card reader than it will make it tough, if not impossible to root.

Basically installing a ROM or update requires putting the update.zip file containing the specific ROM or update in the sdcard root folder (ie, just put it in the sdcard, not under a subfolder in the sd card. and only 1 update.zip at a time of coursE).
Then you turn the phone off.
Press and hold the home button, while you're holding that then hold down the red power button. Hold both until the phone G1 screen pops up, then it loads you into the boot loader.
When you install a ROM you sometimes need to wipe the phone (which will remove texts, call logs, settings and apps. Contacts will be stored to your sim card). The ROM creator will tell you if you have to, or if it's just recommended. It tells you the commands to wipe and to install an update file on the screen (consists of alt+ some key).
Then just reboot the phone after the update is done and successful (hold back and home, it tells you in the boot loader). A note, installing things like ROMs take a while to load especially the first time. Don't be worried if it takes even 5 minutes for it to boot first. But I've found that generally the longer the ROM takes to load the first time around, the slower it is in general.

If it fails an update you can try to load up the phone. If not you'll have to either try and put the same update.zip file back on the sdcard or put an older version of that update.zip on it (like if you were putting a new ROM on and that one fails and you can't get it to work at all, put the previous ROM you had installed back in, always works for me).

Oh, forgot to mention before, here's a nice place to search for apps online. http://www.cyrket.com/

[lordjubblydave]

Spotify, spotify, spotify.
Have I mentioned spotify ?
Truly awesome app, although you have to subscribe to the service.

[Joe]

I have a MicroSD Card reader on my computer.. If that fails, school computers + virtualbox + damn small linux iso. (Or my camera.. or my other phone, I have heaps of options here).

Thanks though, I'll keep that stuff and Spotify in mind.

[lordjubblydave]

Sorry for the off topic, but the new update to the android os (donut)
is set/rumoured for next month in uk.
Is there an android topic on gtaf ? If not we need one.

[Pico]

I was going to make one just the other day, but I didn't think enough people would have a phone running Android.

And do you mean the update for donut? Because donut has been out for a while, I know they're supposed to be coming out with at least 1.6 soon.

[lordjubblydave]

I thought 1.6 was called donut, as the third or fourth line here said.
Whatever its called i'm still looking forward to it

[Andrew]

1.6 ooo, looking forward to that. Even though my G1 is a vanilla G1. I don't trust myself to do anything to it just incase i brick it. Its a shame they've already said that the first G1 won't be getting the full 1.6 donut.

[Joe]

Lets just get a mod to change the topic and have this as the official android topic, even if its only 4 members chatting about it, hahaha.

I'm good with flashing stuff, I've flashed every single one of my Graphics Cards BIOS' with ones that have my overclocked (And proven to be 100% stable) settings in them, flashed a custom BIOS to allow overclocking on an old board, flashed my PSP from Sony to custom to sony to custom, etc heaps, so I think I'll be safe, this can't be more complicated than a GPU where you have to memorize some DOS strings, go into DOS and get it exactly right or have a $400 dead weight.

Of course, the one time I failed I fixed it by using my PCI nVidia TNT2 to see what I was doing.

..Anyway, I can't wait for this phone, it only has a 1Gb SDCard with it and I'm trying to whittle mum down to putting $30 in for a 16Gb one.

[Pico]

I'm waiting for my 8Gb card to come in the mail, cost me $18. Should be plenty of space for music and videos. 16 would be nice, but 8 should do fine for me.

And my mistake, donut isn't out. I confused it with cupcake, which was version 1.5. V1.6 is donut. And yes, due to internal storage limitations the G1 won't get the full thing. But, if you root your phone I'm sure modded ROMs will give you all the goodies from donut. This is because they do apps2sd and move ringtones and other sounds to your sd card, freeing up phone space.
A word to those using a rom that does apps2sd (cyanogen does it automatically as long as you have an ext2 or ext3 partition on your sd card), don't ever take the sdcard out of the phone while it's on, it f*cks things up bad. I learned that the hard way. The phone is still usable but I've had to reinstall all my apps but my settings don't work, so I need to reflash the ROM... going to wait till I get my new sd card to do that

[Joe]

Does it work if you get a new SD card and copy everything, bit for bit, to the new one?

[Pico]

QUOTE (Joe. @ Sep 25 2009, 14:57)

Does it work if you get a new SD card and copy everything, bit for bit, to the new one?

It might but the biggest problem I could think of is the difference in partition size. But it may still work.

With a Hero ROM it might not work though. That's because with pretty much every Hero rom they have it set to use the Linux Swap partition (which is a MUST with any Hero build or else you'll have a slow, unusable phone as I show in my video here).
I think once it finds the Linux Swap partition and allocates that space it set it's size into the system. If you change the swap size you have to reinstall the ROM which usually removes tons of settings. Although it should keep your apps if they're already on the SD card, you'll just lose all settings and texts and any contacts that (for some reason, it happens some times) weren't saved to the SIM card.
I tried upping the swap size on my card and it f*cked it all up, wouldn't even load up so I had to reinstall a ROM. I dropped Hero and went for Cyanogen's when that happened. Then I couldn't merge the Linux Swap partition to any other one (I tried many ways) which is why I bought the 8GB card in the first place.

So if you have a regular ROM in (based on Cupcake) and you copy it over bit by bit, even with a higher or lower capacity per partition the phone should work just fine. Don't be surprised if apps don't work though, it could some how f*ck it up.

I can't wait to get my damn SD card in the mail so I can reinstall the ROM and start from fresh. My phone is so damn buggy right now since I f*cked it up. Don't want to go through the trouble of fixing it, then re-doing it when the card gets here sometime this week.

[Joe]

Wow...

Google sent a Cease and Desist to the guy who makes Cyangogen mod, unless this is fixed by Wednesday and he's still able to release his ROM, I'm definately getting a different phone.

[Pico]

There's plenty of other ROM makers besides Cyanogen. And I'm sure you'll be able to get a hold of the last ROM released. While they have slight bugs (I've yet to be affected by any on my older version) they still work great. I wouldn't let this bump in the road stop me from getting an Android phone.
I don't see how they could send a Cease and Desist on someone for releasing open source files. All he needs to do is remove those specific apps. I'm pretty sure all of them are available on the market anyways.

[Joe]

If I can find someone to send me the right files (He had to delete them off his server), I'll get the G1 because it will probably blow over...

[Pico]

Well, I only have version 4.01, I think he was on 4.04 or something like that. I could send it your way for sure.
I'll probably ask around at xda and see if I can find the most recent version from some one since I want to reinstall the ROM anyways. May as well put the newest one in.

So is Cyanogen the only ROM affected by this thing? Or are other ROM makers?

[Joe]

I found a site with it.

Cyanogen was the only one who got a C&D, but apparently it's illegal now.

He worked it out though, we just have to rip the apps ourselves or something, he'll release a working bare-bones ROM and the tools to rip the Google stuff if we want to.

[Pico]

Yep, figured something like that would happen. I'm sure I can just find the .apk for those apps else where and install them anyways, with out having to rip them or anything.